pet connection

Want to change your cat’s diet? For the owners of many cats addicted to one food and one food only, that switch falls under the “easier said than done” category.

My cat Dickens has health issues that meant a diet change, but he arrived here at the age of 9 months as a kibble addict. When we discovered he had struvite crystals at the age of one and a half, I tried to incorporate canned food, but he wasn’t having any of it. Apparently canned food is, in this cat’s opinion, inedible.

He’s not alone. Dr. Lisa Peterson of CatInfo.org says that cats are often extremely hard to switch from one diet to another. Many are “addicted” to kibble, but more and more feline experts are suggesting that diets high in moisture content are healthier for cats. Others need to make the switch to a diet formulated for a specific health problem. Either way, diet change can be a difficult prescription to fill:

There are few things in life more frustrating than dealing with a finicky cat. The members of this species can be incredibly “set in their ways” when it comes to their dietary preferences. Cats, like children, often resist what is best for them.

The two most frequent comments that I hear from people when trying to convince them to feed their cats a healthier diet are “my cat won’t eat canned food” and “but my cat really likes his dry food.” Children really like potato chips and ice cream but that certainly does not mean those food items constitute optimal nutrition.

The transition process often involves much more than just plunking down a new food item. Time, patience, and tricks are often required.

One reason that cats like dry food so much is because the pet food companies do not play fair when manufacturing this sub-optimal food source. They coat the kibble with extremely enticing animal digest sprays which are very pleasing to a cat – making a poor quality diet very desirable to the target animal.

In addition to the aforementioned coating of dry food with animal digests, another issue is one of a crunchy texture which is very different from canned food. Cats are very resistant to such a drastic change in the texture of their food.

What can owners do? Fortunately, Dr. Peterson has suggestions and step-by-step tips:

The key is to do it slowly and with patience and incorporate various tricks for the stubborn cats. The most important issue is actually making the change, not how fast you accomplish it. I must say that my cats tested every ounce of patience I had over a 3 + month period of time during their transition from dry to canned food. They had been on dry food their entire lives and did not recognize canned food as food. My cats ranged in age from 2 years to 10 years at the time of the transition.

The single biggest mistake I see people make time and again is to say that their cat “won’t touch” the new food and then panic and fill up the bowl with dry food. In many cases, it is simply not that easy to get cats off of dry food! So, roll up your sleeves and be prepared to patiently out-stubborn your cat.

Boiled down to the basics, Dr. Peterson recommends switching diets when a cat is healthy, not when he gets sick. She recommends starting by mixing the two types of food together, and not to free feed because no one will change when they’re not hungry. You will end up throwing away some unconsumed canned food.

On the flip side, never let them go without eating for more than 24 hours maximum because they could get the potentially fatal hepatic lipidosis.

She offers numerous tips – freezing tuna water, sprinkling parmesan cheese, offering deli meat, dipping some kibble in juice from the can, crush the kibble and sprinkle it over the wet food, pet the cat while he’s eating wet food, and so on. The real trick is to have lots of patience for these enigmatic pets (or as I often call them, c*ts.) This is where we all need to stand up to the yowling and not buckle under to the pressure of the pleas. Keep reminding yourself that this change is the best thing for their health, and therefore for your peace of mind and wallet.

A year after Dickens had struvite crystals, he was having increasing difficulties with chronic constipation. I changed his kibble, shaved his long hair into a lion cut, gave him canned pumpkin, and gave him a stool softener at every meal. At the advice of a feline specialist I work with at the Veterinary Information Network, I made other changes. I started him off with little bits of heated, cooked chicken and then stopped heating it. Then I increased the amount of chicken. Then I started incorporating a commercial raw chicken mix  (I don’t even prepare food for myself most of the time.) Eventually he was eating only the raw chicken mixture, with the exception of an occasional rodent.

On Christmas day, Dickens and I spent the morning in the ER where he had an enema that removed a two-inch “clay-like” piece of stool. This blockage meant we were back to the drawing board for his diet.

Through trial and error with my veterinarian, we’ve arrived at a solution that seems to work for his obstipation (that’s the fancy word for chronic constipation).  Half of his meal is chicken I cook, and the other half is a high fiber kibble. He gets stool softener with every meal. Once or twice a week he gets flavored chewable cisapride.  Once in a great while I’ll use tuna instead of chicken. I want to get to the point where he’s not eating any kibble again, but for the moment this delicate balance of food is working for his urinary and digestive issues.

The good news is that he does not seem to have megacolon. The bad news is that we don’t know what’s wrong, but his low folate levels have improved, he’s gained weight, he’s pooping and peeing pretty normally, so for right now he’s doing well. Now he eats the chicken before he eats the kibble, whereas before kibble was his world. His diet over his lifetime – and his third birthday is in a couple of weeks – will undoubtedly see saw depending on his health issues.

The more willing he is to eat whatever is best for him at  any given time, the better off he’ll be. We all need to remember that and ignore the yowling, even if the neighbors think you are somehow torturing your c*ts.

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