Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [82]
It’s a sad problem. With an old or chronically ill cat you always have the option of ending his troubles, but what to do with a fine young friend in perfect health except for these spells of dreadful pain and danger?
Diet was always suspected as a factor. More than one doctor blamed the use of cereal in cat foods. Ash was considered a major villain, and pet food manufacturers made great news of their low ash content. We were told never to feed male cats fish. We were told never to feed cats dry food. We were told to feed them anything but to salt it heavily, so they would drink more water and dilute the urine. Now, finally, they seem to have gotten it right, and put the finger on the acid/alkaline balance in the urine. Acidic urine won’t let the crystals form; alkaline will, and happily it’s no great matter to lower the urine pH to the desired 6.2 to 6.4.
Surgery was an option. It widened the opening of the urethra so the male cat could pee more like the female, but it was major, and expensive.
With the onus on diet now, conscientious people will go with the scientific diets available from your vet but not on your supermarket shelves. However, those who speak for the major producers of cat food insist that their brands also maintain the acceptable 6.2 to 6.4 pH urine. Even dry food is now considered safe for the FUS—or, if you insist, FLUTD—cat. There are medications now too. Your vet will know.
This seems like rather a lot on the subject of a few tiny crystals, but anyone who’s been through it with a sufferer, even if the good news comes too late, rejoices in it.
On the subject of normal diet for normal cats, much is written, much of it contradictory. Books from Britain confuse the American reader with recipes; British cat food, if it exists, must be a disaster, and proper cat owners cook. Not that they agree with each other. Some feed only raw food, darkly hinting at the effects of cooking; pregnant females fed cooked food, for instance, have but few and sickly kittens, often stillborn. Their colleagues hotly maintain that raw food is virtually poisonous for cats, leaving us to imagine cats in less protective times grilling their mice over tiny outdoor barbecues. One says nothing but raw beef, the perfect food; another warns of the dire effects of pork; another says one-third of the meal should be such cooked vegetables as leeks, asparagus, lettuce, carrots, and endive. Cat-keeping in England is hard work. One writer’s cat “makes a habit / Of eating nothing else but rabbit,” prepared fresh daily. Another says the diet must be supplemented with boiled oatmeal and milk. Europeans pour their cats a lot of milk, while the American feeling is that it’s bad for adult cats. The fact is, digesting milk is related to an enzyme that some cats lose when they grow up and some don’t. If our particular cat doesn’t get diarrhea from milk, there’s nothing wrong with it.
Americans are blessed with a busy and competitive pet-food industry. To watch the television commercials you’d think they didn’t have a brain in their heads, but in truth they’re backed by professional research teams as much concerned with nutrition as with talking cats. American cat food is good stuff, at least the recognized brands; we’re warned against bargain cat food as lacking quality control and possibly containing whatever was cheap and handy at the moment.
The disciplinarians say it’s sentimental to suppose our cats need or want variety in their meals, but my vet recommends it; there may be things we haven’t yet learned about nutrition, and it’s safest to touch as many bases as possible. Besides, the single-food cat can be a problem. A cat fixated on tuna, for instance, may develop kidney troubles and have to give up tuna as too high in phosphorus, and then compound its problems by refusing to consider anything else. (A few years back, tuna cat food made feline news as the villain in steatitis, a particularly vicious inflammatory disease, but the addition of vitamin E has eliminated the problem, and most only steatitis victims