New Cat - Diarrhea With Wet Food

Hi all! Just hoping for some advice on my new cat, Jake (1 year old), who is a very recent rescue and has had a pretty crazy couple of months. He was rescued from a hoarder's shed in April with about 50 other cats who were confined, so I don't know much about his nutritional history but assume it's not great. He's pretty skinny (the vet said he could stand to gain a pound or so on his current 8.8lbs) and he was eating an unknown wet food and dry food at the rescue, but refused most of the dry food.

Anyway, the rescue didn't give me any of his current food when I brought him home, so I had to give him what I could, which was a wet food that I know to be nutritionally good (PC Extra Meaty Chicken Dinner in the 5.5oz can) and a dry food that my girl Rosa was on until we switched her to something else at my vet's recommendation (Wellness Core Original Chicken & Turkey). All was well for about 4-5 days - normal stools and he loved the wet food - but he started having bad diarrhea on about day 5, and I put him on a bland diet (chicken and rice) to see if I could stabilize him a bit. It worked until I tried to add wet food back. Any re-introduction of wet food, including another brand (BFF Tuna & Chicken), sparked more loose stools or diarrhea. He doesn't seem bothered by dry food or treats.

On the chicken and rice, he has pretty normal stools - sometimes a little loose but overall as expected. I add some warm water to the mix to make sure he's getting enough hydration, although I think he already drinks enough water day to day (if the fountain levels are anything to go by!).

My vet said that he could be sensitive to an ingredient in the wet foods, and recommended the Purina Pro Pet Plan Veterinary Care EN Gastroenteric wet food and dry food, which I bought. It's been since Friday evening and he's had approximately half a can over four meals, resulting in loose stools every time that smell really bad. They're loose enough that I have to clean his bum when he's had them - not as much as before, but always a little bit, to ensure that my apartment doesn't become a minor toxic waste zone. So these are my questions:

1) How long should I wait for his tummy to get used to the Purina EN wet food? Is this just a 'wait and see' thing, or should I back off the wet food altogether?
2) Are there other foods for sensitive stomachs (like the limited ingredient ones I see) that might be better?
3) I've added some pumpkin puree (Weruva brand, but I'd probably save my budget and buy a can at the grocery store if I continued lol) to his chicken/wet food mix for a couple of meals, and he seemed to like it. Can I safely continue this?
4) Could probiotics help? I've been trying to find Fortiflora and I think my vet may have it.

Any help would be great - as I am not a huge fan of chasing my cat with a wet paper towel OR hand-chopping dinner-sized quantities of poached chicken for him all the time, lol. Of course, I'll be in touch with my vet and take his advice too, but I'd really like to get my new guy on a consistent diet of food that's nutritionally complete for him so that he can gain that pound!

Bless his heart. It is hard to tell what they fed him prior to the good fortune of him meeting you. I don't know much about nutrition. I apologize for not being able to answer your questions. Speck (one of my boys) has a lot of GI problems and we have to be very careful about what he eats. He loves cat treats and even though they are dry, it's a problem.

Since the pumpkin helps, I'd check with the vet to see if the average grocery store brands are good. (Here, canned pumpkin is only available through the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season, so we would have to stock up. For DH's pumpkin pie, not Speck. He won't eat it.)

Good luck to you and Jake. And it is nice to meet you! I don't think we've spoken before. I hope someone comes along that is better versed in nutrition than I am and can be of more help.

Hi. Is there anyway possible to find out from the shelter what he was eating then? It would seem there might have been too many changes in his diet and they are all playing havoc with his digestive tract.

If there is anything that you have fed him that worked, I would go back to that and start all over again. And, let quite a while go by before trying anything else. Once you are ready to try something else, it should be done very, very, gradually. For starters, keep the food mostly what works, and add a very tiny, tiny amount of whatever you want to test. Add a little more of the "new" food, and slightly reduce the "old" food, etc. If after the food is mostly "new" and the loose stools start again, go back to the reliable food.

Keep a journal of what you are doing so that you have a record to refer back to.

nurseangel I did some research and the store-brand pumpkin (100% puree, not the pie filling, of course, lol!) is the same stuff as in the Weruva packets, just waaaay cheaper for the amount you get.

FeebysOwner I did message the rescue and apparently he was eating Friskies wet food and Performatrin dry food, but was also having diarrhea issues on that, so no clues there. Because I'm genuinely wondering if all this change has just upset his GI tract, I grabbed some probiotics from the pet store. I wish we had a reliable food, but the only one I have is chicken and rice, weirdly - knowing that he was having diarrhea at the rescue, it seems like we don't have enough info.

So here's where we're at: Our meals (twice a day) are currently 1-2 spoonfuls of rice, 1-2 spoonfuls of pumpkin, about 65g of chicken, a spoonful or so of the Purina EN wet food, and half a packet of the probiotic powder, mixed with warm water. It looks SUPER gross but he eats it! I only got the powder yesterday afternoon, but I'm actually having okay results right now! He didn't have any really loose stools and the one he did have wasn't well-formed but it also didn't smell like toxic waste.

I'm emailing my vet today to see what he says, but at least the really messy problems are on hold for now! We'll see how today goes.

(I have to say, I am SO glad my cats are bonding - I genuinely thought they would probably just tolerate each other, because my Rosa is a super-skittish girl who's only just let me pet her after 10 months - but I find it SO weird that they are totally fine using each other's litter boxes when I thought they were supposed to prefer having their own! It just adds to my detective work twice a day, lol.)

I have an almost 9 year old kitty that we adopted when he was just 10 weeks old. When he was a kitten, he ate regular kitten canned and dry food. As he got older (around 6-8 mos old) we started introducing adult canned grain free food. He had horrible diarrhea. We put him on Royal Canin Gastrointestinal HE dry food and continued on the kitten wet food. His diarrhea cleared up. We started reintroducing the grain free food and again, diarrhea. Through trial and error, we figured out that his system cannot handle a completely grain-free diet. Fast forward to today, he is still on the RC Gastro HE dry and we mix it with a GF dry and we also feed him a rx canned food with a little bit of GF canned. It's worked for him and kept him regular.

To help him, we also give him a daily probiotic and saccharomyces boullardi, another probiotic.

All of this is to say that perhaps your kitty has a sensitive tummy and cannot handle overly rich or grain free food. Find something that works to keep the diarrhea controlled and keep him on that until his stool is normal for a period of time. Then, work on introducing other food, a little at a time until you can find a combination that works for you.

stephanietx Thank you so much for telling me what worked for your little guy! That's really interesting

So far, so good with the probiotic (once daily, approximately half a packet - although how I am supposed to tell what half of a 1g packet looks like without being a drug dealer and having a super sensitive to the hundredth gram kitchen scale, I do NOT know, lol), pumpkin, rice, chicken, and some of the Purina EN food (more this morning than in previous meals). No diarrhea, at least, though he hasn't had a bowel movement since Sunday evening. I'm talking to my vet tonight and we may decide to move to a hypoallergenic diet and see how that works.