Last week I noticed Ezelle the Cat not eating as much as he normally does. After a day or two, I took him to the vet who informed me that she found some ulcers on his tongue, possible from eating something hot or caustic. I normally feed him hard food, Purina Cat Chow to be exact, but I asked her about the wet food like Fancy Feast and she said that would be fine. He’ll down a can of that stuff in a hurry, but still leaves the dry alone.
It’s been about a little over a week since I first noticed this and started offering him the wet food beside the dry, and he still won’t eat the dry. I figure there are two possibilities, he still has the ulcers or just likes the wet better. I was always under the assumption that dry was better for their digestion as well as their teeth, something I am especially interested in since the vet removed a couple of his teeth last year, I want him to keep as many as possible for as long as he can.
I don’t want to blow another $50 on having the vet tell me he still has ulcers in his mouth, so as long as he eats something he’s staying at the house. How long do I keep offering him both? If he switches to the wet food altogether, it that a Bad Thing?
I’d highly recommend taking your cat back to the vet to have his ulcers re-examined, as well as possibly running some blood and urine tests, since loss of appetite and oral ulcers are among the symptoms of chronic renal failure* (scroll down near the end).
But even if his symptoms aren’t from CRF and his ulcers are completely healed, I wouldn’t say feeding only canned food is necessarily a bad thing. I’d just recommend switching to a higher quality food than Fancy Feast. Another thing you can try, which our cat loves, is moistening his dry food with water (we use 1/4 cup food to 1/3 cup water). That way he’s still getting the fiber from the dry food, but also getting more moisture, as well. Then just feed him crunchy treats to help keep up with tartar control and continue to take him in for annual dental cleanings.
*Don’t despair if he has it, though. Especially if it’s caught early, it’s treatable and cats can live many years with proper treatment. My 20-year-old cat was diagnosed over 3 years ago and still acts like she thinks she’s a kitten most days!
I am not a vet. But I have a lot of experience with cat maladies.
Possibly it’s calicivirus. Calici causes ulcers in the mouth and on the tongue, which makes eating very painful, so the cat stops doing it. A secondary bacterial infection can often develop from calici, which causes the cat’s gums to become infected and then the teeth start falling out. It’s pretty gross.
Calici virus is highly contagious to other cats and can kill kittens. Please take her to the vet to be checked out.
Is she up on her FVRCP shots? Because they vaccinate for calici in that series. (FVRCP is commonly called distemper; you may know it by that name.)
I just noticed that you did take her to the vet who told you she had ulcers.
Well, I don’t want to malign all vets, but some of them are stupid. You’d think that the first thing a vet would think of when seeing ulcers would be calici - it’s extremely common - but sometimes, well, they are stupid.
You might want to “point out” that it possibly could be calici. I am sad, but not surprised, that the vet didn’t think of this herself.
Even if a cat has been vaccinated, he can still get calici. It’s just not possible to vaccinate against all strains.
Calici can live for many days - it’s quite the hardy virus. If you have no other cats in your house and your cat doesn’t go outside, he can still pick up calici. You could have petted a carrier cat and transmitted it to your own cat.
There’s not much the vet can do for calici itself, being a virus, but they can provide medications to treat the ulcers (e.g., lysine) and to prevent a secondary bacterial infection. Googe “feline calicivirus” for information.
Depending on what’s causing the ulcerations, it can take up to two weeks for them to heal, so his mouth may still hurt. He could have eaten something caustic, as cats are prone to doing, he could have calici (although I doubt it in a fully vaccinated indoor cat), he could have renal disease (although renal cats usually have a distinctive smell to their mouths and breath that your vet would probably have picked up on), he could have horrible dental disease, or he could have something else entirely.
Another possibility is that he could simply like the wet food better. You give an animal a choice between canned food and kibble, most of them will go for the canned in a heartbeat. It’s like giving you the choice between cold, dry bread and hot, soft bread fresh from the oven. You’re going for the option that smells and tastes better and has the nicer texture, right? Same with cats.
Canned food isn’t inherently bad for him, but it does tend to build up tartar at a shocking rate, and he’s already got a history of dental issues, so I wouldn’t leave him on canned food long term if you didn’t absolutely have to. You might try mixing a bit of dry food in with the canned, and slowly upping the amount of dry, then decreasing the amount of wet in the mix. That should give him plenty of time for his mouth to heal and smooth the transition for him. Most cats do fabulously with this, but if he gets to a certain amount of dry food and just stops eating, he needs to go back to the vet.
