How long does wet poop last after switching to wet food?

Hi everyone,

My 1  year old ragdoll had on and off problems with her poop since end of December 2013. She was previously on Science Diet hairball control and I switched her to Halo Hearty chicken. At first it went well, but after a month and a half, she started having soft (not wet) poop. I got her checked by the vet and they didn't find anything wrong with her. After that, I switched her to Nature's Variety Rabbit Formula thinking that she may have developed allergy to peas or chicken. At first it went well again, her poop went back to normal. But after a month, she has soft poop again. My vet then prescribed Prescription Diet w/d, and told me I have to feed her that food for 5 days and see how it goes. However, my baby can't and won't eat pate style canned food and so I showed my vet Tiki Cat and they approved of it.

Technically, I switched her to canned food "cold turkey" way as prescribed by the vet, but the stools are still toothpaste-like since Sunday. My question is, when you switch to canned food, how long do their poop usually normalize? Does it takes weeks? months? I really don't want to switch her again

My suspicion is that she has an allergy to some ingredient, probably not an obvious one like a protein but something that's in a lot of wet food, like carrageenan for eg.
Just how bad is it though? She's healthy otherwise and isn't getting acne or fur problems? Maybe the softer stool is her new normal after the food change from the Science Diet and nothing to worry about?

Little Big Cat seems to have revised a lot of their articles, but Jean Hofve did have an article up at one time describing stool the consistency of "toothpaste," (as you have observed) was the perfect softness.

If you look at the Bristol Stool Scale on this webpage, the best softness is either a 3 or a 4.

http://www.littlebigcat.com/health/constipated-cats/

Wet food does have more water in it, so a softer ("wetter") stool is to be expected. I haven't looked at the ingredients/guaranteed analysis, but Science Diet is known for high carb food, and hairball control foods usually have high amounts of insoluble fiber, usually derived from carb sources. This would explain a harder stool.

Talk to your vet about adding Purina FortiFlora to her food- it's a probiotic for animals (and despite many claims, human probiotics don't work for animals because we have different bacteria in our bodies)- it works wonders, and if it doesn't straighten things out, something else is going on.

Although FortiFlora does work for many kitties, it is made from a single strain of bacteria. It is better to get probiotics that have many different strains. Most people on this forum use FortiFlora as an appetite stimulant because it has animal digest in it and not due to its probiotic content.

That's cool.  I just know that it has not only worked miracles for one of my cats, but I've also seen it work miracles on the clinic cats at the strictly feline vet clinic I work at, and we can barely keep it in stock for our clients, it's so popular.  I was a huge skeptic of it out of the gate, because I am not a fan of Purina, but once I saw how great it works, I sing its praises whenever I can, because there's nothing worse than wet poop, especially if you have long-haired cats...