Vegan cat poo blog - warning may contain gory details
I feel very deflated. I've just got home from the vets with a bag of Pro-plan "delicate" meaty food, after about 4 months of feeding my cats vegan food. :(
Unfortunately all three of my cats have been having the same digestive problems for the last few months, precisely when they began it is hard to tell, because it is only lately that we have been keeping them inside at night and so get to see their poos in the litter tray.
Please excuse all the gory poo descriptions (you were warned in blog title!),but basically my cats have intermittent sloppy, loose poos, or half-sloppy half-firm poos or even the rare scary poos with bright red blood on top. When the trouble first started I rang the vet and he suggested a stool sample be tested, It came back positive for Giardia which is a clever but pesky little single-celled organism that colonises the gut and causes loose stools. So I thought this was the culprit, and was relieved it was nothing more serious.
They were prescribed a course of panacur, and we sterillised the hell out of everything they'd ever touched! This appeared to do the trick eventually, at the end of the 5 day treatment their poos just about seemed normal-ish. But merely a week later it was attack of the runs again! disaster.
So i went back to the vet and he suggested they'd been re-infected with Giardia, and gave me a course of metronidazole (flagyl) which is so vile tasting to cats it makes them dribble froth, and they were pretty traumatised by being forced to swallow this twice a day, I just felt awful inflicting it on them. Annoyingly, this stuff seemed to make no difference at all.
I returned to the vets again, with a splendid sloppy specimen poo in a jam jar for him to test for Giardia again. I also took the Ami cat packet down to show him incase he asked about what it was that was going in at the other end! After months of me worrying the vet would be outraged at the vegan cat food issue he was suprisingly really good about it. He read through the ingredients, didn't even seem remotely shocked, but did say he was uncertain about these new "high tech" foods - which is amusing to me because the Pro-plan he recommended to me has lots more ridiculous "high-tech" ingredients in, the list is so long.
It seems unlikely now that my cats still have Giardia, because the metronidazole treatment is apparently usually very effective, and it didn't work at all, so it is not like they got reinfected this time.The vet had said his lab technician who tests for the giardia had infomed him that rarely, in this country, is a bactrial infection soley responsible for chronic diarrhea. I should get the test results back this afternoon so i'll let you know.
As for an allergy to Ami cat or vegan cat food, this I am also unsure of. They also have a little bit of Benevo vegetarian food mixed in, and a sprinkling of digestive enzymes. I have persistantly tried the benevo moist food and the vegecat PH but really have very little success getting them to eat it at the moment, so to change to a different vegan food is not really an option for now. It seems very unlikely that 3 different cats would have the same allergy. Two are possibly litter-mates (they were found as strays in the same area and are very distinctive and similar looking) but one is an entirely different breed. But this is the problem in a multi-cat household, it is hard to know whose pooped when. Every now and then they break the sloppy poo pattern with a wonderful perfectly formed one, or do half a normal poo, but there is no difference in their eating routine or behaviour on these days, between them they eat the same amount of the vegan food. I am trying to find out
more about cat food allergies but it seems common sense that they would constantly have runny poos if it were the food that was to blame.
In every other way they seem healthy and normal, they have wonderful shiny coats, a good appetite. They've not lost weight. They play and run about and are affectionate. They get on well with each other and there is no obvious source of stress, apart from me, their apparently poo-obsessed human, fussing and worrying about their bowel movements!
I really want to know whether the food i am feeding them has some part to play in this mystery, so I am trying this meaty food recommended by the vet for a while, because I really need to know, it is difficult in our small house with three cats with a bad tummy. Perhaps it will be helpful to other people who have had digestive problems with their vegan cats, perhaps it will prove that something other than the food is to blame.
So there we go, I can't believe I've just written a whole blog entry about cat poo, but i have!
Anyone out there had any similar experiences with Ami or Benevo food? Are your vegan cat poos 'normal'!? Anyone had experiences with cats with a Giardia infection, or alternative treatments for it? I'd love to hear from you.
An update 11th November 09
My cats are now increasingly liking the vegecat PH I make them. I have stuck with one recipe "rice & soya" made with TVP and brown rice. Adding the Vegeyeast instead of Engevita yeast seemed to incresed it's yummyness factor greatly. It is still quite slow progress though, and I currently feed them 1/3 vegecat ph homemade food, 1/3 benevo vegetarian food, and 1/3 organic chicken kibble. There is the odd runny stool in both of the persian cats, and I am beginning to wonder if this is just a persian thing! All three cats have been gradually putting on weight ever since i've been looking after them, to the point that one of them, who is really into his food, is really getting quite rotund. I am considering decreasing the portion size of their meals, as i don't want them to get too chubby. All three continue to be healthy happy and playful.
Update 20th November
The saga continues... It seems now only one of my cats is continuing to get the runs with the home-made food combined with benevo and small amount of meaty kibble. However, he gets a bad stomach randomly, and because he is long haired you can imagine how disgusting he gets - ew.
