| Not to belittle your aggravation... I certainly understand
your situation. When we brought home Gandalf, he developed a cold
within a couple of days of being home and we were dosing 4 cats
with nose drops and 2 kinds of liquid medicine.... There was cat
snot and spat up medicine all over. Not to mention the worry about
our beloved kitties.
HOWEVER, you have to look at the realities of the situation.
Other than a yearly checkup, how often do you take your cat to the vet
to be checked out if he is NOT showing any symptoms? And even at
that checkup, until the FeLV vaccine came out, how many of us had
a yearly test for FeLV. Not bloody many, I'll bet. I sure didn't,
both I and my vet consider me an excellent caretaker of my animal's
health. The fact is that, sure, I could have the vet run a full
set of blood tests and give them a thorough checkup, but even with
the volume discount that my vet gives me (I kid you not) that gets
expensive very quickly. (FeLV tests alone cost $12-$20) The truth
is that the kind of checkup a kitten is generally given can be done
by any person who knows cats. (Are the ears clean? Are the gums
pink and healthy? Is there any discharge from the nose or eyes?
etc.) Now realize that most animal shelters deal with an incredible
volume of animals. If the cat shows no symptoms, why do an extensive
checkup? THey have a very tight budget. Any unnecessary medical
costs they avoid, means another animal they may save. (BTW if you had
taken the cat to the vet BEFORE it started showing symptoms I'll be
willing to bet that he wouldn't have found anything either.)
Or to put it in another light. Every year you have a checkup.
Do you have the doctor run tests for sed rate and RA factor everytime?
Those are diagnostic tests for a disease that I have called, Rheumatoid
Arthritis. Before I started showing symptoms, these tests were never
run on me. I don't consider this a dereliction of proper procedure
by my doctor because even though RA affects hundreds of thousands
of people, there is no reason to suspect it and to put up with
the cost of unnecessary tests until sysmptoms show.
As for the fleas, it takes sometimes months to get rid of a
bad infestation of fleas. If the kitten was flea ridden when it
was abandoned at the shelter, it's not surprising that the shelter
could not get rid of the fleas in the 2 or 3 days that the kitten
was at the shelter. (Particularly, since new cats with infestations
are brought in all the time.)
I don't mean to come down so hard on you, it's just that, Animal
Shelters are in a horrible situation. Too many animals to save
too little money and too few people to give the animals the attention
they would like to give them. It's very easy to sit on the outside
and say, "If *I* were running things..." I volunteered at an animal
shelter for a few months, it was a real eye-opener. I had to quit,
I'm not cut out to make some of the decisions they have to make
every day.
Good luck with your kitties. I hope they sick one gets well
quickly and the other one stays well.
tlh
Owned by 2 former strays and 4 former shelter cats.
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