Nutrition After Blockage

Hello, my cat, who is 10 years old, suffered a urinary blockage 3 months ago and has been mainly on wet food. I only give him some dry food as snack in the middle of the day. Since he has been well since then, is it ok to now switch him from Prescription Hill Dry to a regular but, "Grain Free" dry food? Thank you for your advice.

ShirleyD said:

 
Hello, my cat, who is 10 years old, suffered a urinary blockage 3 months ago and has been mainly on wet food. I only give him some dry food as snack in the middle of the day. Since he has been well since then, is it ok to now switch him from Prescription Hill Dry to a regular but, "Grain Free" dry food? Thank you for your advice.

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Here is a great web site with info: http://catinfo.org/?link=urinarytracthealth

Ideally you do not want to feed any dry food for a cat who has had a urinary issue. Dry food is one reason why many cats end up with urinary issues in the first place. If you can, keep feeding canned food to prevent future urinary issues. Some cats may still get urinary issues even on a canned food only diet but there's usually something other than diet that is causing the issues.

Are you feeding prescription canned? Unless your cat had struvite crystals, you don't need the prescription food, dry or canned. There's nothing special about the ingredients that helps prevents urinary issues. The key is to get more water into the cat to keep the body well hdyrated and the urinary system working at optimal level. Any commerical canned food will help. Stick with grain free if you can. If you have to feed some dry as a snack, grain-free is best and be sure to add extra water to the canned food to ensure that your cat is well hydrated. Or instead of regular dry, you can feed freeze dried or air dried raw instead which is a lot healthier than any dry food.

Thank you so much for your advice. I'm not sure which type of crystals he had, but I will find out. And I will certainly try my best for an all wet diet. Thank you.

A little dry food isn't that big a deal, provided you take extra steps to compensate for its lack of moisture. The easiest way to do this is to add a little water to his wet food, but there are lots of other tricks too [article="30756"][/article]

Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable feeding a non prescription dry food, but there are, imo, fewer issues with feeding non prescription wet foods. Having said that, I'd be hesitant to move away from the prescription foods at this point. Crystals are most likely to reappear in the first year after the first presentation, so three months of health really isn't all that long. I would always recommend discussing coming off prescription foods with your vet, anyway. Having said that, I found a mix of primarily 'normal' wet food with a little prescription dry worked wonderfully for my crystals boy - he's been crystals free for 10 years (touch wood!).

If you do decide to switch to normal wet food, keep a close eye on urine output. The best thing to do is to use clumping litter and pay attention to the clump sizes. All big clumps means you're probably fine, but if you start seeing more, smaller clumps then trouble might be brewing.

One last thing - some of the prescription foods are now formulated to break down both struvite AND calcite crystals, so it doesn't make much difference which sort of crystals your boy had.[article="29715"][/article]

Thank you very much for your advice. I have been feeding him Grain Free (non-medicated) wet food with additional water along with Medicated dry food. So far so good, but I will take him to the vet for a urine check just to be on the safe side. I will definitely stick to the medicated dry food as snack. Thank you for this helpful links.