Complete Care for Your Aging Cat - Amy Shojai [3]
Finally, this book wouldn’t be possible without all the special cats that share our hearts—and the loving owners dedicated to providing the best care possible for their aging furry family members. My own Seren(dipity), at age 13 years and counting, provided the extra purr-sonal push to make this book available once again. Without you, this book would never have been written.
INTRODUCTION
The last decade has seen an evolution in the way people treat their cats. We have become a nation of cat lovers. According to the 2009-2010 American Pet Products Association survey, there are 93.6 million cats kept in 35 percent of U.S. households, a number expected to rise. No longer are they thought of as mere pets. More than seventy percent of owners consider their pets to be part of their family. Consequently, the health care extended to furry family members has been greatly expanded.
A lifetime of better care means cats today live longer, healthier lives than ever before. In the past 50 years the average lifespan of cats has tripled, and many now live into their late teens or early twenties. Susan Little, DVM, a feline specialist at Bytown Cat Hospital in Ottawa, Canada, says, “Having better nutrition and better health care for cats when they’re younger means you see a lot more older cats,” she says.
Today, half of all pet owners have an animal aged seven or older. What has prompted this shift to an aged pet population? For one thing, cats used to spend most of their time outside with little or no supervision. Consequently, they became victims of extremes of temperature, malice from disgruntled neighbors or other pets, exposure to disease and accidental injuries that cut their lives short.
For example, cats of the past were typically infested with a variety of disease-causing parasites, which also made them more susceptible to other illness and less able to recover. They ate a mixed diet of table scraps, commercial canned food, and whatever wildlife they could catch. Viral diseases such as panleukopenia (cat distemper) and upper respiratory infections killed 50 percent or more of kittens before their first birthday. Repeated pregnancies without proper nutritional support also caused early death to the mother cats, and produced offspring that often were unable to survive past kittenhood. Roaming and squabbling over breeding issues resulted in debilitating fight injuries among adults, and if a cat’s behavior became a problem, he was put to death. Being hit by a car was also a top cause of early feline death. Even when cats survived, owners often were unable or unwilling to treat the injuries, in part because cats were considered to be replaceable. Although a vaccine for cat distemper was available, in 1965, veterinarians saw fewer than 25 percent of pet cats even once a year and most cats weren’t protected. Many cats died of feline leukemia virus (FeLV), which was first identified in 1967, or from feline infectious peritonitis (FIP). There were no treatments or preventives available. People simply put the injured or sick cat to sleep, then got another pet and didn’t think much about it.
Until the last decade, few cats lived long enough to suffer from “old cat” conditions such as arthritis, or hyperthyroidism. Those that did were rarely treated, either because owners weren’t interested, or the veterinary community hadn’t yet developed the ability to diagnosed and treat such things