Yesterday I had folks over for dinner, and some remarked that my cat, Flathead, seems skinny. Later I weighed him and he's around six and a half pounds, which is about half what he once weighed. I imagined my ex-girlfriend, who once had a significant stake in Flathead, seeing him and exclaiming "you're starving my cat!" He looks fine to me though.
He weighs so little because I mix a significant quantity of Metamucil into his food--a little more than 2 tablespoons per 12.5 ounces of cat food. The Metamucil bulks up his stool--perhaps the opposite of the effect you might expect, but that's exactly what it does. Without it, his stool gets exremely loose--runny, in fact. It's pretty nasty.
For ease of preparation, I mix huge quantities of cat food and Metamucil at once--six 12.5-ounce cans of Wellness cat food along with a little more than 3/4 cup of Metamucil:
It's quite an aromatic experience to beat all that cat food with a KitchenAid. It drives Flathead mad.
The Metamucil--generically, psyllium husks--has the intended effect: he now makes nice, firm turds. An interesting side effect is that, apparently, it makes him feel more full, as he now eats a lot less food. Or, perhaps the Metamucil just makes the food so nasty that he can't stand to eat much of it. I don't know. In addition he has also been a much mellower cat since I started using the Metamucil--he sits around more and doesn't jump on the counters as much as he used to. Maybe he's more satisfied, or maybe he's just lethargic because he doesn't eat as much food. I don't know.
Psyllium husks is the only fiber supplement that works: there's a product with the brand name Benefiber, which humans like because it mixes well with water. It's not psyllium, and it has little effect on Flathead's stool. I also have figured out that this is the amount of fiber he needs: I have tried to cut the fiber allotment, but his stool then starts to loosen.
But since he now is maybe a bit skinny, I was getting a bit worried about him. I'm not sure I should be: most cats I see are absolutely enormous, and I'm starting to think that people think that's the norm for cats. Maybe Flathead is a bit thin, but he might be just fine compared to a healthy cat. Maybe he only seems skinny when compared to the typical obese house cat. Like I said, he looks fine to me.
Sill, though, maybe he's a bit thin. So I need a way to get him to eat more while still keeping all this extra fiber in his diet. So tonight I decided to try something different: canned pumpkin. It's a typical recommendation for a cat fiber supplement, and maybe he will find this more palatable. So I figured out the ratio of pumpkin to food to maintain the same amount of fiber: an entire can of pumpkin for each 12.5-ounce can of food. That's a lot of pumpkin, but then, his stool can get really runny.
I thought he might not eat it, but Flathead will eat a lot of strange things; for instance, he will dig sweet potato skins out of the sink, move them to the kitchen floor and (I think) eat the leftover sweet potato on them. So far tonight he seems fine with the pumpkin. Unfortunately though I'm not sure that he is eating a lot more food. So I will give this a few days at the food dish and in the litter box and see how this goes.
posted at: 21:22 | path: / | permanent link to this entry
