Animal Biome / Kitty Biome Experiences?

[__caitlin]

Hi everyone - since mentioning this on another cat IBD thread, I've been looking into this more. When my IBD cat, Max, had his most recent flareup, I did read all about Animal Biome and the work they're doing and how many people seem to have had good results with it. But ultimately kind of chickened out in trying it since he does have other health conditions (hyperthyroidism) and I had no vet who could talk me through it.

I've since seen that multiple members here have tried the Animal Biome fecal microbiota transplant, and wanted to ask what your experiences have been?

What is the process like exactly? Do you think it's necessary that I do the whole kit -- i.e., pay for testing a fecal sample, etc.? Or would it be enough to just administer the supplement?

Have you all seen results with it? Or on the other hand, did any cat seem to do worse on it? Max hasn't wanted to eat his regular probiotics anyway (was trying to feed him Jarrow's s.boulardii + MOS), so I'm wondering if I should give this a shot before his IBD progresses much worse.

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

daftcat75 , you did the Animal Biome test on Krista, can you answer this one?

 

[daftcat75]

I did the "before" test with Krista. But we ran out of time before we could try the poop pills. She went through a lot of grief and handling in the weeks and months prior. I just couldn't put her through daily pilling when I finally got her off daily pilling. Her remaining meds were either transdermal or flavored oils that she was all too happy to take herself. The flavored oils anyway; she wasn't happy about the transdermal wet willies but it was a lot easier than any pill.

The testing was interesting. They showed where Krista's biome was in terms of diversity and quality on a number of metrics. The idea is that I was going to give her the pills until they ran out and then re-test her afterwards. The testing was expected to show improvements in all the metrics.

She finally reached remission when I finally stopped pilling her with a trigger food (fish flakes.) At that point, the poop pills became nice to have but not entirely needed anymore. All the poop nonsense stopped when I found and eliminated that last trigger--those dang flakes that was supposed to be making things easier.

S. boulardii, fecal transplant, other probiotics are all minor tweaks. IBD often needs stronger soldiers like dietary changes and sometimes steroids. Anti-nausea and appetite stimulant drugs may also be desirable or necessary.

 

[LTS3]

Resurrecting an old thread.

daftcat75 is the pre-testing necessary or can one just start the Gut Restore? How does the product compare to any S. boulardii product besides the fecal component? I have tried S. boulardii and probiotics in the past but they never made a difference to Leroy's IBD. My vet has not heard of the Kitty Biome and isn't sure how well validated it is but he's fine if I want to give it a try

 

[daftcat75]

Resurrecting an old thread.

daftcat75 is the pre-testing necessary or can one just start the Gut Restore? How does the product compare to any S. boulardii product besides the fecal component? I have tried S. boulardii and probiotics in the past but they never made a difference to Leroy's IBD. My vet has not heard of the Kitty Biome and isn't sure how well validated it is but he's fine if I want to give it a try

You don't need the testing to get started. It's interesting though. And it would certainly provide you a reference for after you have completed a bottle of the pills. But the testing delays have become awful. It took me three weeks to get the "before" report. We were nearly done with the protocol when we got the first report. Coming up on the second week since I sent in the "after" sample, and I'm not even sure they received it. I thought they sent me an email confirming receipt after the first sample but I haven't seen the same after the second.

AnimalBiome has three main products:

1. Testing. It's useful and interesting but not required. The Starter Pack is the Gut Restore plus one test and the Gut Restore System is the Gut Restore Supplement plus two tests.
2. Gut Maintenance (GMP): This is more like an emergency pill for diarrhea. This has s. boulardii and will help your cat on runny days to get back to solid.
3. Gut Restore: This is the flagship product. This one does all the heavy lifting for your cat. This is dried poop from carefully screened donor cats. This is not s. boulardii, and it's not just a small sample of strains like probiotic products. This has both bacteria strains and bacteria-eating microbes that help eat the wrong kinds of bacteria. A healthy biome is more than a handful of strains. This is actually what makes the testing so interesting.

You are going to have to find a way to pill Leroy or have Leroy pill himself. There is poop in these pills. You cannot open them and mix them with food. Leroy will not appreciate this. Also the coating of the capsules ensures that everything survives the stomach and opens where it's needed--in the gut. If you cannot get Leroy to take the pills whole, then don't even bother with this product.

