Abbie, for example, in addition to all her other issues, has recently started barking at her reflection, even though she's slept in front of the mirror her whole life.
Even our fish were suicidal.
But our most challenging animal was definitely our cat.
Wily went through a particularly difficult stage when we moved house.
We were told not to let him outside until he had adapted to his new home, but he didn't adapt. He started, um, spraying. On everything.
We took him to the vet, who diagnosed him with anxiety.
We were instructed to give him what was pretty much "Cat Valium" - a task that is much easier said than done.
But once we finally did it, he turned into a zombie.
One day I saw another cat in our yard. I wondered if maybe Wily had seen it before, and if his territorial instincts had actually been the cause of his "behaviour issues".
The vet said it was possible, so we took him off the drugs and let him go outside...
And he returned to his normal self pretty quickly.
And he returned to his normal self pretty quickly.
He wasted no time trying to teach the other cat, Baxter, who was boss.
During one particularly nasty fight, Baxter scratched a large chunk out of Wily's head, and back to the vet we went.
Well-meaning friends suggested that maybe he had found a new family he liked more than us and had decided to move.
While possible, I doubted this was likely.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.
