New kitten has diarrhea

Hello everyone,

We recently adopted a 17 week old "kitten". He came to us on Iams Kitten food, so we gradually changed his food to something healthier. We went with Blue Buffalo Wilderness. We made sure to do the slow mixing, with 25% new/75% old, and so on. However, he developed diarrhea as soon as we started 50/50 new and old food and it didn't stop. We put him back on Iams and it improved, so we started slowly mixing in Wilderness Core. He seemd to be a little better, but he has been at 100% Wilderness for a week now and still has some diarrhea. His poops are (obviously) quite smelly and he passes gas a lot.

Other than this he is very active and quite himself. There are no traces of blood in his stools and he is current on all vaccinations. I let the vet know when we filled out his official adoption paperwork and he said that if it didn't improve, to try a new food. I will let the vet know on Monday.

Any suggestions? Thanks so much!

Katie

Hi BB is a very rich food, my 12 week old is on it as well and it was the same thing just try to go back to the 25/75 for a week and then on to 50/50 and so on it should get better. I also find my boy cannot tolerate any type of fish food no matter what brand it is, he always seems to get diarreha, try the wilderness kitten is specifically designed for kittens hope this helps and he gets rid of his problems.

My cats couldn't eat BB. However, with this kitten being an adopted one, please take it to the vet and have the stool checked. Coccidia and Giardia are two parasites that can make the poop smelly and runny and they need to be treated with meds. I won't go into what we endured last year because it is NOT the norm...but please have the stool checked if this continues.

Congrats on the new kitten!

First of all, I agree with the PP regarding a vet visit. Have him checked to be sure there are no worms or parasites. Then, I'm guessing that the food is the culprit. Tumbles couldn't handle TOTW dry when he was younger, so the vet put him on a prescription dry that's for sensitive tummies. The diarrhea stopped. We now mix the TOTW dry with the RX food and he's doing great!

Thanks so much for the replies. I actually adopted the kitten through the vet - they run a kitten adoption program. They have had the kitten since he was only a few weeks old. He came in very small with his littermates and they nursed him back to health (along with deworming, vaccinations, etc).

I did take him to the vet though and he had a fecal test done (we'll get the results soon). They certainly don't think it's anything other than the food, so they recommended slowly switching him back over to Iams. My husband is thinking maybe we can find a good balance between the two. Maybe Wellness Core is too rich for him.

Also, does anyone have a cat insurance company that they recommend?

Thanks again!