Latitude 24 Cats

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Try a canned food or a grain free dry food like EVO, Wellness CORE, Blue Wilderness, Taste of the Wild. Most foods have a lot of carbs and grains in them and cats were designed to eat meat.

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If your kitty has a sensitive stomach your may want to try a presciption cat food, IE Science Diet Sensitive Stomach
Or…we had this same problem with our pet, and the only food he could keep down was meat baby food (Gerbers chicken, turkey, veal) mixed with rice cereal baby food. We ended up feeding him this 10 years.
But definately, have the vet check out your kitten.
Hope things go better!

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Think about this…in the wild, are there special mice for senior cats? Nope. Why then should a senior cat need special food? A senior cat (and cats of any age) should eat a species appropriate diet to promote the best health. By species appropriate, I mean a canned food that does not have grains and by-products. These are premium foods, and they cost a little more. However, in the long run you will save all that money and more because you won’t have so many vet bills. I won’t endorse one brand over another, but some of the good ones are Wellness, Merrick, and Natural Balance.

Good luck with your kitty. I hope his tummy feels better soon.

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DO NOT Give “milk milk milk” like the above answer states – cats are lactose intollerant. Give the mother small amounts of yoghurt & PROPER kitten milk (or goats milk – as it is lactose free) out for them.

Also, the mother might like some red meat (such as beef) minced & a raw egg in it.

You need to make sure the mother’s diet is high in calcium so the kittens get the calcium through her milk to ensure they don’t have low calcium levels and break their little legs a little while down the track

Also, if the mother is now very skinny & not putting weight on, it may be an idea to worm her with a worming treatment that is suitable for breast-feeding queens….as I live in a different country I don’t know what is available where you are, and cannot help with brand suggestions.

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Since it is still a kitten you should feed it a food that specifies for Kittens only for the first year. Try Purina One, its not expensive and you can hunt around for coupons too. When it gets older try a food that is for indoor cats, hopefully you will be keeping it indoors only. Good Luck!

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I’m sorry, but no, this is not good food to feed to your cat. Let’s look at the ingredients:

Poultry by-product meal, corn meal, corn gluten meal, ground whole wheat, brewers rice, soy flour, animal fat preserved with mixed-tocopherols (form of Vitamin E), fish meal, meat and bone meal, brewers dried yeast

Meat is the 9th ingredient!!! All the ingredients before that have very little nutrition for the cat. In fact, cats have zero need for grain, and the problem with by-product is that you don’t know what you’re getting. It could be nutritious organs, but it could also just be ears, paws, skin and 4D meat:-(

Also looking at the guaranteed analysis I counted that it has 41% of carbs! That is just begging for diabetes!

To be honest, I can’t recommend feeding ANY dry food. Cats are designed to get their water from food. That’s the way nature designed them, they have low thirst drive. When fed dry, they won’t drink enough to compensate for the lack of moisture. They will only consume about 50% of the water they should be having. This can lead to kidney disease, UTI, crystals, blockage, renal failure and more.

Free feeding also leads to obesity. And the fact that dry food is over-processed means, that most of it’s little nutrition has been already destroyed, leaving almost no nutrients for your cat. It needs to eat more to meet it’s needs, and in the process consumes more calories from the fillers.

Btw wetting the dry food will not help. There’s bacteria on the kibble and the water would just allow it to grow.

The only way to give the cat it’s natural hydration is to feed it wet food only.

But some wet foods are junk too. That goes for most commercial foods. Just like the dry, they are often made with cheap fillers such as corn, wheat, soy, rice etc. These are not a part of cat’s natural diet (it’s an obligate carnivore – it eats meat!) and they are not designed to digest it. Grain is carbohydrate which the cats can’t process and it turns into blood sugar and fat, causing diabetes and obesity. In the wild, where cats only hunt for meat, diabetes and obesity are unheard of. It’s us who cause these by feeding a species inappropriate food.

The healthiest food to feed apart from raw feeding is grain-free wet food with no by-product. Learn to read the label and understand the ingredients. Some good brands are Wellness CORE, EVO, Merrick, Nature’s Variety, Blue Buffalo Wilderness and more. These will give your cat the proper hydration and nutrition it’s designed to get and it will be strong and healthy.

