Tristana has pica, but at least she isn't going to the emergency vet hospital in Raisio tonight

[cimorene]

Tristana never misses an opportunity to eat hair. She can't have toys with feathers, and she has to be watched like a hawk when I'm brushing or grooming bunnies, because she will stalk the balls of discarded fur with a surprising amount of tenacity and sneakiness. She frequently manages to steal tiny tufts of bunny fur from the edges of doorways that Rowan passes through (which always accumulate a small fringe of faintly-waving fronds every few days if I don't clean them off), but since bunny grooming is a discrete activity that requires a lot of attention, it is usually possible to simply carry the fur away and put it in a closed trash can that she can't reach without incident (although there have been past incidents with her stealing fur from the trashcan, but she's never managed to get very much).

So half an hour ago Tristana started being both extremely distressed and moderately distressing: horking, but bringing up only bile and white foam. She continued this for several minutes without bringing up any bits of grass or hay, which are the usual reason for our cats coughing up bile. We followed her upstairs, where she continued horking and then started growling as she horked - clearly it hurt her, but I think this is the first time I've witnessed a cat doing this, and it was highly unnerving!

"Tristana, we don't want to drive to the emergency vet hospital right now," I said.

"We really don't," Wax agreed.

Tristana just growled pitifully some more.

Then Wax followed the trail of foam/bile splotches into the bedroom and discovered Tristana's entire dinner, served 1½ hours before, in a puddle in Tristana's favorite chair (fortunately the chair is covered in a fleece pile blanket). In the puddle was what at first looked like a piece of plant leaf. However, when Wax went to pull it out with a tissue, it revealed itself to be a twisted piece of a lump of bunny fur that was in all about the size of a ping-pong ball.

(When picturing a ping-pong-sized ball of fur, recall that Tristana, while fully grown, is tiny. She was a runt and never fully made up for two weeks as an infant when she didn't gain weight. She weighed 2.3 kg or about 5 lb last year, and she is slim and wiry, the typical bundle-of-twigs/greyhoundish Oriental breed build.)

She's finished regurgitating now, and we put a bowl of clean water and the turtle bed, opened up so she could crawl inside, on the heated floor of the upstairs bathroom for her, and she immediately slunk in there to think about her misfortunes. I mean, to feel sorry for herself, not to analyze; I doubt she has any idea the fur-eating was related to her current distress.

But backing up to about midday today, earlier I had brushed Rowan and then neatly rolled up the excess fluff into a ball like I always do; but instead of carrying it into the kitchen and hiding it in the trash under the sink where Tristana couldn't get it, I left it on top of the trashcan because I was going to come right back and use the same trashbag to change the liners in the bunny litterboxes. I was going to put the soiled paper on top of the fur, so it would have been just as inaccessible. However, I got distracted and forgot.

So this is actually kind of an ADHD tax.

Comments

[laurenthemself]

Poor little girl. What a strange fascination on her part! Toby likes licking my dinner plate after I finish regardless of what I ate, I think he just likes to be part of the mealtime.

[cimorene]

That's cute! A lot of cats will just investigate anything in case it's edible, but ours usually don't continue after the taste/sniff unless it's meat or dairy OR (for some reason) beans or... tomatoes. They can't have tomato obviously, so we're always confiscating plates, but they both constantly try to lick tomato sauce. And also beans, but that's not quite as odd... they might smell umami or something...

[cesy]

Oh no, poor you and poor kitty!

[cimorene]

It was scary! But she felt better pretty quickly after that, fortunately. Almost right after I finished the post she came back downstairs all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

[krait]

Oh, no, poor Tristana! That sounds painful, and distressing for all parties.

Is pica, and/or specifically eating fur and hair, common in her breed?

[cimorene]

No! Snookums would always try to lick anything furry (fur rugs), as well as any other creatures (dogs), like he was grooming them, but we had to give all our sheep and goatskin rugs to Wax's mom, lol. It wasn't quite the same though: he didn't go after dust bunnies and only occasionally investigated fur from the trash, and when he did grab it, it seemed that he was trying to lick it and sort of ate it by accident. Tristana isn't trying to lick, she just puts it directly in her mouth.

Anubis (her first cousin) also ate feathers though!

[cimorene]

Snookums wasn't just another cat in the breed though; they have a bit more in common than that. Even though he was not closely related to Tristana, they are both descended from this one very very popular Finnish 1990s Cornish Rex stud who also happened to be The Crazy's dad (Snookums like ten generations away and Tristana way more than that though). Tristana and Anubis trace back to that guy on more than one path as well.