For Betty, she already takes a capsule of other other pills (I repack quarter pills into a small gelatin capsule for her) and hide it in the smallest amount of food, and place that on the carpet. I'm counting on her to not be very thorough with her chewing. And most mornings she wasn't. She would take up the food coated capsule, bite once or twice, and then swallow. Out of 30 poop pills, she opened only two of them. Only one of them opened in her mouth. The other one opened on the carpet. I can verify there is poop in these pills.

The difference between FMT and probiotics has been night and day. I really want to see the second report already. But I'm considering another month because of the stark improvement we have seen. She started the month barely eating with lots of nausea and weekly hairballs. Within a week, she was eating her portions on her own e.g. not relying on me to trick her with carpet morsels (because for some reason when she's nauseated, she'll eat a bite off the carpet but not off the plate.) Her hairballs almost completely disappeared that month except for a heatwave hairball in week three. Unfortunately, the ultrasound still says she's inflamed and we're still proceeding with an endoscopy with biopsy in a couple of weeks. But I do look forward to seeing the second report and possibly starting her on another course after the endo is done.

I'm attaching Betty's report so you can see the kind of information that is included with the testing. The sample that was used in this report was before we started the pills. It looks an awful lot like Betty was a kibble addict before she came to me. Hopefully the month of poop pills have gone a ways to correcting those imbalances.

 

[daftcat75]

S. boulardii, fecal transplant, other probiotics are all minor tweaks. IBD often needs stronger soldiers like dietary changes and sometimes steroids. Anti-nausea and appetite stimulant drugs may also be desirable or necessary.

Having finally gone through this protocol with Betty, I have to amend myself. FMT is not a minor tweak. There has been huge improvements in Betty's appetite, reduction of nausea, and reducing the frequency and severity of her hairballs. I am still waiting to see her "after" test to see the quantitative improvements in her biome balance, richness, and diversity.

 

[LTS3]

Thanks! Leroy fortunately eats anything so getting a capsule in shouldn't be a problem. So after a month of the capsules, is there a product to maintain the gut biome or do you just hope the gut biome is happy and normal?

 

[daftcat75]

Thanks! Leroy fortunately eats anything so getting a capsule in shouldn't be a problem. So after a month of the capsules, is there a product to maintain the gut biome or do you just hope the gut biome is happy and normal?

I don’t know yet. I haven’t seen the after report to see if her gut is balanced or needs another bottle.

They make it sound like the FMT should be a one time thing once the gut is finally balanced again. But in the absence of testing, how do you know if it’s balanced? Absence of symptoms? If that’s the case, Betty is not there yet. I started her back on Vitality Science’s Pet Flora for probiotic until I get the second report back since she is still having hairballs and we’re still waiting on answers from the specialist. Next up: endo with biopsy in two weeks.

 

[gabicards]

Thanks for sharing about your experience! I've ordered the FMT pills too, but I didn't order the testing bit. We'll see how it goes...

 

[Cupcakecrazy]

Thanks for sharing about your experience! I've ordered the FMT pills too, but I didn't order the testing bit. We'll see how it goes...

Hi! I'm thinking about ordering the FMT pills for my kitty. What was your experience like?

 

[daftcat75]

I did the pills and tests with Betty for a little over a year.

Vets and IM insist that Betty has IBD. I'm not so sure. She was certainly challenged last year when I adopted her. But she would only ever toss hairballs. They were brutal all day affairs that ended in pink spits. But she never showed any food intolerances. I put her on prednisilone anyway because arguing with the IM wasn't stopping the hairballs. Parallel to this, Betty also had teeth issues. Indeed, our first dental appointment was canceled because she had another all day hairball affair the week before. Once stabilized on pred, we got her teeth addressed--several extractions. She gained a lot of weight--much more than she needed. But she remained fussy and wouldn't hear of any diet changes. So after being stable on steroids for a year, with the IM's blessing, we weaned her off steroids. We had to do another round of dental work (and she'll probably see a proper dentist next year.) But so far, the hairballs have not returned and she still does not show any kind of food-related enteropathy. If this was truly IBD, I would have expected that she would need a diet change probably off chicken and excluding dry food. She's needed neither of those. Not that she would put up with either.

So that's a little of her history.

