My cat seems to think he is being punished due to being bandaged. How can i convince him it is not a punishment?

Question

My cat who is currently a four year old male has gotten Dermatitis at his neck. We took him to veterinarian and we received some medicine for him. I am not sure if it is the Dermatitis or the medicine but he insisted on scratching the infected area with his backlegs to the degree that it became a wound. In order to prevent him we went to the veterinarian again and placed a bandage around the area with medicine rubbed on it.

My problem is that ever since i started applying medicine my cat who normally accepts his medicine without difficulty(Under normal circumstances he understands i am trying to help him) started shying away from the medicine and he started to get nervous around me. It has gotten much worse after the bandaging and now he barely meows merely sitting around with a scowl on his face. I think he thinks i am punishing him and i want to convince him that this is for his own good rather than some punishment method. How can i do that?

Answer 1

The concepts of "punishment" and "for your own good" are much too abstract for a cat to grasp. It's much more likely your cat is behaving this way due to having something on it that it can't remove. Most cats hate having anything on them, like a leash, clothes, or a bandage, and their response is often to freeze or go limp.

There's nothing really for it at the moment than to continue the treatment and let the cat get used to it. If you had the option, it would be more ideal to slowly acclimate the cat to the bandage in short sessions over a long period of time, but that obviously isn't possible. It might help to encourage the cat to move around a bit by holding a treat out for it just beyond reach.

As for treating the cat, I would start giving it its favorite treat afterwards. Hopefully the cat will start to associate putting up with being treated with something pleasant.

Cats also sometimes start avoiding the person treating them because they hate the treatment so much. If this happens, you will have to patiently work with the cat to make yourself as pleasant as possible when not treating it.