Feeding Kittens - Blue Buff, diarrhea

marycatherine

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I have a new kitten (8 weeks) who is coming with me when I move out of my parents' this fall. My parents have her brother, so right now we are a 2-cat household.

I'm currently feeding Blue Buffalo Longevity Kitten, because I tried to do some research and get the best thing I could find for them. They're eating the LifeSource bits (though often eat them last
) however their stool is runny and smells awful! Both have had a little blood in their stool, as recently as early this morning. They were dewormed (Strongid) 2 weeks ago, and just got a 2nd dose of Strongid this morning, though we don't have a fecal scheduled until next Tuesday. (I work at a shelter and a vet's office, so I was able to just bring Strongid home for the two of them.)

I am going to give it a little more time to see if they are just adjusting to the food? The shelter had them on Purina One, and I tried to mix some to gradually shift them, but they devour the BB, so we're currently just feeding that. They also get Nutro kitten wet food twice a day (each getting 1/4 can in the morning and 1/4 at night.) They both threw up after eating the Chicken/Tuna flavor, so now they're loving Salmon/Ocean Whitefish.

I don't mind shelling out the money for the dry food, as it lasts so long, but I know my parents aren't going to continue spending so much on wet food. Are there decent and affordable wet foods? I kind of want to wait for their diarrhea to stop before I go switching foods on them, but what if the food is causing the diarrhea? Help?
 

strange_wings

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I had Nutro wet (both kitten and adult cat) give a couple of mine pretty bad diarrhea a few years ago. The vet wasn't surprised that they had had that reaction to Nutro...
Others on here have problems with it, too.

You should probably bump up the fecal to tomorrow or Thursday since you're seeing blood - plus they're too tiny to be having diarrhea.


In the meantime you could try a simpler wet food with less extras in it and see if that settles well with them.
Others will have to weigh in on their opinion of that dry - it seems like it has too much stuff in it to me.
 
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marycatherine

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Do you have any suggestions for a simpler wet food? I tried getting them to eat a little bit of a Blue Buffalo duck wet I had, but they wouldn't even try it! Picky kitties.

They are very active, drinking tons of water, so I wasn't too worried at first, but they're so tiny so I want to get this under control before anything happens. I'll give my vet a call. I go to work later today so maybe I can just bring them in with me!
 

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Read the labels ... I found simple formulas in By nature a bit back, avo derm is simplier..

Ie look for one meat, one grain formulas/one starch
 
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marycatherine

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I"m so frustrated and tired I just want to cry. So much for simpler wet food helping, they starting throwing up and Annie's worse than ever.

I gave some By Nature patÃ[emoji]169[/emoji] turkey tonight because it looked like the simplest thing at PetSmart. Mosby threw it up just now at 4am, about 8 hours after they ate it. However in his throw up I also found a lot of undigested LifeSource bits from the BB. There's also a very loose stool in the litter pan though I'm not sure from who it came.

Annie just threw up clear phlegm and then went and had purely watery diarrhea.


They have a fecal in twelve hours, if it comes back negative, I think I'll be switching from BB to something with a little bit of grain in it, or something without the LifeSource bits as I think they're too hard to digest for these little sensitive tummies. I chose BB because I figured it would give me less stool and healthier kitties, but we've just had lots of very smelly diarrhea, so obviously that hasn't worked out.
What dry food can I use??

So far:
BB dry + Nutro MaxCat salmon/ocean whitefish = stinky diarrhea.
BB dry + Nutro MaxCat chicken/tuna = vomiting (plus the diarrhea from above.)
BB dry + By Nature 95% turkey = vomiting plus diarrhea


Also they just don't like patÃ[emoji]169[/emoji]. Annie tries to cover it, doesn't eat it as well. They love shredded Nutro MaxCat Salmon and Ocean Whitefish. It's the only thing that hasn't resulted in early morning vomiting. Why are all of these wet foods making them vomit??
 

sharky

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read the label .. of memory serves the max has only rice and possibley some oats...

The common thought here is ... The best food= the one you can afoord , kitties like and they do well on.... for some that is common grocery foods, for other s it is raw and others it is mid line premium
 
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marycatherine

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Originally Posted by sharky

read the label .. of memory serves the max has only rice and possibley some oats...

The common thought here is ... The best food= the one you can afoord , kitties like and they do well on.... for some that is common grocery foods, for other s it is raw and others it is mid line premium
Yeah, I think I'm going to stick on the salmon/whitefish for a little while just to let their tummies adjust to everything since it's what they're doing the best with. After the vet's visit today hopefully I'll have a little better grasp on how to tackle this, too.