I've made the decision that I can't continue feeding him vegan food, because i think he must be allergic to something that is a common ingredient in all of the foods I have tried him on so far (soya perhaps). So I have dispairingly reverted back to tinned meaty food which is what he'd been eating his whole life before he lived with me.
It seems to have done the trick. The problem is, my cats try and steal each other's dinners all of the time, and they don't tend to eat in one sitting. So i reluctantly decided it is best if all three get at least some of the meaty tinned stuff, and the two without the stomach problems get vegan kibble, which makes up roughly a half of their meal, Pig, the big greedy cat with the bad tummy, gets entirely meaty food.
I am glad that they are eating a percentage of vegan kibble, and i've tried pretty much everything in the vegan cat food market available in the UK, to see if i could help the tummy troubles. I am still really interested in vegan diets for cats, and know it is possible where other underlying health problems do not conflict.
I wish there was more support for those feeding a vegan diet to their cats from the manufacturers of the food, but there is really relatively little knowledge and experience out there, that when you come across problems such as food allergies, you don't feel like there are any answers. I would encourage any vegan cat food manufacturer to be in closer contact with their customers, and the vet community, to help make vegan cat food a less daunting option to those who encounter feline health problems which appear to be aggravated by a vegan diet.
Unfortunately all three of my cats have been having the same digestive problems for the last few months, precisely when they began it is hard to tell, because it is only lately that we have been keeping them inside at night and so get to see their poos in the litter tray.
Please excuse all the gory poo descriptions (you were warned in blog title!),but basically my cats have intermittent sloppy, loose poos, or half-sloppy half-firm poos or even the rare scary poos with bright red blood on top. When the trouble first started I rang the vet and he suggested a stool sample be tested, It came back positive for Giardia which is a clever but pesky little single-celled organism that colonises the gut and causes loose stools. So I thought this was the culprit, and was relieved it was nothing more serious.
They were prescribed a course of panacur, and we sterillised the hell out of everything they'd ever touched! This appeared to do the trick eventually, at the end of the 5 day treatment their poos just about seemed normal-ish. But merely a week later it was attack of the runs again! disaster.
So i went back to the vet and he suggested they'd been re-infected with Giardia, and gave me a course of metronidazole (flagyl) which is so vile tasting to cats it makes them dribble froth, and they were pretty traumatised by being forced to swallow this twice a day, I just felt awful inflicting it on them. Annoyingly, this stuff seemed to make no difference at all.
I returned to the vets again, with a splendid sloppy specimen poo in a jam jar for him to test for Giardia again. I also took the Ami cat packet down to show him incase he asked about what it was that was going in at the other end! After months of me worrying the vet would be outraged at the vegan cat food issue he was suprisingly really good about it. He read through the ingredients, didn't even seem remotely shocked, but did say he was uncertain about these new "high tech" foods - which is amusing to me because the Pro-plan he recommended to me has lots more ridiculous "high-tech" ingredients in, the list is so long.
It seems unlikely now that my cats still have Giardia, because the metronidazole treatment is apparently usually very effective, and it didn't work at all, so it is not like they got reinfected this time.The vet had said his lab technician who tests for the giardia had infomed him that rarely, in this country, is a bactrial infection soley responsible for chronic diarrhea. I should get the test results back this afternoon so i'll let you know.
As for an allergy to Ami cat or vegan cat food, this I am also unsure of. They also have a little bit of Benevo vegetarian food mixed in, and a sprinkling of digestive enzymes. I have persistantly tried the benevo moist food and the vegecat PH but really have very little success getting them to eat it at the moment, so to change to a different vegan food is not really an option for now. It seems very unlikely that 3 different cats would have the same allergy. Two are possibly litter-mates (they were found as strays in the same area and are very distinctive and similar looking) but one is an entirely different breed. But this is the problem in a multi-cat household, it is hard to know whose pooped when. Every now and then they break the sloppy poo pattern with a wonderful perfectly formed one, or do half a normal poo, but there is no difference in their eating routine or behaviour on these days, between them they eat the same amount of the vegan food. I am trying to find out
more about cat food allergies but it seems common sense that they would constantly have runny poos if it were the food that was to blame.
In every other way they seem healthy and normal, they have wonderful shiny coats, a good appetite. They've not lost weight. They play and run about and are affectionate. They get on well with each other and there is no obvious source of stress, apart from me, their apparently poo-obsessed human, fussing and worrying about their bowel movements!
I really want to know whether the food i am feeding them has some part to play in this mystery, so I am trying this meaty food recommended by the vet for a while, because I really need to know, it is difficult in our small house with three cats with a bad tummy. Perhaps it will be helpful to other people who have had digestive problems with their vegan cats, perhaps it will prove that something other than the food is to blame.
So there we go, I can't believe I've just written a whole blog entry about cat poo, but i have!
Anyone out there had any similar experiences with Ami or Benevo food? Are your vegan cat poos 'normal'!? Anyone had experiences with cats with a Giardia infection, or alternative treatments for it? I'd love to hear from you.
