#I wish I could express this kind of nuance simply but I haven't figured that out yet

[wallabywannabe]

I followed my vet's advice to a T and absolutely zero results. So then I followed a hunch of my own and...voila!

So I love my vet and she's the only reason I would hesitate to move too far away. I went through a lot of vets to find her when I was having trouble with my first cat.

I've grown and learned a lot and will always be learning more. I know anecdotal evidence is not great. I KNOW this. But the problem is there often isn't much else to go off of! And nutrition is especially lacking in veterinary medicine. All of the research is pretty much in the hands of the big pet food companies. Which is obviously suspect.

I have also learned that human doctors don't do a lot of nutrition schooling, which I believe carries over to how veterinary schools work. But at least there are human nutritionists that can fill that gap a little bit. That's not common for veterinary medicine.

Anyway, I refuse to believe feeding corn/wheat/soy/legumes/plant starches in high proportions can be good for obligate carnivores like cats. Zoologists and wildlife experts try to fit diet for captive animals in their care as close to what they would eat in the wild as possible. Why would it be different for domestic animals? Their brains are a little different from their wild ancestors which makes them domesticated, but their digestive systems have not experienced consistent evolutionary pressure for long enough to cause big changes there.

What Hills and Purina recipe formulators and scientists do is start with a cheap base of calories (corn, soy, or wheat) and add in supplements till it meets the basic nutritional needs for a cat to not develop short term problems (for a couple years). Long term problems do develop, because animals get sick. (But also I suspect that they get sick more often than they would because of the diet.) And they take their base formula and see if they can tweak things like pH and concentrations of vitamins and minerals to conteract a specific illness until they get results. It works for some diseases, so those they make food for and market it to vets. It goes through research and trials and results are measurable, so they're convincing and scientific! And they can sell them as a prescription diet at a huge markup.

But they don't do any research to see if feeding a more biologically appropriate ingredient profile would have even better results, or not lead to the problems in the first place. And they don't check long term to see if their tweaked prescription diet might cause other long-term problems down the line.

For example, I have never heard of a cat who has only ever been fed wet food and/or properly hydrated raw food who ended up with urinary crystals. It's very common in cats that eat dry kibble, though (but don't worry! Hills has several prescription diets for that!).

Anyway, I largely operate off the idea that I should feed wet and get as close to a carnviorous diet as possible with my cats. Not easy to avoid all problematic ingredients in commercial foods, but I don't feel confident enough that I have the time and energy to make my own at this point.

Petra started having loose stool about 8 months ago. No other symptoms. Vet went through the checklist with bloodwork and a detailed ultrasound, leading to a diagnosis of simple colitis. Vet told me I could keep feeding her normal food, but I just had to add a probiotic in the morning and beer root fiber powder in the evening.

Now, I already give a probiotic that I've had great results with. It completely cured my first cat's constipation, and I have noticed that if I don't give it, my otherwise healthy current cat Purrcy seems to get a little constipated. My theory, and this I admit could have no merit because it's just an idea I can't prove, is that wild cats eat the intestines of their prey and get a dose of naturally occurring probiotics every meal that way, so maybe their intestines aren't built to maintain a healthy microbiome without redosing every meal.

So I give my cats probiotics. I worked for a bit in microbiome research, so I know enough to know that we really don't understand why probiotics work or what certain strains are doing exactly, but we know from trial and error that there are benefits. I started with an expensive pet probiotic with several strains and good reviews, which worked. I eventually switched to a human brand with a few strains that have good general reputations, high CFU count, and good reviews. That worked just as well.

My vet gave me a Purina brand probiotic to use instead. She said try it and see, and if I didn't see results I could go back. This prescription (expensive) Purina probiotic only has 1 strain that I hadn't been using, but I didn't do any research on it so I don't know much about it. I was going to follow her instructions exactly, though, to see if there was anything to it.

So I gave the new probiotic and the fiber in my cat's food, slowly increasing the amount of fiber as directed. I reached the full dose she initially recommended, but she said I could do more, so when I saw no improvement, I eventually went up to double that.

6 weeks of no improvement. Her stool might even have gotten more watery. And on top of that, Petra had stopped eating as much of her food, either because she could taste the fiber at that dose or it was making her feel too full.

I was willing to try the plant fiber additive. Sometimes when you have an illness you need an atypical diet. That happens. But after it didn't work, I decided to try something else.

In the past I tried a lot of different foods with my constipation-prone cats. Most raw foods I couldn't feed 100% of the time, because they tend to have a rather high bone content, since they grind the meat whole with the bone in. Too high and it would make constipation worse. (There was ONE brand that substituted bone with eggshells as a calcium source and it was amazing until the FDA shut it down after testing a sample that had been in a hot car all day. I'll never forgive that. RIP Radcat!)

But, maybe bone was what I needed to firm up my cat's stool and get her colon back on track, since fiber wasn't doing it.

So I got a couple types of commercial raw. One brand Petra loved immediately. It's been 2 days and already her stool has form to it again!

I'll have to monitor for constipation in the other cat, since trying to separate their food seems to give them a whole new anxiety disorder. Maybe I'll have to tinker a ratio of wet and raw. But I think I'm finally on the right track!

I'm going to tell my vet what I discovered and I'm sure she'll be fine. Like I said, I think she's great! But there are still a lot of unknowns in veterinary medicine.

I don't think there's any magical property about raw food that makes it better than canned or kibble. (I do think there are a lot of dental benefits to feeding whole prey raw or pieces of raw meat/bones, but that's a whole other post). The commercial raw food I buy has been pasteurized, so does it really even count as "raw" still? But what's important is these raw foods tend to have species-appropriate ingredients, and this isn't the first time I've seen that kind of diet make a difference.