One bad first vet trip and now the kitten vanishes the second the carrier comes out. How do I undo this?

Our kitten Poppy is 15 weeks and had her second vaccination appointment last Thursday. Getting her there was a fiasco entirely of my own making.

Carrier lives in the shed. Came out an hour before, smelled of shed, and I tried to post her in through the little front door head first while she braced all four legs on the frame like a cartoon. Took two of us and about ten minutes. She screamed the whole way in the car and did a wee in the carrier, then was completely fine and charming with the vet, which felt personal.

Since then she has developed radar. I moved the carrier to test it and she was gone before it was fully out of the cupboard. She's a KITTEN, she's had one bad experience, and she's already decided. There's a booster and then a neutering appointment coming, so I need to fix this rather than repeat it three more times.

Am I overthinking? Everyone I've asked in person says just grab her and get on with it.

You are not overthinking, and please do not "just grab her and get on with it" three more times, because that's how you end up with my Otis, who at seven years old has to be manoeuvred into a carrier by two adults and a towel, and whose vet visits I dread for a fortnight beforehand.

The good news is a 15 week old kitten will unlearn this so much faster than an adult. You have basically the easiest version of this problem.

Take the top half off. Whatever else you do, that. Both of mine are fine going into a carrier when it's a bowl shaped thing you lower a cat into, and both fight like anything when it's a tunnel you push a cat through. Same cats, same box, different orientation.

Also get it out of the shed. A carrier that smells of shed and spiders is not a familiar object, it's an alien one.

Mine sleeps in hers. Took the door off entirely, put an old jumper in it, stuck it next to the radiator, and now it's just a bed that occasionally goes in a car. Cost nothing and took about six weeks of ignoring it.

Vet moderator. The direct answer first: yes, this is fixable, and at 15 weeks you're working with the easiest possible material, because she's still in the window where new experiences are being catalogued rather than confirmed.

What she has actually learned is a sequence, not a fear of plastic. Cupboard opens, box appears, bad things follow. So the repair is to break the sequence, which means the box has to appear hundreds of times with nothing following it. Leave it out permanently, open, with bedding that already smells of her and of home, and let it be the most boring object in the room. Feed her near it, then in it. Only once she's choosing to sit in it do you close the door for a couple of seconds, then open it before she asks. If she leaves, that's information, not failure: go back a step.

Two clinical notes worth having. A carrier that opens from the top, or better still whose upper half unclips, changes the appointment as well as the loading, because a nervous cat can often be examined sitting in the bottom half rather than tipped out onto a table, and that gives me more useful readings than a cat I've had to extract. And if you have a genuinely fearful cat rather than a kitten who's had one bad day, ask your own vet about pre-visit medication given at home. It's an established option, it's prescribed to the individual animal, and it's a far better answer than an owner who stops booking appointments.

The site's guide to getting a cat into the carrier has the loading technique in order, and the kitten vaccination and vet schedule sets out what's still coming so you know how much runway you have before the neutering appointment.

One correction to the advice you're getting offline: "just grab her" is the approach that produces the adult cats MillieAndOtis describes. It works four or five times and then it stops working for the next fifteen years.

Carrier is now in the living room with the door unscrewed and a fleece in it. She sat next to it and glared at it for two days as though it had insulted her.

Question while I'm here: do I do the same with the car, or is that a step too far? The screaming in the car was somehow worse than the loading.

Yes, do the car too, and do it separately from the carrier work. Cat in carrier, carrier in car, engine on, engine off, back inside, no journey. Then round the block. Cover the carrier with a towel for actual trips, it cuts out most of what they're reacting to.

Mine still complains for the first two minutes and then settles. I've decided that's just his opinion and not a problem to solve.

Booster appointment done on Friday. She walked into the carrier after a bit of chicken and I closed the door on a cat who was already inside it, which after last month felt like witchcraft. Still yelled in the car. I'll take it.