An update 11th November 09
My cats are now increasingly liking the vegecat PH I make them. I have stuck with one recipe "rice & soya" made with TVP and brown rice. Adding the Vegeyeast instead of Engevita yeast seemed to incresed it's yummyness factor greatly. It is still quite slow progress though, and I currently feed them 1/3 vegecat ph homemade food, 1/3 benevo vegetarian food, and 1/3 organic chicken kibble. There is the odd runny stool in both of the persian cats, and I am beginning to wonder if this is just a persian thing! All three cats have been gradually putting on weight ever since i've been looking after them, to the point that one of them, who is really into his food, is really getting quite rotund. I am considering decreasing the portion size of their meals, as i don't want them to get too chubby. All three continue to be healthy happy and playful.
Update 20th November
The saga continues... It seems now only one of my cats is continuing to get the runs with the home-made food combined with benevo and small amount of meaty kibble. However, he gets a bad stomach randomly, and because he is long haired you can imagine how disgusting he gets - ew.
I've made the decision that I can't continue feeding him vegan food, because i think he must be allergic to something that is a common ingredient in all of the foods I have tried him on so far (soya perhaps). So I have dispairingly reverted back to tinned meaty food which is what he'd been eating his whole life before he lived with me.
It seems to have done the trick. The problem is, my cats try and steal each other's dinners all of the time, and they don't tend to eat in one sitting. So i reluctantly decided it is best if all three get at least some of the meaty tinned stuff, and the two without the stomach problems get vegan kibble, which makes up roughly a half of their meal, Pig, the big greedy cat with the bad tummy, gets entirely meaty food.
I am glad that they are eating a percentage of vegan kibble, and i've tried pretty much everything in the vegan cat food market available in the UK, to see if i could help the tummy troubles. I am still really interested in vegan diets for cats, and know it is possible where other underlying health problems do not conflict.
I wish there was more support for those feeding a vegan diet to their cats from the manufacturers of the food, but there is really relatively little knowledge and experience out there, that when you come across problems such as food allergies, you don't feel like there are any answers. I would encourage any vegan cat food manufacturer to be in closer contact with their customers, and the vet community, to help make vegan cat food a less daunting option to those who encounter feline health problems which appear to be aggravated by a vegan diet.
Comment
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Comment by Imogen on September 16, 2009 at 9:41am -
Just to update...
I gradually upped the amount of Benevo, but larger quantities of this also seemed to cause slightly runny tummys all round. Which lead me to deduce that both types of the commercially produced vege/vegan kibble give my cats loose stools, when fed exclusively, and that Ami cat alone was not to blame for their bad tums.
So now i am trying giving them a mixture of Ami & Benevo kibble, home-made Vegecat and a tiny amount of meat food. Their digestive systems seem to be working well. My only worry is all of them seem distinctively less keen on the home made Vegecat, although they do eventually eat it after they've eaten all of the kibble and are hungry again! They seem to prefer it when it is stale. I would love any suggestions of cat safe food which can be added to improve flavour, i already sprinkle with yeast flakes, and unfortunately can't seem to get any imitation bacon pieces which don't have onion powder in. I see the vegecat kibble recipe calls for tomato puree, anyone tried this as a flavour enhancer in the wet food?
Thier coats are looking particularly wonderful which i hope is due to the introduction of vegecat.
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Comment by Imogen on July 21, 2009 at 6:27am
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thanks, my cats are much better, their stomachs are working propery, hurrah.
and...I've had some promising signs, I was a bit short-sighted on the cat food supply situation and ran out of the pro-plan delicate, so I weaned them onto just Benevo (UK company vegetarian cat food sold on veggiepets.com) for the weekend until i could get some more of the pro-plan, anyway, this didn't appear to have any bad effects on their digestion at all. Whereas the effect when they came off the Ami was pretty instant. They are not as madly fond of the Benevo as they are of Ami or even the pro-plan, but they do eat it all, just less quickly. So I am going to try adding quantities of this to the pro-plan, and also some home-made vegecat. I got a lovely electric powered blender in a charity shop the other day so can hopefully make really smooth blended vegecat which will be more tasty.
I see Ami has a lot of corn products in and i wonder whether this could have been the cause of the allergy. Corn is not the easiest thing to digest. I'm going to try returning the food to the wholesaler, before i try other routes, but thanks.
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Comment by Ari Moore on July 20, 2009 at 3:57pm -
So sorry to hear about this experience - but I'm so happy to hear that your kitties are feeling better! Feel free to use this site to arrange a trade or purchase of the food - maybe someone else who has had a better time using AmiCat would be able to buy the remaining food from you.
Your plan to allow their stomachs to settle for a while sounds like a good plan. Let us know what happens if you try changing their food again...
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Comment by Imogen on July 13, 2009 at 12:06pm
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I wrote this a few weeks ago, without being able to post it up because my computer was playing up.
The update is that all my cats poos are now normal it seems.
The vets latest test for Giardia came back negative.
I plan to allow their stomachs to settle down for a month or so, then try with a different type of vegan cat food. Unfortunately I bulk ordered the Ami so have rather a lot of bags of it which i daren't feed to my cats. :(
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