During Easter 2004 we discovered that the kitten I kept from my first litter was sick. Her tummy swelled up and she became very slack. Thursday evening 22 April the test results came. Effusive FIP. The day after we put her out of her misery.

By Connie Garfalk
It was rather late in life I found out that it could be an interesting challenge to try myself at breeding – to try and breed an Oriental Shorthair that corresponded to the image I have in my dreams. When the decision was made I already had three neuters, three members of the family that didn’t spontaneously applaud my getting first one, then another little queen into their house.

Fortunately they are very kind and understanding cats, so they did their best and soon they had taken the new little girls to their hearts.

When the silver Oriental, called SingSang, gave birth to her first litter 25 October 2003, it was pure bliss. I experienced a happiness almost comparable to when I myself gave birth to my two sons. The co-operation between me and SingSang was marvellous. She trusted me, and I trusted her. She got five lovely, healthy kittens.

SingSang proved to be an excellent mother. Moreover, she was very proud of her babies and loved to show them to visitors.

The first setback came after 10 days. One of the boys died suddenly. The Post Mortem showed that he died of a combination of partly collapsed lungs, probably due to remains of liquid in his lung sacks, and a massive intestinal inflammation caused by the ordinary E.coli-bacterium.

Well, he was only 10 days old. I never got to know him that well. Maybe I should have made efforts to make sure that he didn’t have liquid in his lungs right after birth. Who knows?

I concentrated on the other four, and they gave me great joy. Especially so the only girl in the litter, my little Oline, as I called her. She was born with the personality of a bulldozer – if she had to climb a mountain to get what she wanted, she climbed that mountain. Of course I couldn’t sell her, she was my first born girl, and she had this beautifully built head. She should help me in my work to breed the Oriental cat of my dreams. This was not to be.

When the kittens were 10 weeks old, they came down with a diarrhoea and stopped eating. The vet I then used, refused to give me antibiotics on the grounds that this was probably a viral infection. Two of the boys did also get well by themselves after a couple of days. The third boy was a bit sicker a little longer, but Oline got really sick.

After six days (and nights) when I fed her water and liquidized food every 15 minutes (she couldn’t hold down more than a few ml at a time), I thought I was going to lose her. I went to the vet and demanded antibiotics. This time I got it. The day after, Oline was eating and drinking by herself, and she was soon as radiant and active as she used to be. She had of course lost a lot of weight, but she soon gained what she had lost.

If this infection could have lead to an impairment of her immune system, is only something to speculate about. Maybe it’s more natural to believe that her immune system was a bit weaker than the others’ to start with?

During Easter we saw that Oline wasn’t her usual self. She got passive, but at the same time she started eating even more (if that was possible, she was always a hearty eater) than usual. Her tummy grew. We thought at first this was due to her eating so much, but soon her tummy looked awkwardly big.

After advice from experienced breeders, Oline was dewormed. To no avail. First working day after Easter I took her to the vet.

The vet took some blood samples, then examined her with ultra sound. On the screen we could see huge amounts of liquid in her abdomen. The vet looked at me, I looked at her – almost simultaneously we said it aloud: This looks like effusive FIP.

To mitigate her discomfort she was tapped for liquid. Close to 500 ml dripped out. A sample from this clear, yellowish liquid was also sent to the lab for analysis.

The vet wrote a prescription for Prednisolone and Synulox. Medication that also was relevant for another disease that could give rather similar symptoms. In addition I started giving her extra vitamins and aloe vera juice to strengthen her immune system.

Tuesday 13 April. That was the day Oline got examined. From that day on I knew that she had FIP and was going to die. But I refused to give up hope. I prayed for a miracle, but I knew. The days that followed were raw pain, stupid hope and fear.

After Oline got rid of most of the liquid the first time, she became remarkably better. She was actually rather fine for the whole week. During the following weekend her tummy started to swell up again.

In spite of the liquid filling up her abdomen, Oline showed signs of a slight dehydration. I started giving her extra water again. Like that time once before.

Monday I took her back to the vet and asked her to take out liquid again. She did, but made it very clear that she was only giving symptom relief treatment as long as she saw that the kitten didn’t suffer unduly.

The second tapping didn’t lead to the same improvement as the first one did. Oline got somewhat better, but her tummy soon started to swell again. She remained very slack, and it was heartbreaking to see her come slowly walking after me if I tried to leave her to go into another room.

I called the vet and made an appointment Thursday 22 April. That Thursday morning Oline suddenly looked much better, and she seemed so very alive. I couldn’t kill her. Not that day. I rang the vet and cancelled.

Later that night the vet called and told me that the testresults had arrived. No doubt about it. This was effusive FIP.

Friday morning, the day after, Oline was sicker than ever before. She seemed to have some breathing problems as well. I called the vet again, and was told to bring her in that same afternoon.

It was a horrible decision to make, but seeing Oline like that made it a little bit easier. Her death was not that traumatic either. She was first given a shot that made her go to sleep. I sat with her comfortably sleeping against my chest for almost an hour. It was a good hour.

When the vet came back she gave Oline a deadly shot straight into her heart. She died momentarily. We then saw that liquid not only trickled out from her behind, it oozed out from her nose as well. A sure sign that she had developed liquid in her chest as well as her abdomen.

Oline is dead. Unfortunately her mother SingSang was mated three weeks before we discovered that Oline was sick. SingSang was soon very happy and provokingly pregnant. In such a situation you are facing a rather difficult future as a breeder.

SingSang will probably deliver healthy kittens, but of course the fear is present.

All of the cats will be tested for a period to come, in an attempt to see if there is a chronical shedder in our house. How we shall deal with SingSang and her litter, will depend on the results from these testings.

International research recommends that the queen and her kittens are isolated from the other cats. The kittens are protected by their mother’s immune defense as long as they mainly live on her milk. Coronavirus don’t pass from mother to foetuses.
When the kittens are weaned, preferably at an early age (five-six weeks), you are supposed to isolate them from all other cats, including their mother. If they are tested negative, one could vaccinate them against FIP when they are 16 weeks.

The FIP-vaccine is, however, not completely reliable. Some studies say that protection could be as high as 70 %, given the right circumstances. Others say that the vaccine has no measurable effect at all. All of them say that the vaccine doesn’t do any harm. The vaccine is anyway something we have to decide about later on.

Another dilemma is the psychological aspect. If you remove kittens from their mother too early, which you definitely do if you take them away by the age of five-six weeks, you risk that they develop behavioural problems later in life. From human medicine we know that psychological balance has great impact on the immune system. No reason to believe that the same doesn’t go for cats.

So I will have to weigh the benefits against the disadvantages, before I decide which route to follow. In the meantime, I hope, on behalf of Oline, that our experiences could be of some use for others.