Complete Care for Your Aging Cat - Amy Shojai [120]
Kitty Café: This is a handy trick for dealing with multi-cat households where a fat cat and skinny cat need to be fed separately. Basically, a box is fit with a tiny door that only the thin cat can get through. The thin cat is fed inside the box, and the fat cat can’t get inside to swipe anything and must be satisfied with the diet food available on the outside of the box. “Until the fat cat gets skinny enough to fit in there, he can’t have any,” says Dr. LaFlamme. Make your own box from a plastic sweater container. This also works well to keep dogs out of the cat’s food.
Golden Moments: Pooh Shapes Up
Pooh Bear, a blue spotted tabby domestic shorthair, was diagnosed with diabetes when he was 9 ½ years old. “I found some sticky stuff on the side of the tub where the cats go to the bathroom,” says Michelle West of Toronto. Pooh was in the hospital for four days, and came home perfectly regulated on 4 units of Humulin U insulin once a day. “Then I had to diet him down—he weighed 26 pounds.”
He had always been a big boy, says Michelle, but she hadn’t really noticed how bad he’d gotten. “Then one day I looked at him, and was horrified that I’d let that happen to him. I'm sure that if he hadn't gained so much weight, he never would have become diabetic. I could just kick myself for letting it happen.”
She decided to put him on a strict but careful diet, hoping to gradually slim him down and also help with his diabetes. She knew that trying to force weight loss too quickly could create fatal liver problems.
She tried some of the commercial “lite” reducing diets, but the high fiber caused serious constipation problems. “There were a couple times I thought poor Pooh was going to have a heart attack just trying to go to the bathroom,” says Michelle. High fiber foods counteract diarrhea and constipation by normalizing the bowel movement, but fiber works a bit differently in individual cats.
Michelle settled on a combination of three different brands: 50 percent Waltham Calorie Control, and 25 percent each of Hill’s Science Diet Senior and Meow Mix. “Without the Meow Mix, he gets seriously constipated from all the fiber in the other two,” says Michelle. She says it took a long time to work out the perfect mixture for Pooh—and what works for him might not work for others. “It might take a couple of months to work out the right mix for your overweight cat,” she says.
As a breeder of Scottish Folds, Michelle had two other cats in the household that needed a different diet: Toni, a breeding female, and an aging retired girl named Punkin with arthritis problems. “I needed three different foods for my cats,” she says. “The minute I knew Pooh had to go on a diet that was the end of free feeding in my house.” Before, they didn't like each other’s food anyway, so leaving it out all the time wasn’t a problem. But once he was on a diet, Pooh wanted to eat anything that didn’t move faster than he did.
Once the diet started, Michelle locked up all the food in one-pound cottage cheese containers, labeled them for Toni, Punkin or Pooh, and kept a set for each cat by the living room chair, by the couch, and by her bed next to the desk where she works. “Wherever I am, I am close to food,” says Michelle. “For the girls, it was easy to teach them to come to the containers when they wanted to eat. I’d just open the right one when