If you switch it’s diet, do it gradually, by mixing the current food with the new one over couple of weeks until there’s only the new. This will prevent diarrhea and upset stomach.

If you have trouble getting your cat on the new food, look at this website that has some helpful tips for dry food junkies: http://www.catinfo.org/docs/TipsforTransitioningPDF12-18-09.pdf

And more on feline nutrition below.

Good luck!

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First thing is, no dry food is a substitute for proper teeth brushing. And crappy dry food with a fancy “dental diet” label on it is no better for your cat’s teeth than eating pretzels is for your teeth. It’s not like cats really chew their food, anyway. So you are making a wise choice to find higher quality foods for your cat – this will provide better quality nutrition to keep the cat’s whole body in better health. I agree with the other poster who said that both are good, but the Blue Buffalo is better. But the expense is nothing to sneeze at, so if you find yourself choosing the Chicken Soup, you can feel reasonably confident that you are doing the best you can with the resources you have available. Do bear in mind that the more nutritionally dense a food is, having fewer fillers (i.e. Grains and veggies) and more actual meat (as opposed to by-products), the more satisfied your cat will be eating smaller portions. So these spendy bags of premium foods will last much longer than similar sized bags of less expensive stuff like Purina. Other brands you can look at include Felidae and Natural Balance – they are both better than Purina, but possibly not quite as expensive (or quite as good) as the Blue Buffalo.

Here is a website that is a good resource for learning how to read cat food labels so you can make the best choices possible with what is available in your area, and within your budget: http://www.catfoodguide.com/long-guide/ Another way it is useful, is that it describes how to switch foods gradually, to minimize the potential digestive upset from a sudden change.

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You do not have to worry about the 9 lives…they are owned by Del Monte and they have not been recalled. This is from the Del Monte site, you can also go to www.menufoods.com and look up the name brand and find what has been recalled, also it is only wet food….

*From the Del Monte Site
Del Monte Pet Products’ Response to Recent Pet Food Recalls
The nationwide recall of pet foods by Menu Foods and other companies does not include any products made or distributed by Del Monte Pet Products. Del Monte Pet Products makes or distributes the following brands:

MeowMix® Gravy Train®
Kibbles ‘n Bits® Wagwells®
9Lives® Jerky Treats®
Snausages® Cycle®
Pup-Peroni® Gravy Train®
Milk-Bone® Reward®
Meaty Bone® Skippy®
Pounce® Canine Carry Outs®
Nature’s Recipe®

Del Monte is committed to delivering safe, high-quality products to consumers and their pets. We deeply regret that this unfortunate incident has impacted families with pets, and we will provide as much support throughout this challenge as possible.

For the latest information regarding the Menu Foods recall, we recommend you visit the Food & Drug Administration website at www.fda.gov.

A complete list of the recalled products along with product codes, descriptions and production dates is available from the Menu Foods Web site at http://www.menufoods.com/recall/. Consumers with questions can also call 866-895-2708 or 866-463-6738.

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I have been feeding my cat 9-lives wet food for years..She loves it but I wouldn’t recommend feeding your cat only wet food…I did that and it started to riot my cats teeth as she became older, so make sure you feed your cat a mixture of dry and wet food to help keep it’s teeth strong.

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It sounds like it was not even properly diagnosed what is wrong with your cat before giving her all this stuff. Only a minority of cases with such symptoms are actually from bacterial urinary tract infections that would need antibiotics. The way to find out is to get a sample directly from the bladder via cystocentesis, then it’s best to send it to a lab for a culture & sensitivity test to find exactly what bacteria and what antibiotic is effective on it. It sounds like they are just throwing antibiotics at her without knowing if she needs them.

And if they didn’t even get a urine sample at all, how do they know she has crystals? That’s what the food is for. Many cases of bladder inflammation are idiopathic — no known cause, but sometimes related to stress.

But actually, once I read about the hard water in your well, I think crystals ARE a good bet. Hard water is alkaline (high pH) Too high urinary pH can cause struvite crystals to form, which can irritate the bladder and even form clumps, partially blocking the urethra ( or even completely blocking it but that’s much more seen in male cats) . This could have been the cause of the symptoms you saw. So changing the water was a very good idea, and you only did that yesterday so you wouldn’t see the results yet.

