This weekend we brought home a new addition to the family. She is an 8 week old, pure Maine Coon Cat and she has already stolen all our hearts. She has the standard feral look of a coon cat with pointed, tufted ears, and big polydactyl paws in both the front and the back.
Unfortunately for our little girl, she also came with some challenges. Our little one has Swimmers Syndrome, an uncommon deformity of the ligaments in the legs and/ or arms. From what I have read, it is common in small litters where the kittens get a lot of milk from Mom causing fast weight gain that their joints can’t keep up with.
I had never heard of Swimmers Syndrome before, but I have had some experience with splayed leg, a condition in young chicks that is basically the same. The chick grows too fast for their leg joints to catch up splaying the leg to the side. In this case, we put two elastics joined together to bring the leg under our chick and it was fixed in 2-3 days. In that case the chick was only days old.
For Moxie, we are getting her at 8 weeks. Most research showed that the sooner you shackle, the better the success rate. Lucky for us, she did have some preventative shackling done already, but her legs are very much sprawled to the side of her.
Unfortunately, it is not a well studied issue despite being found in kittens, puppies, and even wild animals. Even the vet didn’t know a lot about it and had to do some research. Sadly, most animals that develop this way are euthanized instead of rehabbing. We all agreed that she was worth giving our best effort. So off to google I went researching all the best ways to PT and shackle. I found so many different ways to bind the legs that my head was spinning. Everyone used different material, they shackled on different parts of the leg. The puppy videos weren’t helpful because their legs were so much bigger. There was even a snow leopard cub at the Bronx zoo with swimmers syndrome, but again, her legs were so much bigger to work with I couldn’t relate with how they shackled. Moxie only weighs 1.5 lbs, there isn’t much leg for me to get around without totally binding her up.
And can I tell you how hard it is to bind a fluffy kitten?
Or what a mess it is when the kittens thighs have medical tape on them. Every time she pees or poops, it gets everywhere! We are all expert kitten bathers at this point.
This image to the right was when I was trying to get the feet bound so they would face forward. The thighs bound so her hips were in the right alignment, and her knees bound so that everything was square and the way it should be.
This was all an epic fail. So, we went back to one shackle at the knees. Far enough away from her bum, and high enough that she could use her feet.
Now we just wait and see. The vets all agree that there is no reason she shouldn’t live a normal life. All my research had happy endings with not only older, happy, healthy pets – but almost all of them were 100% corrected and running and jumping like normal cats and dogs. So, we will keep shackling, keep stretching her little legs and best of all keep our hopes high. She is quite a fierce little kitten!
Update: 3/12: Unfortunately, the outcome was not what we hoped and we had to put our little one down. I’m leaving this post, despite the bad news because I wish I had more information going in. Turns out Moxie had fluid all in her abdomen, we aren’t sure why. Whether the swimmers syndrome was a part of it, or she got Swimmers because of other problems, we will never know.
Three Monkies Farm 
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