- Joined
- Mar 3, 2015
- Messages
- 150
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Hi all,
I'd love some feeding advice. My cat (almost 2 year old Maine Coon) can't have dry food or seafood due to bladder sensitivity after a big incident when he was 6 months old which almost killed him. His appetite was never great after his hospital stays back then, but for months he would happily eat TC Premix with turkey for protein and even though he would sometimes still not eat as much as I'd like and was underweight at least he was consistently eating and gaining a tiny bit at a time.
However, I think he developed a turkey allergy. In fact I think he _might_ have some sort of poultry sensitivity in general or maybe a new sensitivity to something in the premix. He does fine on poultry flavored wet foods and grain free foods but the home made raw has started giving him diarrhea all of a sudden, consistently. I suspected a bad batch but this was over 3 different batches (which involved 2 different batches of the premix as well, not just the meat itself). I even tried baking just the outer part of the turkey breast a bit before preparing to make sure all surface bacteria are dead for the last batch, but no matter how careful over several days he would just poop liquid.
In the past I tried switching him to premix with duck instead of turkey, but he flat out refused it. And with him now getting constant diarrhea with turkey there was no opportunity to slowly try to introduce some duck because I couldn't just let him poop brown water every day.
So we decided to switch him off of the raw and find another food to try. But he just won't consistently eat anything since. One meal he will want nothing but his Royal Canin Urinary SO, the next he will flat out refuse it and want some flavor of GranataPet, the next he'll only eat GranataPet or Urinary SO when mixed with Hills Critical Care, etc. And even when I do find the particular food he'll eat for a meal he doesn't eat enough of it. Sometimes he'll want his meal warm and other times it won't make a difference. Sometimes I can convince him to eat a bit of an egg yolk to get more calories in, but not consistently. I tried sprinkling FortiFlora - he liked the smell but refused the taste. It is impossible to predict, and he is still not eating enough.
Just waiting for him to get hungry isn't an option - when he's hungry enough he will eat a few bites at a time and then walk away, and as a result lose weight even further.
He has regular checkups with an internal medicine specialist after his previous incident and over the last 2 checkups she agreed that he was too thin, but after full blood panels and urine tests there was no sign of infection, nutritional imbalance, nutrient absorption difficulties, parasites, etc. She has checked his teeth. The last checkup he was at his heaviest, but that was right before the raw problems started and we had to stop the raw.
There basically doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that part of him - he just won't eat well! There was another kind of commercial raw I used to get at the pet store that he liked a lot (Vom), but one day I found a huge maggot in it, reported it to the store and company, and never fed it to my cats again (that's what made me look into TC Premix, which worked for a while until this happened).
Aside from being picky he is just not that hungry. But he is a big, long cat who is still growing and now weighs 5.1kg (and at this rate I'm afraid he'll keep losing). He is at least 1.5kg underweight. Raw seems to be the one thing he would eat the most of, whether home made or commercial, but so far I haven't found another source of _complete_ commercial raw here in Sweden other than the one that I ditched after the maggot incident. Can someone provide any suggestions for what I can try here (or knows of another complete raw food I can find around Sweden?) Thanks!
I'd love some feeding advice. My cat (almost 2 year old Maine Coon) can't have dry food or seafood due to bladder sensitivity after a big incident when he was 6 months old which almost killed him. His appetite was never great after his hospital stays back then, but for months he would happily eat TC Premix with turkey for protein and even though he would sometimes still not eat as much as I'd like and was underweight at least he was consistently eating and gaining a tiny bit at a time.
However, I think he developed a turkey allergy. In fact I think he _might_ have some sort of poultry sensitivity in general or maybe a new sensitivity to something in the premix. He does fine on poultry flavored wet foods and grain free foods but the home made raw has started giving him diarrhea all of a sudden, consistently. I suspected a bad batch but this was over 3 different batches (which involved 2 different batches of the premix as well, not just the meat itself). I even tried baking just the outer part of the turkey breast a bit before preparing to make sure all surface bacteria are dead for the last batch, but no matter how careful over several days he would just poop liquid.
In the past I tried switching him to premix with duck instead of turkey, but he flat out refused it. And with him now getting constant diarrhea with turkey there was no opportunity to slowly try to introduce some duck because I couldn't just let him poop brown water every day.
So we decided to switch him off of the raw and find another food to try. But he just won't consistently eat anything since. One meal he will want nothing but his Royal Canin Urinary SO, the next he will flat out refuse it and want some flavor of GranataPet, the next he'll only eat GranataPet or Urinary SO when mixed with Hills Critical Care, etc. And even when I do find the particular food he'll eat for a meal he doesn't eat enough of it. Sometimes he'll want his meal warm and other times it won't make a difference. Sometimes I can convince him to eat a bit of an egg yolk to get more calories in, but not consistently. I tried sprinkling FortiFlora - he liked the smell but refused the taste. It is impossible to predict, and he is still not eating enough.
Just waiting for him to get hungry isn't an option - when he's hungry enough he will eat a few bites at a time and then walk away, and as a result lose weight even further.
He has regular checkups with an internal medicine specialist after his previous incident and over the last 2 checkups she agreed that he was too thin, but after full blood panels and urine tests there was no sign of infection, nutritional imbalance, nutrient absorption difficulties, parasites, etc. She has checked his teeth. The last checkup he was at his heaviest, but that was right before the raw problems started and we had to stop the raw.
There basically doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that part of him - he just won't eat well! There was another kind of commercial raw I used to get at the pet store that he liked a lot (Vom), but one day I found a huge maggot in it, reported it to the store and company, and never fed it to my cats again (that's what made me look into TC Premix, which worked for a while until this happened).
Aside from being picky he is just not that hungry. But he is a big, long cat who is still growing and now weighs 5.1kg (and at this rate I'm afraid he'll keep losing). He is at least 1.5kg underweight. Raw seems to be the one thing he would eat the most of, whether home made or commercial, but so far I haven't found another source of _complete_ commercial raw here in Sweden other than the one that I ditched after the maggot incident. Can someone provide any suggestions for what I can try here (or knows of another complete raw food I can find around Sweden?) Thanks!
I will contact the company and ask if there might be some obscure reseller that I haven't dug up.