I would put AnimalBiome in the, "it sort of helped her but it certainly didn't hurt her" category. The trouble is that if you aren't addressing the sources of imbalance, there's only so much those poop pills can do. If you aren't changing the inputs, how do you expect the outputs to change? I think if you have a less fussy cat than mine that you can follow their recommendations like more exercise, more fiber, or whatever specifically they recommend based on the testing results, maybe you can get more mileage out of the pills than Betty did. I can say in the beginning, they certainly helped shore up her appetite. But we seemed to have plateaued and our tests weren't really changing from one to the next. Lately, Betty has been super fussy about taking her capsules and I'm lucky if I can get her to take the one capsule that has her gabapentin and ondansetron. She used to pill herself. I'd coat her capsules in Hills A/D and drop them on the carpet and she would scoop and swallow each one. Now that fuss bus is no longer making her regularly scheduled stops in meds town and I have to resort to squirting the foul tasting liquid into her and hoping I can also get the ondansetron squished into to the tip of the syringe. She no longer wants to take meds. It's very frustrating. And that's something to keep in mind here. If you can't get that capsule into your cat whole, you cannot open it into food or treats. Not only will she not appreciate the taste, but without the protective coating of the capsule, the contents die in the stomach.

It might help. It probably won't hurt. It's probably not the miracle you are looking for. But if your cat does allow you some flexibility around changes, you just may be able to follow their recommendations (you'll have to pay for at least one test to get their recommendations) and perhaps between you, your cat, and the AB team, you may get her (his?) gut on a better footing.

(And if you don't have that kind of flexibility or cooperation from your cat, you may want to look at Pet Flora and/or Feline Comfort from Vitality Science or Gut Soothe from Adored Beasts which also have good reviews and don't promise the moon.)

 

[Cupcakecrazy]

I did the pills and tests with Betty for a little over a year.

Vets and IM insist that Betty has IBD. I'm not so sure. She was certainly challenged last year when I adopted her. But she would only ever toss hairballs. They were brutal all day affairs that ended in pink spits. But she never showed any food intolerances. I put her on prednisilone anyway because arguing with the IM wasn't stopping the hairballs. Parallel to this, Betty also had teeth issues. Indeed, our first dental appointment was canceled because she had another all day hairball affair the week before. Once stabilized on pred, we got her teeth addressed--several extractions. She gained a lot of weight--much more than she needed. But she remained fussy and wouldn't hear of any diet changes. So after being stable on steroids for a year, with the IM's blessing, we weaned her off steroids. We had to do another round of dental work (and she'll probably see a proper dentist next year.) But so far, the hairballs have not returned and she still does not show any kind of food-related enteropathy. If this was truly IBD, I would have expected that she would need a diet change probably off chicken and excluding dry food. She's needed neither of those. Not that she would put up with either.

So that's a little of her history.

I would put AnimalBiome in the, "it sort of helped her but it certainly didn't hurt her" category. The trouble is that if you aren't addressing the sources of imbalance, there's only so much those poop pills can do. If you aren't changing the inputs, how do you expect the outputs to change? I think if you have a less fussy cat than mine that you can follow their recommendations like more exercise, more fiber, or whatever specifically they recommend based on the testing results, maybe you can get more mileage out of the pills than Betty did. I can say in the beginning, they certainly helped shore up her appetite. But we seemed to have plateaued and our tests weren't really changing from one to the next. Lately, Betty has been super fussy about taking her capsules and I'm lucky if I can get her to take the one capsule that has her gabapentin and ondansetron. She used to pill herself. I'd coat her capsules in Hills A/D and drop them on the carpet and she would scoop and swallow each one. Now that fuss bus is no longer making her regularly scheduled stops in meds town and I have to resort to squirting the foul tasting liquid into her and hoping I can also get the ondansetron squished into to the tip of the syringe. She no longer wants to take meds. It's very frustrating. And that's something to keep in mind here. If you can't get that capsule into your cat whole, you cannot open it into food or treats. Not only will she not appreciate the taste, but without the protective coating of the capsule, the contents die in the stomach.

It might help. It probably won't hurt. It's probably not the miracle you are looking for. But if your cat does allow you some flexibility around changes, you just may be able to follow their recommendations (you'll have to pay for at least one test to get their recommendations) and perhaps between you, your cat, and the AB team, you may get her (his?) gut on a better footing.

(And if you don't have that kind of flexibility or cooperation from your cat, you may want to look at Pet Flora and/or Feline Comfort from Vitality Science or Gut Soothe from Adored Beasts which also have good reviews and don't promise the moon.)

I appreciate it! I'm looking for a way to repair my boys gut after three back to back antibiotics, the last of which was Convenia and seemed to really mess him up. I'll look into all of your suggestions, thank you!

 

[maggie101]

Adored Beast Feline Gut Soothe, do you use this product?

Please help! IBD senior cat, but all meds cause severe diarrhea

Diaheria is a puzzle I am still try to solve(formy cat)!