Will change in a protein cause diarrhea

[AnnieLu]

Hi,

My cats usually have canned food at the morning and home-made cooked food with EZ complete at night.
They had chicken or turkey with EZ as dinner before but I wanna gave them something new so I gave them lamb with bison today. They pretty like the lamb. However, all of them have diarrhea after they have dinner!
Will change in a protein cause any diarrhea? Should I just give up the lamb option and continue on feeding turkey or chicken?
And is it necessary to add any probiotics in EZ food?

 

[Talien]

Yes, it can cause diarrhea. Any change in food can do that actually, as can giving different food like canned in the morning and raw at night. It's best to stick with one food to avoid causing digestive upset.

 

[daftcat75]

If you wanted to try a new food, you would need to stage it into the diet over a period of several days rather than offering the new food all at once to minimize the digestive discomfort and disruptions. A sample transition period may be 1/4 new food mixed in with 3/4 old food. Wait for a poop before deciding whether to proceed (good poop), hold (softer poop but still mostly formed), or go back to the last good poop's food (diarrhea or liquid stools.) If proceeding, you can change the food by 1/4, e.g. 1/2 new to 1/2 old until the next good poop. So it would take at least 4 good poops to fully transition. It may take longer than four or five days to achieve this. With multiple cats, you may just wait a couple of days at each transition amount to give them all a chance to poop.

It may also be that red meat (lamb and bison) is different enough from poultry (chicken and turkey), that although they may like the red meat, their gut and/or butt may always disagree with it. That can vary from cat to cat.

It's a lot of work to transition a cat's diet. For that reason, I find it easier on myself and the cat to add an extra meal to Krista's schedule when I want to try a new food with her. That one extra meal gets transitioned as above rather than all her meals. Once I've transitioned that one meal, I can now alternate between the two foods for that meal or any other meal. But if I want to feed that new food for more than one meal a day, I would repeat the transition period for another meal. If I added a breakfast and then converted second breakfast to the new food, I would repeat the transition for first breakfast too if I wanted to feed her the new food more than one meal a day. The benefit of transitioning a single meal, besides being easier on the cat, is that, if the transition isn't going well, it's (hopefully) only affecting one meal of their day rather than all of them. It makes it easier to cancel the extra meal or transition it back to the old food rather than having to back out an unsuccessful transition on all the meals.

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

As to the probiotics, if EZ Complete doesn't contain them, I would definitely add them, along with digestive enzymes. But just like the food, you might want to add them in slowly since it appears they have sensitive digestive tracts.