Sorry, this is long but I always feel it is easier to give too much information than not enough, The last three paragraphs are diet related and the rest is about the cat and how he stands today.
My guy is 18 years and 4 months old and until a few years ago he was healthy and then he got into a fight where he got a fang knocked out and a claw sheath stuck in his side. The claw ended up infecting him so he needed to be cut open to clean the area and have a drain for a bit. All of this cleared up but at the same time he started yowling. Everything seemed fine with the cat and he was going to the bathroom properly but he yowled here and there with no real reason. He started slowly losing weight and his tests came out pretty much normal until he started throwing up. In a year he has pretty much lost half of his weight and needs daily sub-q injections because of renal failure. Add to this he has IBD and will throw up large amounts of water and food from time to time. This slams him because of the renal failure because he loses a lot of moisture which his body has a hard time processing through the regular systems.
Flash forward to today and he can go for a week or two without throwing up and just recently he made it to 19 days without throwing up which is his record. His stools are fine for the most part but he has really long stools because food just moves right through him. The IBD comes and goes like a yo-yo and when he is near the bottom I can hear his stomach gurgling which stops the food from breaking down and being absorbed and he ends up throwing it up. Because wet cat food is 75/80% water this all comes back out when he gets full and can't process what is there so up it comes. I found the sub-q's stopped all yowling and stopped him from drinking too much liquid and he gets 100ml each day. He was still throwing up every day to three and after more test we found he needed B12 shots and this helped increase the duration between throwing up from a day to 3 to 7 - 12 days and just recently he went 19 days and then 9 days.
Today is day 2 after the last time he threw up and his weight is up a little and he is eating more food and moving stool properly. They are really big stools for a cat that is not even 7 lbs but this is the IBD. He has had ultrasounds and they can see the damage but noting seems to fix it for long. He is currently taking 0.45cc of Famotidine to help reduce acid build up and he takes 0.2cc of Buprenophine twice a day for arthritis. He has been on both Cerenia and Prednisolone but neither of these changed anything with the throwing up and his stools sorted themselves out.
That's kind of how Scratchy stands today, he is fairly stable with the IBD and he was born with his left kidney being half the size of his right so short of sub-q's each day there is not much that can be done here. A buddy was reading about raw diets so he made a modified version of this one to see if the cat would even eat it. http://www.catnutrition.org/recipes.html Currently the cat eats Medleys Shredded Chicken Fare and Chicken Florentine which seem to agree with him for the most part. So we used the recipe with chicken thighs that was lightly baked so just the outsides were cooked and cut into cubes Another buddy has a super press/juicer so all of the raw chicken hearts and livers as well as the bones from thighs and they came out a red foamy almost liquid, This was poured in the chicken meat and a few of the vitamins were also added.
I didn't see much of how this could harm the animal but how it was hard to get them to eat it in the first place. I ended up feeding small bits to him and he ate it up and over an hour or so he had eaten about 1/2 a small can of food and wanted more. I checked for stomach noises and he was good for about 2 - 3 hours and then his stomach was making a lot of noise. By the time I went to bed he was burping what smelled like stomach and this was the worse he has been. He made it 1/2 a day and ended up throwing most of this up with a lot of water content.
The vet put him on Metronidazole for 10 days and I am now putting Purina FortiFlora on his food to help it digest. The first few days after giving him raw food were pretty bad and he wasn't eating much for those days but he seems to have pulled out of it,. His IBD stools are back and he is eating about twice the recommended amount of food so he seems to be back to normal for him.
Given the above what would be a safe way to try and transition a cat with his issues to a raw diet? It doesn't seem to a problem to get him to eat it but I need to find a way to do it without hurting him.
Thanks for any help with getting this guy on a raw diet.
My guy is 18 years and 4 months old and until a few years ago he was healthy and then he got into a fight where he got a fang knocked out and a claw sheath stuck in his side. The claw ended up infecting him so he needed to be cut open to clean the area and have a drain for a bit. All of this cleared up but at the same time he started yowling. Everything seemed fine with the cat and he was going to the bathroom properly but he yowled here and there with no real reason. He started slowly losing weight and his tests came out pretty much normal until he started throwing up. In a year he has pretty much lost half of his weight and needs daily sub-q injections because of renal failure. Add to this he has IBD and will throw up large amounts of water and food from time to time. This slams him because of the renal failure because he loses a lot of moisture which his body has a hard time processing through the regular systems.
Flash forward to today and he can go for a week or two without throwing up and just recently he made it to 19 days without throwing up which is his record. His stools are fine for the most part but he has really long stools because food just moves right through him. The IBD comes and goes like a yo-yo and when he is near the bottom I can hear his stomach gurgling which stops the food from breaking down and being absorbed and he ends up throwing it up. Because wet cat food is 75/80% water this all comes back out when he gets full and can't process what is there so up it comes. I found the sub-q's stopped all yowling and stopped him from drinking too much liquid and he gets 100ml each day. He was still throwing up every day to three and after more test we found he needed B12 shots and this helped increase the duration between throwing up from a day to 3 to 7 - 12 days and just recently he went 19 days and then 9 days.
Today is day 2 after the last time he threw up and his weight is up a little and he is eating more food and moving stool properly. They are really big stools for a cat that is not even 7 lbs but this is the IBD. He has had ultrasounds and they can see the damage but noting seems to fix it for long. He is currently taking 0.45cc of Famotidine to help reduce acid build up and he takes 0.2cc of Buprenophine twice a day for arthritis. He has been on both Cerenia and Prednisolone but neither of these changed anything with the throwing up and his stools sorted themselves out.
That's kind of how Scratchy stands today, he is fairly stable with the IBD and he was born with his left kidney being half the size of his right so short of sub-q's each day there is not much that can be done here. A buddy was reading about raw diets so he made a modified version of this one to see if the cat would even eat it. http://www.catnutrition.org/recipes.html Currently the cat eats Medleys Shredded Chicken Fare and Chicken Florentine which seem to agree with him for the most part. So we used the recipe with chicken thighs that was lightly baked so just the outsides were cooked and cut into cubes Another buddy has a super press/juicer so all of the raw chicken hearts and livers as well as the bones from thighs and they came out a red foamy almost liquid, This was poured in the chicken meat and a few of the vitamins were also added.
I didn't see much of how this could harm the animal but how it was hard to get them to eat it in the first place. I ended up feeding small bits to him and he ate it up and over an hour or so he had eaten about 1/2 a small can of food and wanted more. I checked for stomach noises and he was good for about 2 - 3 hours and then his stomach was making a lot of noise. By the time I went to bed he was burping what smelled like stomach and this was the worse he has been. He made it 1/2 a day and ended up throwing most of this up with a lot of water content.
The vet put him on Metronidazole for 10 days and I am now putting Purina FortiFlora on his food to help it digest. The first few days after giving him raw food were pretty bad and he wasn't eating much for those days but he seems to have pulled out of it,. His IBD stools are back and he is eating about twice the recommended amount of food so he seems to be back to normal for him.
Given the above what would be a safe way to try and transition a cat with his issues to a raw diet? It doesn't seem to a problem to get him to eat it but I need to find a way to do it without hurting him.
Thanks for any help with getting this guy on a raw diet.
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