Now you see him, now you don’t. Binibeca Tom returning to joyous freedom

Now you see him, now you don’t.
This was meant to be a video of our black and white Binibeca Tom returning to joyous freedom.
But he went so fast there’s wasn’t a chance.  He came from Binibeca in September. I had reports that he was dragging a back leg.

It took nearly two weeks to catch him , making it early September. It came at a time when we pickup quite a few toms with bad bites.
But Tom turned out to have a pellet from an air gun in his spine. This was removed but then he needed bed rest and painkillers and anti inflammatories twice a day. So he came to stay. In a huge cage in one of the cat rooms in my house.
He is quite wild by the way. Slowly he appeared to get a little better and sometimes seemed to put a little weight on his foot.

He no longer needed the medication I took him to our vet with the idea that we would let him loose in the surgery as our vet is fearless at catching them. I knew that he would probably start climbing the walls but the Vet said that he would do it.
I couldn’t handle him. Far too strong and frightened for me. What I do in these cases is put another cage inside the big one and keep it covered so that the cat will often sleep in it then when I need to get them out or clean the cage properly I quickly drop a door down on the small cage

However on the day Tom was so scared that he was hanging off the vets arm!
He pinched he bad leg and said that the nerve had gone. We discussed amputation of the leg but given his temperament the aftercare would have been very difficult.  The main objective of letting him out was to see if he could lift the leg as otherwise he might have damaged it by dragging it in the floor.

One of my first rescue cats more than 20 years ago was a Tortie who I called Tripod.  She dragged a paw and eventually developed gangrene in that leg and so she came to live with me and we amputated the leg.  She lived happily for another 7 years after that , taking all new arrivals under her stump and predicting bad weather by flexing the stump.  Anyway we took the decision to release him in the garden where he had been living.  He shot off, lifting both back legs just like a rabbit.