Ripley's world of silence......

Ripley is becoming a very needy cat as she gets older! Right now, as I try to type, her head is on the keyboard and she keeps nudging my hand as I attempt to type...........it makes for some rather interesting spellings of words, I can tell you!! Mind you I am deleting the mistakes as I type so don't worry, even if it means I am taking three times as long to do this blog *sigh*.I do think she is going deaf too, because she really doesn't appear to hear us any more, and sometimes she utterly howls the place down. It is almost like she is calling us but cant hear herself call so it is very loud indeed! Just as with all our other cats, we do call her back if she does this, but she never comes running so we have to fetch her. We have tested her reaction to sound in various ways and we are sure she only hears a tiny portion of sound, if any. Yesterday Ripley was seated on my husbands lap facing away from, and I called her name a few times. If you did this with any other of our cats , even if they didn't turn round, their ears would twitch in response. There is nothing with Ripley! Nothing at all....no response. If you tap her shoulder she will turn and chirp  but nothing else. How sad is this. I do think we will have to get her to a vets to verify this. To be honest I have had a suspicion for a while now because she doesn't run from the hoover any more. Ripley has always hated the hoover and has fled the room any time it was near her but now she just sits and watches it. She has always been very sensitive to sound and jumped at loud noises and been rather skittish compared to the other cats, so maybe she has always had problems? How sad it is for an animal to be in a world of silence? Obviously it is sad for a human too, but we can learn and adapt with help from others. What does an animal do? In the wild this would make the animal susceptible to danger and probably the animal may not survive for long, although there have been remarkable stories of some species of animals helping each other. There was a remarkable picture in the papers recently of two dogs. One of the dogs was blind and the other dog would always stay right next to him, in effect being this other dog's eyes. How amazing and wonderful? I think Ripley has become to reliant on us humans and I do worry how she will be in the summer when she goes out more. We live on a main road and the cars speed along. To be honest , she has never wandered far so I do think she will stay in the garden mostly, but you never know. If this had been Jonesy I would have worried even more, though. He was a roamer and being deaf would have been extremely dangerous for him. How protective do I feel over all my cats.....and yes I still miss Jonesy more than anyone knows...........