Herpes   

Yesterday evening I got a call from my vet, and she told me tha she had a call from SVA earlier that evening. They have examined the samples from our cats, and one of them wich have no symptoms was negative for Herpes, Clamydia and Mycoplasma. The cat with symptoms in the eyes was also negative for Herpes, Clamydia and Mycoplasma. The cat with symptoms from the eyes and the upper respitory system tested positive for Herpes and Mycoplasma. Luckily our vet had chosen to start the treatment with Doxycycline and Terramycin-Polimixin B on all our cats even before the conclution came from SVA. Now we have a group of cats in the livingroom at the ground floor, a group in the bedroom at the same floor, and the rest of the pack has the rest of our house as a playground. And they really need a playground! The whole pack is behaving like they are kittens everybody, and they play for several hours each day.

We thougth we have found a perfect home for Kikki, Joker, Doc and Mischa but the ment-to-be coowner of Kikki did not think she could give Kikki what she needed and there was not any alternatives to her. Joker and Doc was planned to move to the south of Norway, to a home that seemed to be perfect for them AND their new owners wanted to use them in breeding! They have shorthaired oriental cats, and wanted to try out the longhaired too. I sent them an e-mail when I have finished the phone with the vet, and told them about the results of the tests and gave them some links to facts about Herpes. They read some of it and decided that they would not take the chance to take Joker & Doc because they already had 3 siameses at home and they did not want to expose them for the Herpes virus. None of these 4 cats mentioned have had any symptoms of Herpes, Calici, Clamydia or Mycoplasma and they might not shed any virus at all. I have sent the new owner of Mischa an e-mail and told her too about the testresults. I have not got any answer from her yet, but she migth be occupied or she is thinking about what she should do. As long as she hasn´t said no to Mischa, it´s still a hope for here to move to this home wich would be perfect for her! We cross our fingers and hope the best!

The medication of our 15 cats and kittens 2 times a day and giving them eyedrops 3 times a day are no big deal, luckily! I guess we use 10 minutes to medicate all of them, and we are still in the very beginning to medicate every cat in the house. How long time will we need when we have given the cats treatment for 3 weeks? I guess we really will got a hang of it by that time!

I need to thank Malin (S*Vildbackens) for her support and help to find information about not only Herpes, but everything I´m asking her about! Without her we would have ended our dreams about our breeding long time ago. She´s there and she answer every question I have, at any time. Thank you so much Malin, I really look up to you and your work with developing the balinese breed.

Another support is Berit ((N)Yowie´s). She has done the same as Malin, and without Malin and Berit have ended our dreams about breeding a long time ago. Thank you so much Berit! It´s hard to stand on our feets when the storm comes, but you 2 has managed to help us in every storm.

Another breeder that has helped us with advices and information is Veena((N)Attacks). I was higly surprised when a PM from her landed in my inbox at FB. Suprised because we have had quite extended problems with our communication. I am really glad that she choose to look through the past and helped us on the way. Thank you so much Veena!

Some links to facts about Herpes

http://www.netdyredoktor.dk/sw28909.asp

http://www.netdyredoktor.dk/sw12969.asp

Forums

http://www.kattegale.dk/

http://www.sphynxdillan.se

Today we will start the medication on our young and grown up cats. It has taken some time to come to this point, but finally the time was right! If anybody needs to learn how to medicate a cat, you are most welcome! 10 young and grown up cats + 5 kittens will be given the Vibranord-mixture 2 times a day, for at least 4 weeks. And all of them will understand what we are doing as soon as we have given the first grown up its first dose. And then the battle begin...... Suddenly no cats will be seen, all of them will vanish like ghosts. I guess my daughter and my husband will have a lot of exercises in this 4 weeks that we have in front of us. But challenges is healthy and sometimes fun - I guess we will have a lot of it!

I am very happy to tell that the eyes of Jagara and Cheetara is much better than we dared to hope for! Cheetara`s eye looks almost normal now, and we hope for it to be allright in the end. Jagara`s eye has some scare tissue, and she will most likely not have a 100% normal eye with normal vision, but she is able to see something with it!   

Jagara´s eye on the 10th of January

It´s not easy to see the difference at once, but if you look closely you can see it! This pic´s from the 16th og January

All the kittens are eating very well and they have grown a lot these two last weeks. When we started to give them Vibranord they weighed only 400-450 grams - at the age of 8 weeks! Now - at the age of 10 weeks - their weight is 850-900 grams.

