Or more accurately, Barfing Cat Question. Our two males are nine years old now, and throw up (naturally, only on the carpet) from time to time. Not all that often, perhaps once every 3-4 weeks. One cat does it more than the other. They eat Iams kibble exclusively.
The vomitus never seems to contain any hair, so it does not seem to be hair-ball caused.
I’ve asked the vet each time they get an exam, and she just smiles condescendingly at me. Yeah, I know most cats do this, but the stuff is really a dark brown and our rug is off white, so unless we catch it soon afterwards, it is a big job getting the stains out.
Edit: Oh, yeah, they both are indoor only cats.
Is there any medication or anything else we could give them that might prevent this endearing habit?
If you don’t brush your cats regularly, start doing it a couple times a week. All the hair that ends up in the brush is hair that won’t end up in the cat.
Cats, God bless 'em, are damn fools about eating any little thing they find. They’ll eat bits of thread, spiders, buttons, earring backs, you name it. Some of that junk makes them vomit, so it’s really hard for a vet to diagnose occasional puking. If a cat is barfing up everything he eats for more than a day, that’s something to see the vet about.
When my Z barfs, it’s usually because I’ve come home a few hours late and fed her a full scoop all at once. She’ll gobble up every last bit, and then 15 minutes later it comes back up. When she’s extra hungry I have to remember just to give her a little bit of food to start, and let her digest a bit before feeding her the rest.
That’s probably not the problem here, but I offer it as a suggestion anyway.
Like others have mentioned, cats barf from hairballs that don’t always come up with the barf. Hairball barfs tend to be bile only, and come up when all the other food is out odf the stomach. Eating-too-fast barfs tend to bring up food.
My cat barfs (after eating too fast) only if I forget to give her the hairball remedy. If she’s had the remedy recently, she can eat as fast as she wants without barfing.
Petromalt comes in both malt and tuna flavors. There’s also a competing product called Laxatone that comes in a tuna flavor. I don’t have to resort to any tricks to get my cat to take the tuna-flavored stuff - she just licks it off my finger.
Brushing also helps prevent hairballs. Most cats enjoy a good brushing, and you’d be amazed at the amount of loose fur you can remove.
I used to take Indonesian language tutoring from an Indonesian vet, so we talked about animal health a lot. One time I wanted to say in Indonesian that “sometimes, cats throw up for no particular reason.” A grammatical Indonesian sentence for this is:
Kadang-kadang kucing-kucing mentah-mentah.
Now THAT’s a sentence. (Sadly, however, honesty compels me to note that as a more knowledgeable speaker I now know that you don’t really need to say “kucing-kucing,” you would most likely just say “kucing.” But you COULD say kucing-kucing, it’s grammatical.)
There is a spectrum of “ease of vomiting”. Cats vomit very easily. Dogs are intermediate. Horses and rabbits are unable to vomit. In addition to the other advice offered; a diet high in fiber will help some cats vomit less frequently, as will changes in husbandry practices that lead to slower ingestion.
My roommate’s cat pukes way too much (in fact, I recently wrote a little comic about it, myself). The vet prescribed “Duck and Green Pea” wet food. I don’t know why, as it hasn’t helped.
The amazing thing with a cat (and probably other animals too except humans) is that they can throw up and then go back and continue eating the food that they just vomited.
Do not feed them crappy cat food with high ash content or they will piss blood at one point in their life. I lost a shirt to this. I checked the internets and bought Iams from there on in.
Flush your toilet twice to minimize the amount of bacteria they will inevitably drink and then puke all over your house. It is only water. The planet is covered in it. It will recycle itself. That is what our planet does. Or just leave the seat down.
[hijack] You have a cat named Z? I have a cat named Z!.Well we had a W, then we got an X (the unknown kitty), eventually we got a Z (there is no Y. Why? Here there is no Y.)[/hijack]
Actually, there are other, less labor intense methods to slow ingestion. One is to put large marbles in the food dish and then mix the kibble in. This slows prehension and therefore ingestion.
Does your cat nibble on house plants? Mine does, and invariably vomits. He’s especially fond of dracaena and spider plants. He also vomits after chewing on the straw of a broom.
I hear ya on the cats munching on EVERYTHING remotely hair-like.
Drives me nuts. Dryer lint, hair they rip out of each other, dust bunnies, what have you. I have to keep my Oriental rug fringe covered in bitter apple.
What is it in their tiny brains that drives them to do this? shakes fist
Very clever vetbridge. Our guys eat slowly, but that is a tidbit of information I’ll file away for possible future use, and may be valuable to others.
So, today I got a tube of Petromalt (fish flavor). Not only some posters here, but also the salesperson told me cats just loooove to lap the stuff of your fingers.
Think ours will? Of course not. They took one sniff, turned up their noses (one nose per cat, that is) and walked away.
I followed the old rule and smeared some of the glop on their paws. Once guy licked it off immediately, making faces. The other guy ran all around the house on three legs, shaking the afflicted paw now and then. He would then stop, open his mouth, put out his tongue to lick, but as soon as he smelled it, he started three-legging it again.
After about an hour, he finally sat down and lapped it off. Certainly made for an entertaining interlude.
Will try it again tomorrow, but probably won’t be able to catch them. So it goes in the wonderful world of cats.
