Unless this beautiful girl stays on a special food, she gets leaky stool and it is so sad. They have thrown everything they can think of on her to stop this from happening and I have been reduced to putting her in the special enclosure which gives her access to the outside. Not a good thing for a young kitten. It is either that or live in a cage for the rest of her life.
So I put a specially worded ad out about her and I hope to find someone who is catless, who has the patience to keep her on the low-residue diet (which is sadly prohibitively expensive or I would put ALL the cats on it) and who is willing to wait this out until her system develops more and she can thrive like a normal kitty.
Wish us luck- I even emailed Best Friends in Kanub Utah in the hopes that they might take her and be able to either cure her forever or find her a loving home
Hang in there, Jedi Kat. Things should get better.
What is the low-residue diet like? We’ve got a little girl around here with a similar problem we’ve just started trying to treat. We might want to take a shot at that, too, if it isn’t to complicated or hard to get.
Iams makes it but we had problems with her accepting it so I switched her to Canidae Pure Elements which is essentially all pure chicken and chicken-by products. It seems like each year, we encounter more issues with cat food then the year before. Makes me wonder what they are putting in the stuff that wasn’t there earlier?
Two hits of interest on her but when you mention diarrhea most people don’t want to deal with it. I can understand that which is why I want to find the right home for her.
Wonder how she would do on a raw diet…. One of my friends has an older cat that had terrible stool for a long time. She was close to giving up and decided to try plain raw chicken. The stool problems cleared right up. So now, that cat eats only raw chicken with the appropriate additives to make sure she gets everything she needs nutritionally. The other 4 cats in the house won’t touch it.
Just curious if a raw diet would benefit Jedi? Feed her in a carrier to contain food and keep others from sneaking a bite. I am trying to switch one of mine with dietary issues, but he is older and set in his ways. Some with IBD issues at The Cat Site have reported good results. Wishing you and her good luck with food and finding her a home.
Were it not for the fact that most of the chicken bought these days are factory-raised and the slaughter houses douse the meat with a combination of sodium chloride and ammonia nitrate (to kill any e-coli lurking) a raw chicken diet might work. But free-range chicken is becoming increasingly harder to find these days as poultry farmers become pressured into reverting to the horrific practice of raising chickens devoid of sunlight, air and exercise.
I feed ready-made or supplemented raw to several cats.
Not sure of origin, but Nature’s Variety and Primal widely available in this part of the country. They’re more mass-market, but you could check their websites or customer service for more info.
I have frozen raw delivered from two sources: (1) Hare Today – Gone Tomorrow, 800-640-3582, hare-today.com/ – NW Pa. Don’t think they use factory farm practices. Have every possible food imaginable.
(2) Darwin’s Natural Pet Products in Seattle – 206-324-7387 (google website for more info and toll-free #). Their chicken is free-range; think their turkey is, too.
Raw food is pricey, esp if you have to factor shipping, but if the food Jedi is currently eating is expensive, anyway . . .
Just wanted to pass on some options. Good luck with Jedi.
Have you tried giving her some Libby’s Pure pumpkin? Not the stuff for pumpkin pies, but the pure pumpkin puree. If you’ve ruled out parasites, (and I would definitely test for TF before you do as it’s something not often tested for, but could give symptoms like she has), then the canned pumpkin will keep her firm while she eats whatever the rest of them are on. I do this with all of mine whenever they have a food change, and it works brilliantly. Either syringe 5-10 mls 3 times a day, or mix a teaspoon of pumpkin with 3-4 meals a day instead. Hope this helps.
Yes- pumpkin is always the first thing I try and then I try sweet potato (cooked and mashed) as it has the same results. They did a full fecal on her not just a smear and the results coming back tested for everything.