- Joined
- May 29, 2022
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Hello everyone,
I am writing to you all today about one of my family cats, my beloved 21 year old girl named Lily who came into my life when I was 3 and I have not known a day of my life without her being in it. She has always been such a tiny cat, around 6 pounds during her younger days and now that she is older and more frail, tends to vary somewhere between 5.5 lbs and 4.5 lbs depending on how her allergies are doing, which I'm about to get into. For the past 5-6 years or so, she has developed terrible allergies that have seemed to progress to the point where we can only feed her one protein manufactured by one brand of food, otherwise she will have violent diarrhea (with blood if she eats too much of anything else) and will scratch her ears and face sometimes until she hurts herself. And when I tell you it is almost an immediate reaction when she eats something she is not supposed to, I truly mean immediate. We have three other cats, and if she gets so much as a pebble or two of their dry food, it takes a maximum of 10 minutes before she is having diarrhea so it's quite a clear correlation. I am in pre-veterinary studies, and I've had my fair share of working around different hospitals to gain experience but have never come across another animal with food sensitivities like this, and neither have any of the vets we've visited about her issues. We even bring her to a highly regarded feline specialist veterinarian, not just a dog and cat vet.
She went from being allergic to everything but beef, to everything but venison and now she can only eat the lamb and blueberry canned food by N&D. Any other brand of lamb (even though they are limited ingredient diets with lamb only) she will have a food sensitivity reaction to. Today, I gave her a crumb of a Feline Natural's lamb and organ treat, whose only ingredients consist of lamb, lamb heart, lamb kidney, and lamb liver... but again within 10 min she was having running off to the box to have diarrhea. She is so sick of her food, and I feel so badly that she has to eat the same thing day in and day out, she acts hungry for anything else all the time, not to mention the fear I have for if she ever develops a food allergy to this food. We will have nothing to safely feed her anymore that her body doesn't reject. Introducing her slowly to a new food, as demonstrated with the crumb of lamb treat that I gave her today, will still result in her having diarrhea. And she is so old, I would be so worried about the effects of prolonged dehydration like that on as old a body as hers.
I guess what I am trying to ask is, has anyone ever dealt with a cat like this or had any type of experience similar to this at all? Can anyone provide any type of advice? I know this is a tough question, especially since professionals can't seem to help either, but I have found that sometimes it's the pet owners that come to a solution in a tricky situation like this, because it is our love for our animals that motivate us to find one. It was a grueling period of trial and error on my family's part that has allowed her to still be with us today.
I am writing to you all today about one of my family cats, my beloved 21 year old girl named Lily who came into my life when I was 3 and I have not known a day of my life without her being in it. She has always been such a tiny cat, around 6 pounds during her younger days and now that she is older and more frail, tends to vary somewhere between 5.5 lbs and 4.5 lbs depending on how her allergies are doing, which I'm about to get into. For the past 5-6 years or so, she has developed terrible allergies that have seemed to progress to the point where we can only feed her one protein manufactured by one brand of food, otherwise she will have violent diarrhea (with blood if she eats too much of anything else) and will scratch her ears and face sometimes until she hurts herself. And when I tell you it is almost an immediate reaction when she eats something she is not supposed to, I truly mean immediate. We have three other cats, and if she gets so much as a pebble or two of their dry food, it takes a maximum of 10 minutes before she is having diarrhea so it's quite a clear correlation. I am in pre-veterinary studies, and I've had my fair share of working around different hospitals to gain experience but have never come across another animal with food sensitivities like this, and neither have any of the vets we've visited about her issues. We even bring her to a highly regarded feline specialist veterinarian, not just a dog and cat vet.
She went from being allergic to everything but beef, to everything but venison and now she can only eat the lamb and blueberry canned food by N&D. Any other brand of lamb (even though they are limited ingredient diets with lamb only) she will have a food sensitivity reaction to. Today, I gave her a crumb of a Feline Natural's lamb and organ treat, whose only ingredients consist of lamb, lamb heart, lamb kidney, and lamb liver... but again within 10 min she was having running off to the box to have diarrhea. She is so sick of her food, and I feel so badly that she has to eat the same thing day in and day out, she acts hungry for anything else all the time, not to mention the fear I have for if she ever develops a food allergy to this food. We will have nothing to safely feed her anymore that her body doesn't reject. Introducing her slowly to a new food, as demonstrated with the crumb of lamb treat that I gave her today, will still result in her having diarrhea. And she is so old, I would be so worried about the effects of prolonged dehydration like that on as old a body as hers.
I guess what I am trying to ask is, has anyone ever dealt with a cat like this or had any type of experience similar to this at all? Can anyone provide any type of advice? I know this is a tough question, especially since professionals can't seem to help either, but I have found that sometimes it's the pet owners that come to a solution in a tricky situation like this, because it is our love for our animals that motivate us to find one. It was a grueling period of trial and error on my family's part that has allowed her to still be with us today.