Sugarplum’s fine after her bloody vomit episode; the vet thinks it was just stress, since there was nothing else wrong with her. I went with the senior wellness workup, since she’s 10 years old. Bloodwork normal; her teeth need some attention for tartar, but I’ll wait on that until we’re settled in the new place.
However.
She weighed in at 20 pounds, which got me good and yelled at by the vet. I hadn’t brought her to this vet in four years (her only other trip to the vet in that time was to the emergency vet when she had diarrhea on the weekend). She was 15 pounds back then.
Here’s the kicker: I’ve been feeding her a controlled portion, between 1/2 and 5/8 of a cup, of high-quality, no-grain, high-protein dry food all that time. And while that amount is theoretically just fine, and in fact should have resulted in her losing weight, it made her gain weight. Which I hadn’t really noticed because I see her every day and I don’t have a scale.
For some perspective, consider this: while I was going through my papers and filing, I found her adoption record from 2000. She was 7 pounds then, which was really too skinny (she’d been picked up off the street), but she would have been fine at something like 10 pounds. Like a lot of street cats, she was very anxious about food, and I wound up leaving out dry food all day, which helped make her (as well as Zuzu) fat. After the 2004 weigh-in at 15 pounds, I restricted her intake, which she adjusted to well; she didn’t even eat the dog food, which I left out all day because Junebug doesn’t really eat unless it’s something I’m eating.
Obviously, the whole dry-food thing isn’t working, even on a restricted basis. So I bit the bullet and got high-protein (at least 12% by weight; a lot of canned food is 9%) canned food. Now, I hate dealing with canned cat food. It stinks, you have to wash the bowls twice a day, and then you have to deal with the cans (which will be a real joy when the dog comes back). But, well, it’s for my cats’ sake.
And it seems to be working. I don’t have a scale, like I said, so I can’t check her weight, but she appears a bit thinner, and she’s more active just in the short time (about 2-3 weeks) I’ve been feeding her the wet food (which, incidentally, is the same brand as the dry food).
But the best part? Her shit doesn’t stink! Seriously — I used to be able to smell her shit all the way across a 950-square-foot apartment, and now I can’t smell it five feet away. The litterbox in this place is, literally, five feet from the couch where I watch TV and work on the computer, and had I not had a confirmed sighting of a huge turd sitting there, unburied, I would not have known she’d taken a crap this morning.
Okay, so I don’t seem to have your e-mail. Send me one? In the meantime, check this out… http://injectingsense.blogspot.com/2008/07/beyond-ignorance-beyond-offensive.html
I haven’t gotten 2 read ur blog yet BUT will definately SOON! I wanted to let u know that when u click on your name zuzu in a comment section of someone else’s blog it pops up && says that u r and inverified user && ask if the person looking at the screen is u…Which means someone could take over ur disque profile!!
I remember my vet telling me cats digest wet food differently and easier. I’ve got an older cat who can’t glean nourishment from dry food, so we have to feed him wet food often. I wonder if it’s something with how your kitty digests?
Our cats have stairs to climb and that’s helped them muchly. As well as hairball diet rather than diet-diet. They really didn’t like the diet food, and it didn’t really seem to make them lighter.
Twenty pounds, though… That’s more than our two cats combined.