Sadie – Weaning…..

[admin]

Hi Linda

Fantastic news that Sadie’s PCV is stable! I’m so pleased.

Thank you for thinking of me re: your friend’s cat. Mable is fed on a very mainstream wet cat food (Felix, one of Purina’s products). I am not keen on these foods as they are only 4% meat! All the main brands here are. Unfortunately, she will not eat anything else. Due to this, she is supplemented with Iams biscuits and Royal Canin dental biscuits. She is the fussiest, and yet easiest cat I have ever known. I tried giving her some tuna and smoked salmon recently, but she turned her nose up! Admittedly she would take a little ham or chicken, but since I stopped eating meat I tend not to have it around. She would live on biscuits if she could but I insist on some wet food for renal function. I have occasionally fed mashed egg and rice to my cats when they have had upset stomachs, but only for limited periods and usually mixed in with meat. Mable has also been known to supplement her diet with birds, mice, frogs….. ;)

Cats nutritional requirements can be a bit tricky. Too much fish is a bad idea, as it can cause pansteatitis. Cats also need dietary taurine, and are obligate carnivores. Another issue with feeding fresh food is that many seemingly innocuous foods are highly toxic to cats. Obviously, onions and garlic are a big no-no, but many other things are also poisonous to them.
Some of the very fancy cat foods with a high percentage of meat/fish do not contain all the essential nutrients and should therefore only be used as a complementary food (the label should say whether it is a complete or complementary food).

This is a good place to start:

http://www.vet.cornell.edu/FHC/health_resources/FeedYourCat.cfm

I also like this site:

http://www.felinecrf.org/which_foods.htm

I don’t know how reliable it is, but I read a lot on here before Molly’s IMHA diagnosis and found some very useful information.

What is your friend feeding her cat? Molly was on Royal Canin urinary S/O wet food, as she suffered idiopathic cystitis. I must say that before that, she was on medications and still suffered bouts of cystitis every fortnight. She never suffered another episode after starting the vet diet, and I was quickly able to stop all her medications (although, of course, I questioned if it was the special diet which had caused the IMHA). I also used to make her “broths” of chicken or fish/shrimp boiled and blended with lots of water, to boost her fluid intake. This is cheap and easy to add in as a complementary food (and was recommended by my vets). I’d freeze it into little pots, a bit like baby food!

Personally, I would suggest that she continues to feed her cat the vet diet if it is a specialist renal diet, although I am sure she could add in some fresh/raw meat to complement this.

I hope this helps a bit, but am more than happy to look into it further if there is any more information you would like?

Lots of love from me and Mable to you and Sadie! x