PLEASE HELP CAT ALLERGIC TO PROTEIN

So I just found out a couple days ago my cat is allergic to her food and any food that contains "traditional protein" such as chicken. She has been put on a novel diet which means only "weird" proteins like venison, duck, rabbit...etc... She HATES ALL OF IT. I am almost tempted to put her back on beef and gravy Fancy Feast (the ONLY cat food she will eat) and opt to take her to the vet every 2 months for a depo shot, which works like a charm, going on her second round but the vet said to try these new foods but she just isn't having it and she hasn't eaten for 3 days. Any advice? Should I feed her the beloved Fancy Feast and keep getting her those shots???

If she hasn't eaten in 3 days she is in danger of becoming really sick. I would feed her FF rather than endanger her. When you try her on new foods do you do so gradually? It should take around 4 days to transition a cat gradually from one food to another, mixing the two together each day in the proportions 1/3, 2/2, 3/1 and 4/0. Many cats will refuse a plate of all-different food.

Transitioning cats to new food takes patients. While a true protein allergy is not necessarily uncommon feeding foods with lots of fillers like FF with gravy makes it more likely that your cat is allergic to something in the food, rather than the protein itself. Here is more information. There are lots of different brands that have venison, duck, and rabbit including Ziwipeak, Merrick LID and Instinct.

http://feline-nutrition.org/health/is-it-a-food-allergy-or-intolerance

These are tips for transitioning a cat off dry food to wet food, but the tricks apply to feeding new wet foods too including using toppers, tuna, or even forti flora. 

http://www.catinfo.org/docs/TipsForTransitioning1-14-11.pdf

One of my cats has this same kind of allergy. I feed her Primal raw frozen. There are several varieties that don't have chicken or turkey in them, so I can rotate through them to hopefully prevent the development of any new allergies. It took me a while to transition her, but that was relative to my other cat who is basically a garbage disposal. She loves it now though and is kind of a demanding, bratty monster about meal times.

I have a cat with an intolerance to chicken. She's on the Hills z/d because so far it's the only thing that has been successful at treating her bouts of diarrhea. Initially I changed her dry food slowly from what she was eating to Royal Canin hypoallergenic. I started by putting about a tablespoon of the new dry in with the old. It went pretty smoothly, she seemed to like that one. The z/d needed to be eating by both my cats. It's a weird mousse like texture and I never had any luck at all getting my boy to eat anything but chunks in gravy.

I started by leaving just 1 teaspoon of the z/d on the plate next to the food they were previously eating. It took WEEKS of throwing out plate after plate of it (he was eating the Fancy feast with gravy still but leaving the z/d). I slowly added more and more of the z/d reducing the amount of ff he was getting so he was a little hungry. His choice, the hypoallergenic was out all the time. Once we got down to about 1/4 serve of FF I removed all wet food for 24 hours (only 24 and he was eating the dry, don't just take away ALL food). Then I dished up the z/d. To my surprise he tried it. He didn't eat much, but he tried it.

At this point I danced around the kitchen with him, tears of happiness running down my face.


(Joking................not really).


After that all bets were off. If he wanted wet food, z/d was it. And that was pretty much it. He ate more and more of it every meal until finally he was eating full meals of it. This is a cat who starved himself once for 16 hours straight because he refused to eat pate Fancy Feast instead of chunks. He would make burying motions around any food he deemed unfit for his palate. And he ate it happily for 7 weeks before our first standoff, but it was okay because at that point I knew it wasn't working for him (he's itchy) but it was working for my girl. He gets a mix of food now but he still  happily eats the z/d if I dish it up.

Be patient, be persistent and go slowly. It feels impossible sometimes and be prepared to waste food at first, but you can do it eventually! And their tummies will feel so much better.

I have three cats with food allergies, so we are now trying to figure out what they will eat. Like yours, ours don't love venison, rabbit or duck, at least not the brands we have tried, so now I'm trying some new ones from online (can't be found locally).  In the meantime, our vet suggested prednisolone for one of our cats that is scratching himself silly.  We had been using depo medrol shots, but the vet said you're flooding the system with a bunch of steroid all at once and it slowly depletes over time.  Giving pills periodically means that the use is better regulated and the system keeps a more even keel - the body isn't flooded with more steroid than it needs all at once. Additionally, we will be giving as little as is necessary, so we will start every other day and try to go down to one or twice a week.  If the itchiness is managed, then we will stay with a lower dose. If not, we will increase the dose back to a point where the cat is no longer itchy. If you can give pills to your cat, you might want to look into this. My cat is used to it, as I give him a daily thyroid pill using a pill plunger and then a treat to help it go down.