Kikki and Doc, whom we thoutght was pregnant, started to call on the day which we thought was their day 60 in the pregnancys. It was a bit sad, because we really wanted to have variants after Kikki and Muffin, but as the situation is here now it was the best that could happen. I do not want to think of two newborn litters here now, with Mykoplasma Felis on the run through our house   

I talked to Siv, Potis new owner, yesterday and she told me that Potis new friend, the Devon Rex Astrix, was very sick. He has a severe pneumonia and high fever and he was in really poor condition. My first thought was that Potis has infected him, even though Potis has no symptoms. Hopefully Siv´s vet will take some tests of Astrix to find out if he has Mykoplasma Felis. I called Siv´s vet and told him about the situation here, and I have sent him an e-mail giving him the details of this process we have been through the last month or so. And now I just sit here waiting for the vet to call to tell me what they would do with Astrix. I cross my fingers for Astrix to be well again without to much problems   

Our experience these last weeks have made us think a lot of the future of our cattery. We want to do our best to prevent deseases among the cats, and especially our coming litters. Some of our rutines will be changed, and as I have written before, we will not show our cats in 2011. In addition to these measures we will reduce the number of cats. That means that some of our grown ups are for sale, either neutered and as a pet, or fertile if someone wants to use them in longhair breeding. Our dream of a (N)Bekmørtnans bicolour oo/and seychellois longhair will not come true, and this is a bit sad. But we have to do what´s necessary, and in addition to the health of our cats we have to admit that nowadays there is to much work for us to have 10 cats. My health is not the best, and it looks like it´s not getting any better, but the opposite. My husband Finn-Ove´s work as a teacher is not an 8 to 4 job, but a lot more. Often he does not come home before 20.00 at night, and that is 12 hours a day! All our cats will be treated with antibiotics against the Mycoplasma infection for 4 weeks, and then they have to stay with us for some weeks before moving. We want to be as sure as we can that they are healthy when they move to a new home. Tonight we have been at the vets taking some tests of some of our cats to find out if there is something else in addition to the Mycoplasma.

The cats that are looking for new homes are GIC S*Coral Reef´s Joker (osh d 24 var), IC (N)Bekmørtnans Spitfire (bal f), (N)Bekmørtnans Wen (sia d var), (N)Bekmørtnans Dr. Meow (osh n 03 var) and (N)Himmeltinden´s Dark Rose (sia h). We have given the breeder of (N)Himmeltinden´s Dark Rose the opportunity to take her back if she wants to, and if she do Dark Rose will of course not be sold to another home   

GIC S*Coral Reef´s Joker

(N)Bekmørtnans Dr. Meow

IC (N)Bekmørtnans Spitfire

(N)Bekmørtnans Wen

(N)Himmeltinden´s Dark Rose

If you want to see more pictures of some of these cats, you can find them in their galleries on their own pages at www.bekmoertnans.com

If you want more information, don´t hesitate to send us an e-mail or give us a call.

I want to emphasize that these pictures of the cats don´t show their wonderful eyecolour!

..... when I thougth we could stop the medication of our little girls. Instead we changed to another medicine, this time Vibranord (Doxycycline) and Terramycin-Polimixin B. Both we and our vets thougth the girls had either Clamydia or Mycoplasma Felis, and the vet took a sample from their eyes and sent it to SVA in Sweden. At the same time the vet examined Jagara´s and Cheetara´s right eye, and as we was prepared on Jagara´s right eye was destroyed because of the infection. The eye was all white, and it looked like the third eyelid has grown into the eye together with the mucus membranes. Cheetara´s eye looked the same way, but the eye was not as white as Jagara´s and the vet think Cheetara migth will be able to see at least some with her eye.

6 days ago the vet who took the sample from their eyes called me and told me that she has taken the wrong test and that it was impossible to analyze it. Need I tell you that I was both mad & sad? I wanted to test some of our other cats right away, but the vet did not agree. She wanted us to wait untill she had talked to a vet at SVA(The lab in Sweden) to be sure to take the right tests and the right cats. She would have to wait till next week because she had a week off. I wrote a long mail to the vet.centre and told what we wanted and why, and yesterday we got an appointment tomorrow to take a bloodsample of Muffin, who is the only cat that´s not vaccinated against Clamydia. In addition the vet was supposed to take a test from Vascos mucus membranes in his eye, to check if it was possible to find Clamydia, Mycoplasma or other bacterias/viruses. But this afternoon another vet called me and told that SVA had found Mycoplasma Felis in Jagara´s test, they have managed to analyze it despite they said it was not possible. And now we are waiting for our vets to decide that we could start to medicate all our cats. If they do not subscribe antibiotics to our cats, we have to stop breeding and showing our cats. And we can not sell any of them, that means we will have 15 cats for as long as they live   