Thank you everyone for your help! I really appreciate any suggestions. My last cat-- basically my brother who I grew up with my entire life-- died from sudden renal failure which we presumed was due to the food recall in early 2007. I am probably over-paranoid over what to feed them but I'm so petrified over losing them over something I can definitely control.
 

addiebee

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That Nutro has a little bit of wheat gluten in it, too, but not a lot. My boys like the Nutro wet overall. They didn't like any of the BB foods.

You can also try the upset tummy formula that lots of people have done in the past. Get some chicken -on the bone - boil it up till it's cooked. Save the water from that cooking. Pull the chicken off the bone and cut it into little pieces. Cook up some white rice - if you have a rice cooker even better. Blend together the chicken, chicken water and rice - a few quick pulses of a food processor would work... and give that to them for a couple of days to see how they do.
 
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marycatherine

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The fecals came back negative, but we started them on Albon and gave them a little Strongid anyway because the vet thought their stool looked weird enough.
She also suggested just staying on the salmon wet and BB dry for now because she thinks that things will calm down after the dewormers go through. I'm willing to wait and see! The kittens seem happy so far.
 

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Weird but same thing happened to my cat Carly. I got her without realizing she was pregnant so I put her on Blue Buffalo kitten formula (the spa selects) and she would have runny diarrhea quite often and sometimes it was bloody and the small was incredibly horrible. I thought it was the pregnancy but it continued even after the kittens were born so I figured it was due to a wheat allergy and took her off of it immediately. I put her on Authority sensitive stomach cat food and she's had much better bowel movements and unless she sneaks and eats a piece of cereal the kids dropped she maintains that. Barley is the 4th ingredient in the Blue kitten food so that's definitely a wheat factor and would cause the upset if your kittens are wheat sensitive.

I edited this because I didn't realize you were feeding wet. My cat cannot tolerate wet food so you might want to put them on a dry formula with absolutely NO wheat products at all. The fact that they are throwing up and having diarrhea says it's the food and most likely it's something that they aren't tolerating due to allergy. Many of the higher end foods have a wheat grain in them (unless they are grain free) instead of corn product but some animals just cannot tolerate the wheat (since cats don't eat a lot of wheat in their wild diets anyway they aren't equipped to tolerate it) and tolerate corn just fine. My dogs are the opposite and get very dry skin with a corn product food so I have them on a Natural Balance. I did a ton of research into the ingredients of cat food looking for one that didn't have either barley or wheat and found that my choices were very limited when I got into the higher end foods so I went with Authority like I said.
 

goldenkitty45

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I would also strongly suggest you not feed the fish based foods, especially to kittens. Kittens can easily get hooked on fish and refuse to eat other (and better) foods.

We NEVER EVER give kittens any kind of fish foods - they are always started out on chicken or lamb (mildest) canned food and then add in beef later. Males are more prone to UTI's when fed a lot of fish. I've never had a kitten get loose stools feeding this way.

I'd go get chicken and lamb or beef canned foods and stop feeding the fish - that could be the cause of the problems, not the BB kitten food.
 
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marycatherine

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Well right now when I feed them any wet food other than the salmon, they vomit all night. I'm going to eventually switch them, but they've been through enough in the past week that another week of salmon will be okay. (Also the first ingredient in the wet food is chicken broth, so there's some chicken in there!)

There is some barley in the Longevity kitten, however it's the 8th ingredient. I'm going to wait and see how their stool does over the next few days before jumping to think it's an allergy. They had a dose of Strongid and are on Albon for the next 10 days, so I'm hoping that does the trick.
 
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marycatherine

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I wanted to update. Their stools have been fine and we've even been able to get them to eat Purina wet food-- but still only the salmon flavors?? Anytime they eat any sort of chicken or turkey or beef, they have diarrhea. I've been wondering if this may have something to do with the Blue Buffalo, so I'm slowly transitioning them to Avoderm. Annie has been really gassy on the BB, so I'm hoping a different sort of food may help. We're still in trial-and-error mode.
 

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Just had to add my 2 cents to this. I tried blue buffalo-got a great deal on some 50% off close dated food-the mom nursing 3 lil kits was not given any.
I did the mixing and the first day I had about half my 23 eating it with loose stools. I gave up the 2nd day when I went to do litter and there was stool all over-it was a mess. I believe for the most part the bodys of many cats have never eaten rich foods. I would try some basic basic kitten food as messing with to many rich foods early on will just lead to dehydration-I know we all want the best but maybe let the stomaches recover then try again in few weeks/months on a higher grade food. I also did get by nature-my cats refused it-don't blame them the smell is like cardboard to me..
 
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