It’s true that sometimes even low quality urinary formula foods (which contain chemical acidifiers to change the pH) can help, for example if a cat is prone to struvite crystals, the acidified food may help to dissolve the crystals and prevent that type of crystals from forming. (In the past there’s been a problem that the chemically acidified food went overboard and cats ended up with the pH TOO low and got calcium oxalate stones which have to be surgically removed. This Purina St/Ox is trying to solve that and deal with both types of crystals at once.)

No matter WHAT else is going on, one thing is for sure: cats need adequate moisture in their diet to keep the urinary tract flushed out and healthier. Our little domestic cats are descended from desert wildcats from North Africa, who developed to get their moisture from their food — the bodies of prey, which would be about 70% water, pretty similar to canned cat food. . They did not get a strong thirst drive. There have been studies that found that cats on a dry diet get only half as much total water as cats on wet food, and that is counting both the moisture in the food and the water they drink.
So if feeding the kibble will stop her eating her wet food, I would not give it.

I found that for my cat (who DID have a problem with struvite crystals and had even had a blockage),. Transitioning him to a high protein, low carb wet diet prevented those problems. It’s been 5 yrs and he has not had any more urinary problems since he went to all low carb wet food . At first I fed Innova Evo. Then various ones including Wellness, Merrick, Nature’s Variety, Before Grain etc. But if needed for budget reasons, one could also sometimes feed some cheap canned foods like Friskies that are grain free or very low in grains & vegetables.

Another important thing to consider is that there are other health issues besides the urinary tract. . Many so-called “prescription” / “veterinary formula” foods especially the dry versions, use a bunch of cheap grain “fillers” to cut their production costs and increase profits. The top ingredient in the dry Purina food you got is corn gluten meal! It also has brewers rice (scraps from the brewing industry) oat fiber, wheat gluten and whole grain corn (which is hard for cats to digest). This is worse than useless. Cats have no nutritional need for grains and they are not made to cope with huge amounts of carbohydrate. My cat was on a similar diet ( c/d dry) for 6 years and gained a pound a year even on a very small amount, and ended up with diabetes. Since then I have heard a lot of people say their cats got diabetes after being on one of these foods.

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You could treat the fleas, do try using a flea collar if you haven’t al ready tried that , also i suggest you to use a a flea product , use Frontline and Advantage brands.frontline is the choice of veterinarians when it comes to combating both fleas and ticks. Frontilne is proven protection. Frontline Plus killed 100% of fleas within 12 hours of application.
It is long lasting and continues to kill fleas and ticks all month long. It is also approved for use on puppies and kittens 8 weeks of age and older and on breeding, pregnant or lactating cats and dogs and is waterproof: effective even after swimming, bathing and grooming.
Also, the Advantage brand for fleas in cats is very effective and safe and kills fleas fast .it has been used by vets ans is EPA and FDA Approved.

Also there is a spray that you can put on her and the kittens that is natural its called
Natural Chemistry Natural Cat Flea Spray
•Botanical formula kills fleas on contact
•Provides flea control for up to one week
•Contains no pyrethrins
•No mixing required; spray is ready to use
•Safe for cats and kittens of any age

if it has worms , please make a vet visit and get it dewormed

if you really can’t keep the cat, you could give it to the shelter but do make sure that it’s a No-Kill shelter .also call the humane society and they could help getting your cat a new home.
Do talk to your friends or other people you know and see if some one would like to keep your cat.

I starred:)

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There are glands on either side of the cats anus that can become blocked, this may of happened.

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Sometimes when people answer questions they don’t know what to do so they say “go to the vet”. I don’t always agree with their solution, but in this case I do. A lot of over the counter products to treat animals don’t work. The solutions are of poor grade and may end up doing more harm to your pet than good.

A vet can swab your cat’s ears and get the mites out. Deworming should also be done by a vet. It can be more expensive than getting over the counter products and doing it yourself, but it’s worth it if you want it done properly and safely.

Cats when they are being adopted from shelters get their checkups plus vaccinations, deworming and spay/neuter. Please make sure your cats have all of these plus are up to date with vaccinations even if you didn’t get your cat from a shelter.