We have decided that 2011 will be a year where none of our cats will attend to a cat show. We want to try our vets advice for a year to see if the cats will be more healthy when they are not so exposed to stress and other cats. It will be hard to be at home the weekends when our breeder friends are on cat shows, but we will try this advice and see how it works. We have decided that we will not buy any new cats in 2011, and hopefully none of us will fall in love with a kitten outside our cattery before 2012    We plan to build a real large cat run at the back of our house, and hopefully this year we will make it! The plans have been there since before we moved in, wich is nearly 3 years ago. We also hope that we can be able to build a second cat-room with a separate cat run, for a spraying fertile male and a friend or girls in heat.

The kittens are much better, and we hope they will not need medication after a week more or so. Jagara will not move to Sweden now as planned, and time will show if she or another girl will move.

Potis/Læstefar seems to love his new life in Skien, and no one is more happy than we are about that!

Vasco, our boy from Germany is the sweetest boy ever! He absolutely loves ham, but it has to be a spesial type of ham, the one we use on our homemade pizza. He search our bags when we have been on the shop buying grocerys. If he see the package of ham, he follows Finn-Ove like a dog, frightened to loose the opportunity to have some!

Couple a days ago Finn-Ove got some MMS´s from Malin who is the "mother" of (N)Bekmørtnans Bårr (sia e). And our little boy has grown up since he moved from us! This little guy that was only 58 grams when he was born is now 4.2 kilos!

Isn´t he beautiful? Thank you Malin for taking care of our little boy!

Jagara and Cheetara are much better but not all heathy yet. Both of them have open eyes now, but the mucus membranes are a bit swollen yet. There´s now sign of the pneumonia any longer, and they eat very well now. They have gained around 250-300 grams in a week! Thanks to their apetite and Hill´s a/d. Lion-O is all ok now, he did not get as sick as his sisters. He will not move to France as planned and that means he either will stay with us or we will find another home for him. Time will tell   Jagara is moving to Sweden and Cheetara to Italy if everything is ok with them. There is a possibility that kittens who have been sick as a small kitten may develop a hook on it´s sternum for a period of time. This hook might disappear when the kitten is about 1 year old. We have had 3 kittens with a hook on their sternums as a small kitten and where the hook is gone when the cat is an adult.

Our dear Muffin got his Suprelorinchip at the 6th of December, and it looks like it has been successfull so far. Joker has started to be fertile, and we wonders if he or Vasco will be ready first. Hopefully Vasco will wait a bit like his father, and let us use Joker on a couple of litters before he´s neutered.

Our 2 pregnant girls are on day 54 today, only a few to go before the delivery! Kikki is not big at all and we think she has only 1 or 2 kittens. Doc is bigger but even she has only a few kittens - maybe 3? It´s soon time to prepare for new kittens!

And that is something we have felt for some time now. When our litters were 1 and 4 weeks, they all got diarrhea both the 2 mothers and all 7 kittens.  It took us over a week to stop this, and the kittens were very thin. We feeded them with formula in addition to the milk from their mothers and they gained weight quite fast. At least 6 of them. Little Ko Samui did not gain any weight and we took here til the Vet - again, and she got Baytril for 2 days. Finn-Ove gave her the shots, but it was really difficult for him to give them because Ko Samui was so skinny, she did not have any muscles or fat left. After 2 days she was better, and we got more Baytril from the Vet. Five more days of Baytril and we hoped that would be enough. She recovered quite well, but two days after finishing the Baytril she was really sick again. She lost 20 of her 189 grams (she was 3 weeks and 6 days old) during the day and we called the Vet again. We was shure that Ko Samui would not survive the nigth, she was like a little bird and struggled hard with her breathing. And we wanted the Vet to put her to sleep, we would not try to keep her alive too long, we did not want her to suffer. The Vet came home to us, and before she saw Ko Samui she was optimistic, but when she saw Ko Samui and hold her we could se in her eyes that she had lost her optimism. But the Vet wanted to give her a chance, and would give Ko Samui a shot with some different antibiotics. This medicine was supposed to be given in a muscle, but Ko Samui did not have any....... The Vet gave her the medicine in her neck, and Ko Samui screamed loudly while the medicine got into her body. She also got a shot of painkiller medicine, and Ko Samui acted like frantic after this shot. She had some form of cramps, and she bit me several places on my fingers. This was terrible to look at her, and I just cried and cried. We wanted this little girl to either survive or to die peacefully, and then we put her through this horror! We hoped for this little one to be better, but some hours after the Vet left we understood that Ko Samui very soon was reaching the end of her road. She died, lying in my arms, at 4.30 in the morning. Yesterday we got the result from the autopsy, and she had a most severe pneumonia caused by Pateurella Multocida. Nothing else was found.

