I wanted to thank you for your advice and to update you with how Henrietta is doing.
Your advice was really helpful, some of it I was already doing - such as when I brought her home with us I kept her litter tray in one corner of the room in an alcove, I placed her food and water bowl at the opposite side and end of the room and her bed was placed on top of a small table on the opposite side to her food and we kept Henrietta in this room only for the first few weeks allowing her to roam into additional rooms every few days as you would do with a kitten.
I had pretty much left Henrietta alone as did the children under my instructions as I wanted her to adapt to her new surroundings in her own time, however after reading your article about bonding it occurred to me that perhaps Henrietta needed more of my attention in order to settle in. So I made a concious decision to make sure that I spent quality time playing with Henrietta until she grew bored (before i would play for 5 mins then stop when I had enough), I also decided to stop the treatment from the vets as her ears appeared much clearer and no antibiotics will make a difference if the body is in extreme stress - my opinion anyway. So the end result is Henrietta is now a very content, healthy happy cat. As you pointed out she was stressed and in trying to help her medically I feel we exasparated her stress and she must have been unbelievably distressed and insecure with everything. Henriettas diarroah has now completely gone, although I have noticed that it returns whenever I have been too busy to give her quality one to one attention and playtime (the other four members of our family play do play with her whenever I am too busy. So now no matter how busy I am I try to fit in a few minutes of quality play (even resorting to tieing a piece of string to the back of my jeans belt loop so that it trails behind me whilst I tidy up!) combined with talking to her this seems to work well!!!!
In the nar future I hope to upload a short video of Henrietta playing in the indoor play centre I have created for her to ensure she is getting enough exercise (she is an indoor cat) in the meantime thank you once more.
If you have a top tips page I would like you to consider adding the following tip (which occurred to me whilst Henrietta was sick)
# TIP trust your insticts - seek a second opinion from this site and use the advice given along with your instincts to change your behaviour/lifestyle according to your pets needs.
Kind Regards Henriettas Family UK
Thank you so much for the update. It is good to hear that she is a happier cat now. let me know when you add your video of henrietta to you tube. i will link to it from this site. Thanmks again Kate
