We had cats live in this house before, but they were old cats, so there are things we didn't think about when we got the new ones.Besides the ceiling (see Styx's adventures), we have a banister that runs around the upstairs and opens to our basement. At the end of this are windows. It never occurred to us before we got the Rivers that they would try and get on said windowsills.
Then we took Styx off the banister many, many times and realized this may be a problem. Before we had a chance to solve this, Tigris got up for the first time, tried to make the window and fell all the way down.
Dramatic recreation |
It is fair to say both the Man and my hearts stopped watching this happen.
We raced downstairs and she was no where to be seen. As we were worried about injury, when we found her under the bed, we pulled her out. We did a full exam and discovered, other than what appeared to be a sprain in her front left paw, and a scare, she was ok. She ate, she purred etc. We watched her very closely and by day 3, she was back to her normal self.
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Tigris tolerating us icing her paw |
The limp persists some, it is not as bad and not all the time, so isn't a major concern.
We are sure she lost a life that day. We hope that she has learned to NEVER try this again.
We have put a Kleenex box (seen in the window) and a temporary tinfoil barrier to discourage anyone from trying this again. If people have ideas for a better solution, please let us know!