My kitten died from Failure to Thrive but...?

Question

my sister broke the cats right hind leg before then. she was limping around and a few hours later after we took her to the vet my mother said the vets said her leg wasnt broken at all. days after that Fuu (the kitten) started acting strange. she was acting depressed and she wouldnt play and stuff...she wouldnt clean herself...she wouldnt eat...even the mama cat tried to separate her from the other kittens. and from what i learned when the mama does that she wants to protect the others from suffering. when we took her to the vet again the vets diagnosed her with "failure to thrive" two or three weeks after i heard she died. i was really sad about this. i just would like to know how exactly did this cat die? i dont understand. how does a kitten get so depressed out of nowhere? it just doesnt add up. i believe my mother told me a lie so i wouldnt kill my sister for basically murdering my baby. can anyone make sense of this? i cant find anything on failure to thrive. please help me

Answer 1

I had never heard of this, so I looked it up on google. This should tell you everything you need to know about possible causes.

http://veterinarymedicine.dvm360.com/vet...

Don't blame your sister. I can't tell you how many times I have accidentally almost stepped on my kitten. It was an accident. But I am very sorry that your kitten died.

Answer 2

somebody is lying to you, this is confusing.

Answer 3

In my estimation, it's about equally likely to have been some internal defect that was just bad enough to prevent the kitty from growing, or to have been due to an injury inflicted accidentally or deliberately. Depression just meant she didn't feel well, and that was because she was dying -- it doesn't really tell you anything about why. Kitty might have been squeezed or stepped on or something that bruised up her internal organs, and there would be no way to know until she stopped thriving; or she might have been born with a heart or liver defect, or other genetic problem, that killed her. Kittens grow so fast, they can have a defect and be okay, then quickly reach threshholds as they grow, that they can't pass because of the defect. Vets call it "failure to thrive" because there is really no point in knowing exactly why, it was just that kitty wasn't meant to live very long. It seems most likely to me that there was either a birth defect, or else the kitten was injured again shortly before she died ... seems less likely that the injury would have killed her several days later.

These things happen, at any rate. Young kids present a danger to baby kittens, and not necessarily on purpose. It sounds like you have a solid intuition about what happened, and there's no reason I can think of why you should not trust that intuition. If your sister harmed your pet deliberately and maliciously, I wish you strength to deal with the damage that is done in your relationship with her. If it was an accident, I wish you the strength to forgive her.

Answer 4

I'm so sorry about the kitten!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm glad to see your passion for animals is the same as mine.  Especially when stupid people post stupid comments.  How old is your sister?  How old was the kitten?  I know rabbits can suffer from this....because I have one.  We lost our family dog last year and my female rabbit seemed fine one day and the next looked a second away from death.  The vet ruled out anything that causes a rabbit to stop eating and get thin that fast.  The only thing I can even think that caused it...was my son and I were crying a lot, severely depressed, and she went into her own depression.  Had I not fed her through a syringe and still do....she would have died.  Most of what the vet told me to do was wrong......anything that helped her, was information I got from the internet.  She was dying in my arms on several occasions and I kid you not.....something as simple as getting her on Pedialyte......turned her completely around.  I had even spoke a couple times to the vet if I should put her down, I didn't want her suffering.  She kept telling me although she was weak, she was feisty by what I described to her...and she was not suffering.  I think she is full of S**t....but, I did want to give Cami the chance to survive.  I finally got her eating a little on her own and even got her to put on a pound--which was a huge accomplishment..............and I be damned....we are back to square one.  She is frisky, she will toss her syringe at me....throw her towel at me....she is truly rotten in a good way.  She could be jealous of the baby kitten we just rescued in a brutal storm....and feels like she isn't the baby anymore...although I try an assure her she is.  Being that the year just passed that we lost our precious dog Simba and have been upset more, and the kitten coming in about 3 weeks ago....the timing is about right for why she stopped eating on her own again.  I have to rush home and cut trips as short as I can to make sure she is fed and will go back to adding hot bottles in her cage to make sure her body doesn't shut down.  Animals are smart and do get depressed just like humans.  I can see Cami being jealous of the new kitten...because I am very over protective of him.  He was like 10 minutes from death and the storm was brutally beating him.  Try yahoo search.........type in kittens/cats failure to thrive.  Do you know if it had fleas?  Fleas will cause that kind of death, especially in kittens.  Feel free to email me.  I have to do some searching on stuff tomorrow...I will look into it over the next day or so....email me if you don't have an email on your profile and I will get back to you.  I have some health issues going on...but will try and get some info before the weekend....TAKE CARE!!!!!!!

Answer 5

if your looking for a new cat mine just had kittens so if u live in thee boston area drop me a e-mail

Answer 6

Failure to thrive basically means it was born with something wrong.  The only way to know exacty what was wrong would be to do a necropsy, which is basically an animal autopsy, and that would cost a couple hundred dollars at least.  Cats and dogs can also get sprains and dislocations, so the limping doesn't automatically mean the leg was broken.  Digestive problems, liver problems, cleft palates often are not immediately apparent and result in "fading" puppies or kittens.  Also newborns can get caught in a downward spiral of hypothermia and hypoglycemia.  They don't eat, so their blood sugar gets low.  The low blood sugar makes their body temperature drop.  Then they don't want to eat or move because they're cold, so they get more hypoglycemic, which makes them even colder..... it can happen very quickly.  The mother cat separating her is a big indicator that something was wrong with that kitten at birth as well.

Answer 7

Failure to Thrive?

DUH. That is the definition of death, is it not?

I don't know why that would happen. Maybe there was something else wrong with it?