IC (N) Coco Island`s Leo

02.09.08, thanx to Wieke for all the pictures:-) 12.31.09 HCM: Normal on 10.03.04 & 01.15.08 HCM: Borderline on 10.05.06, 10.12.06, 02.10.09 & 12.15.09 PKD, HD & PL: Normal on 10.03.04 GSD IV: Normal Weight on 04.10.10 4,58 kg COI (coefficient of inbreeding): 2,34% Pan's Polaris COI: 18,80%

Finally he is here and he is everything that I have ever dreamed of. He is really long all over and has such a wonderful temperment. It will be interesting to see what he can add to my breeding program. 9 months old he weighed 4.5 kg. He had grown both in lenght, hight and broadness. He was no longer to long when you compared his length with his broadness, like he was when I first got him. Then he was all lenght but still had a good balance in the body when you lifted him. Now he is muscular and very even to look at.

3 years old and a lot has happened during his developmen! He is still long and tall, but he has finally started to get some wideness and he is also very heavy to lift now.

Leo stayed 3 months in Stockholm, where he mated 3 ladies, and when he was entering Sweden he was weighed at the airport and the scale said 7 kgs, without the carrier. 2 of the 3 ladies had kittens with him, the third went unfortunately empty:-(

After Leo`s visit in Sweden, he really gained weight! He weighed 7.6 kg and that is not bad at all. He wasn´t fat but merely had a lot of muzzles that were well-placed on him.

Leo became a Champion, in the *high* age of 4 years:-) I plan to show Leo and see how it goes. He has the best temperment and won't let anything throw him of his balance, which I think SHOULD be a given, even for entire males.

Leo has had an operation, more information here!

On October 17th. 2004 Leo became an International Champion in Luckenwalde!

01.15.08

As part of the HCM project at KVL all of our cats was called to come and give bloodsamples and be scaned for HCM. Leo was one of the cats we entered the project, where he will be scaned according to the "normal" procedures we follow, as recommended by Pawpeds, and he will also be scanned/examined when ever the researchers wants to. They have chosen to use Leo as one of the guidelines for what a normal cats heart should look like.

12.16.08

The researchers has asked us if we will come with Leo in January 2009 and have him scanned, not because there's something wrong, he has a healthy looking heart, but becasue they want to follow some "older" cats and see what happens to their hearts as they get older. Of course we have agreed to let them see him again. They also want to see Leo back in a year and scan him again.

01.30.09

We plan to mate Leo to Kicki in 2009, which is the same combination as the Y2-litter. He might also be mated with Oktavia but that is not decided for sure yet.

02.10.09

Because it was hard to find a day that suited us all, it wasn't until February we could bring Leo and the other cats the researchers had asked to see. It went very well and Leo has a very healthy and welfunctioning heart and THAT is always nice to know:-) His heart's status has changed from "normal" to "borderline" (or equivocal as some call it) but despite this fact, the researchers told us that there is nothing to worry about and the scanning of his heart will be used as part of how a normal heart looks like in an older cat. The only reason why he got the "borderline" assessment is due to the fact that the LVFWd level (also know as the left ventricle freewall) is 5.3 and anything between 5.0 - 5.5 is always considered to be within the borderline assessment. But the researchers said that there was nothing to be worried about and that the heart is in perfect health:-)

05.30.09

Leo is still going strong and has just become the proud father of our F3-litter!

09.20.09

Leo is the proud father of our I3-litter. We plan to neuter Leo this winter because he's going to be 10 come November and he has contributed with nice kittens to our breeding program as well as breeding programs all over Europe and Japan. Right now a really pretty female is visiting him from Austria and hopefully she's already pregnant with him, and if she is pregnant she will go home, have her babies and ones they are 6 weeks old, we will neuter Leo.

11.09.09

In September, we noticed that Leo looked slightly different than normal. His head was hanging a little bit, seemed a little thinner than usual and well just seemed "different". We took him to the vet who also thought that he looked a bit miserable and they took a blood sample in order to do some tests. They showed that he had elevated kidney values and that his T4 level (T4 level tells something about how the thyroid is working) was at the high end and even though none of the figures was alarming, the vet thought that we should put him on a special kidney diet first and wait of with the meds until we had seen if the diet would be enough to make his values go down. After 4 weeks on the diet, we took Leo back to the vet and they again took new blood samples which showed that his numbers had gone down into the normal range again. Leo will continue on the special kidney diet and have new blood tests done in early January, to see if his numbers remain normal and if we can control it with the diet or not. The veterinarian also said that it looks as if we came with Leo in time and we are very relieved of this news because we want him in our lifes for many years to come.

12.15.09

At the HCM scanning today Leo's heart is still looking perfect and will be one of the hearts used for a phd-project to show how a normal heart should look like in an older cat, along with some of the other cats we brought to the HCM-project today:-) Leo is still set to be equivocal/borderline because his left ventricle wall is 5,1 and any heart with the meassurements 5,0 - 5,5 has to have that "diagnosis". But the researchers reassured us that Leo's heart doesn't display any signs of HCM and probably never will, which is a great reliefe for us:-)

12.20.10

When we discovered that Leo had bad kidneys in September 2010, it has gone up and down with his health. For a long time he got better on the special diet we fed him, in fact he became so well that we could switch his food to mixture of 50% normal and 50% special food, but after some months he took a turn for the worse. During the summer it was obvious that he wasn't getting better and he looked worse and worse, probably due to the extreme heat, among other things he coat looked more dull, but apart from that he seemed fine and his usual self. During all this time we took regular blood samples to keep an eye on his kidneys as well as his other organs and there was a few times where we thought that "now" is the time to say goodbye, but every time the decision was postponed because Leo seemed otherwise fine. The last 14 days of his life, we could see that it went downhill and on July 29th. we decided that Leo should have peace. It was a though day to get through and the days after was also hard, but knowing that we had made the right decision for Leo made it a bit more bearable that we had said goodbye.

After waiting some months we got the result of his autopsy. In his heart they detected some moderate disarray and fibrosis, but there was no thickening of the left ventricle wall, nor did his heart weigh above 25 grams, which means that 2 important indications for HCM was missing. The pathologist found that Leo's kidneys suffered from chronic intersitial nephritis, an inflammatory condition in the kidneys which comes from unknown cause(s).