Spot and the ear mites!

Poor Spot was a tom cat who was hanging out near a house at the edge of Van Etten, with a big red wound behind his right ear from scratching desperately at ear mites, poor boy.

Luckily Karen, the landowner fed him and was worried about him. I finally managed to get over with a trap, and as we talked, he warily checked it out and finally went inside. Once here, I put some Revolution on him to start killing off those ear mites and set him up in a cage. Karen called the SPCA of Tompkins County and they were able to fit him in the next week. By today (the day of his appointment) he had stopped scratching and his ear had scabbed. The veterinarian's today cleaned out his ears, soaked off the scab, treated the ears with Ivermectin, and gave him a dose of Advantage II. That's quite a big dose of mite killer (since I had given him Revolution eight days earlier) but he seems to be OK. He got his rabies and FVRCP, and is sporting an eartip. I think someone ran a comb through him as well, because he is looking quite dapper!

He likes to be petted and scritched under the chin, but he has swatted me once or twice. I'll take him back home with a cage so he can learn to let Karen pet him as well, and hopefully he can be an indoor/outdoor cat. If he refuses to stay inside, at least he'll have a shelter and there are lots of places to hide there.