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Cats are naturally fussy eaters. Our cat (Reese) is a runt, and eats relative to her size- smaller animals require less food. Inactive (don’t play much) don’t need to eat as much as active cats.

They don’t eat like dogs do- everything available, and right away, they pick at the food as they need it.

Try other foods, see what she likes and stick to it. Pet food manufacturers offer trial-sizes of food, so visit a pet store that can help out.

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MANY diseases have been caused by fleas, ever heard of the “Black Plague”?
You can try the adavantage or whatever you use on your cat (not hertz hopefully). And Sprinkle Borax around (make sure your cat doesn’t eat it). You can complian (maybe even anonymously) about the abuse the other animals are facing. Also you can use flea bug bombs (but make sure all people and pets are out of the place for awhile as stated on the packages). 100% Lavender and lemon oils can help,
BUT
unless they treat their animals you are most likely going to suffer along with your animals.

Hope you don’t get ill either

I heard they found a couple of cases of the “black plague” again in New york within the past couple of years =(

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Http://www.goblinville.com/pages/recipes/kitty-litter-cake.htm

I’ve made the kitty litter cake many times – I’ll warn you this much, it usually doesn’t get eaten. I guess it’s something about the gross factor but I’ve taken that cake to 4 or 5 different pot luck dinners and usually wind up taking 3/4 of it back home with me, to be dumped out. The people who DO try it say it tastes really good, but usually everyone turns their nose up at it.

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Is it for Halloween? I ran a Google search

INGREDIENTS
1 (18.25 ounce) package German chocolate cake mix
1 (18.25 ounce) package white cake mix
2 (3.5 ounce) packages instant vanilla pudding mix
1 (12 ounce) package vanilla sandwich cookies
3 drops green food coloring
1 (12 ounce) package tootsie rolls
DIRECTIONS
Prepare cake mixes and bake according to package directions (any size pan).
Prepare pudding according to package directions and chill until ready to assemble.
Crumble sandwich cookies in small batches in a food processor, scraping often. Set aside all but 1/4 cup. To the 1/4 cup add a few drops of green food coloring and mix.
When cakes are cooled to room temperature, crumble them into a large bowl. Toss with 1/2 of the remaining cookie crumbs, and the chilled pudding. You probably won’t need all of the pudding, you want the cake to be just moist, not soggy.
Line kitty litter box with the kitty litter liner. Put cake mixture into box.
Put half of the unwrapped tootsie rolls in a microwave safe dish and heat until softened. Shape the ends so that they are no longer blunt, and curve the tootsie rolls slightly. Bury tootsie rolls randomly in the cake and sprinkle with half of the remaining cookie crumbs. Sprinkle a small amount of the green colored cookie crumbs lightly over the top.
Heat 3 or 4 of the tootsie rolls in the microwave until almost melted. Scrape them on top of the cake and sprinkle lightly with some of the green cookie crumbs. Heat the remaining tootsie rolls until pliable and shape as before. Spread all but one randomly over top of cake mixture. Sprinkle with any remaining cookie crumbs. Hang the remaining tootsie roll over side of litter box and sprinkle with a few green cookie crumbs. Serve with the pooper scooper for a gross Halloween dessert.

Looks disgusting though! Lol

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I love making a cemetery cake. Make your favorite cake in a 13x9x2 pan, take white icing and add green food color to make a nice green grass shade. Use Milano cookies for headstones and gummy worms for well effects. I take the cookie parts from oreos to make a freshly dug grave, pile it up like dirt etc. I have also buried cotton balls before making the cake and noted the spots with toothpicks then laughed my butt off when someone got that piece. JUST MAKE SURE LITTLE KIDS DONT GET THAT PART. I guess someone could choke on it, but my Friends all know me to look for the strange and weird things. Good Luck KG

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Dumpster Juice Jubilee
Cow Pie Cake
Toenail Torte with Toe Jam Filling
Blood Clot Cake
Googly Eyeball
Boogery Bundt
Revolting Rat Cake
Severed Arm Cake
Road Kill Cheesecake

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Cup o’ Worms

Mix up packaged chocolate pudding and place in single serving cups.

Place gummy worms into pudding, top with crumbled up Oreo type sandwich cookies.

Serve. Yummy(?)