I took Jagara to the Vet to give her the first of her 2 shots that morning, and everything went well. Two days after the shot, Jagara started to sneeze a lot. This developed quickly to a infection in her eyes with LOTS of goo, and her eyes closed up. We started to wash her eyes and hoped that this would be a minor thing. But not such luck..... Today both Jagara and Cheetara are in really bad condition, their eyes are mostly closed up except a few minutes after we have washed them. They both got a pneumonia, and their nostrils are clogged up and makes it difficult both to breathe and to eat. Lion-O has a milder infection in his left eye, and hopefully he will not have to go all the way as his sisters had. We have informed the new owners of our 3 Thundercats about this situation and told them that we would understand it very well if they choose not to buy the kitten. Time will show how this ends....

And as if this was not enough, we lost Ko samui´s sister Ko Phi Phi Lee only 10 days after Ko Samui. One of our grown up girls wanted to be Phi Phi Lee´s mother, and took her at the top of our highest schratching post - approx 185 cm high. When she reached the highest platform, she stumbled and lost Phi Phi Lee down on the slate tiles at the floor. And off to the vets again! Phi Phi Lee was paralyzed in her back, she could not move anything behind her hips. But she felt deep pain and the vet wanted us to give her a chance to see if this was something she could recover from. She got a shot if cortisone and we were to come back the next morning. At first she was better and I was not able to keep her still, she wanted to be with her sisters at the floor. She was not able to go, but she pulled herself forward with her front feets, and she did at fast as a wind! We were optimistic and thought that she migth could overcome this. But the next morning we saw that there was only one solution on this...... We had to let her go. She did not feel any pain at all when the vet tested her, and she was could as ice on her back legs.  A last picture of our little girl, lying in Finn-Ove´s arm, sleeping.   

Right now I am not looking forward to the two litters we are expecting early in 2011, and if I was able to choose, I would not have any litters for a loooooong time. This year (2010) we have had 3 litters with a total of 10 kittens, where 5 of them have died so far. This is like a nightmare! And with our two latest litters we have done everything "right" that is having the mother and her kittens in a separate room and not together with the "wildbunch" before the kittens were more than 4 weeks old, the room was washed thoroughly and desinfected before the mother and her kittens moved in, and everything in that room was desinfected before it was placed there. We also desinfected our hands everytime we went to check on the cats, and between touching every kitten. We have never been so careful with a litter before, and the only reason we did it was that "everybody" (other breeders and our vets) have told us that this is the best way to raise a litter. Well, we are not impressed!

This beautiful boy have moved to a new home! He was picked up last night in Oslo, and he now lives with a family of 4 and a Devon Rex boy. His first hours at his new home he spent in the bedroom of the teenagerboy in the family, sleeping under his quilt. For breakfast Læstefar got boiled chicken, which is his favourite meal and after the breakfast he has been cuddled with until he was so tired that he felt asleep on the sofa, under the blanket with his new catfriend Astrix. I guess he would be even more spoiled in his new home than he was here   

We wish Læstefar and his new family all the best in the future!

We use to take photos of our kittens every Sunday, and today is a normal Sunday so here they come! The battery was low on power and there was no time to recharge it and they take some pics of the kittens because we have twilight here for the most of the day. So the pics was not the best, but I hope that you will be indulgent with me  when it comes to the quality of the pics  

We have had one box for each mother to her and her litter for them to be in, but they have only used one at the time so today we removed the second box. Both mothers and all 7 kittens are in the same box, and the kittens goes between them.

Ko Phi Phi Lee

Ko Tarutao

Ko Samui

Ko Kham Yoi

Thundercats are 5 weeks old tomorrow and they are quite active! They climb, runs and even jumps!

Lion-O

Jagara

Cheetara