I had a string eater and an erp-er. I came home one day to find the Siamese in the litter box with a shoelace on the way out and instinct made me grab it. I immediately knew it was a mistake but he was fine. He wasn’t obsessed with eating string like some Siamese so simple common sense took care of it.
My Siberian Husky had a guy of iron. All she vomited was a cleaning cloth, all she pooped out was fruit roll-up paper. My kids learned to tear them into small pieces or I didn’t buy them.
My Ragdoll erped a lot. It wasn’t vomit because it went down and went up … sometimes she just had to gorge on food. My vet said he’d done work-ups on erping cats and the conclusion was that the cat erped so if it wasn’t a huge problem he doesn’t do it-
My Ragdoll was always a tiny beast and just died tonight which is why I’m still awake. She had an URI since last weekend that wasn’t getting better and she’d just been clipped because she was terribly matted. I offered her heating pads and little covers, which she liked and she had a vet appointment coming up. I wiped her nose clean and laid her on the bed so I could go to the bathroom. Before I walked away she seemed to seize and she was gone. She’d been looking borderline for kidney disease so she already had the appointment but I keep wondering if there was more I could do, even as simple as hold her upright instead of lay her down.
Sorry- I digress. I didn’t expect to lose her tonight.
Boris is a plastic eater. The whole house has been kitty proofed. He has eaten countless plastic bags, Easter grass, a rubber snake, an entire feather from his toy, and of course the infamous $3000 penny (technically $2999.99 since the vet did return the penny after the surgery). The little stinker is currently just vomiting up his food. I am expecting to find a hair ball soon.
– I don’t see any way that holding her upright would have prevented her death. She was comfortable, and safely on your bed, and she just went. Hard on you; but quite possibly easier on her.
I’m very sorry to hear that. At least it was not a long, drawn out process. It is one of the things I feel worst about for animals–when they are in pain, they cannot understand why or whether there is any end in sight. As a result I’m usually not in favor of heroic measures to save an animal’s life. It is hard on their owners but I think better than the reverse. As thorny_locust noted, she died in comfort and safety. I think the value in that exceeds the value of a few extra weeks or months of life but dying in a cage at the vet.
Cats can suffer from the eating disorder pica. My Will was one who developed this later in his life. He suddenly started eating anything plastic. He would dig it out of the garbage. I tried hiding it at the bottom of waste baskets and he would find it. He once ate a fist-sized hole in my shower curtain (I had to change to a cloth one). I was changing the litter once and found a turd with a readable piece of a nutrigrain bar wrapper around it. He was relentless. I couldn’t leave anything laying around for even a few minutes. I finally started putting all plastic trash in a bag in the refrigerator until trash day. It never caused him any medical issues but I had to be on my toes all the time.
We had a cat, in fact a Siamese as Pheline mentioned, who ate a threaded needle. She had to have surgery, but was okay after that.
I didn’t realize Siamese are especially prone to eating things…I’ll have to keep that in mind because as a Balinese, little Linden is basically a long-haired Siamese.
That’s what the vet told us to do when our cat Piper ate some string once.
Is it possible your cat has pica? One of my sister’s cats does, to the point where she has to have him on kitty prozac. She could have a Xmas tree up the one year, it got so bad. When he’s really upset, he’ll eat his toys, the carpet, anything, poor baby. The afore-mentioned Piper had it too, but not nearly so bad.
We also had a cat who just liked to lick plastic – bags, wrapping, anything. She’d root through my waste basket for stuff, and if you took it off of her, she’d get really pissed off. Cats are freaking weird.
LOL. One year I noticed a sparkle from back end of one of our dogs (Maltese). I stopped her and yep, a string of tinsel was hanging out! I pulled it out, but it happened a couple more times over the next couple of days. Not sure what motivated her to eat it. I suspect it’s because she in particular would walk under the tree to drink the water and the tinsel would get stuck her fur. After that, we’d have to stop hanging tinsel about a foot from the bottom of the tree.
Evidently, some cats will eat things you would honestly expect them not to eat. Someone told me that he bought some plants for his apartment. One of them was a lily. The cat ate some, and even though the vet gave her something to make her puke it up, she was not in good shape. I hope she survived.
A cousin of mine has one really stupid Doberman. Shortly after getting him as a puppy a few years ago he ate a dish towel. This of course plugged him up and surgery followed. A few months after recovering from the surgery he ate a pair of her under wear. Another surgery followed and the vet told her the next non food item he eats will probably kill him. He was good till a month ago when he chewed up a shoe and ate some of it. He survived this surgery but is may not live through another. He will now wear his muzzle except when he is in the presence of his people.
My vet told me cats will eat anything. The way a cat’s skull is made, it can’t really see what it’s eating, and they make poor decisions about what goes in.
They don’t decide what to eat by looking at it. They decide by what it smells like. Didn’t your vet ever notice a cat sniffing at a plate of food, or at anything else it was considering eating?
It is very definitely not my experience that cats will eat anything. Most of them are pretty picky. However, it’s true that they’ll sometimes eat things that are bad for them; and it is also my experience that nearly every cat will eat something you don’t think of as something that cats eat. Not the same something, of course – if it were the same something for each cat, we would think of it as something that cats eat.
We had a cat when I was a child who loved asparagus; and I had one once who absolutely loved coffee beans. Yes, he ate them, not just licked at them. I tried consulting with the vet. as to how many coffee beans were safe for a cat, and she said ‘I’ll have to get back to you on that, I never heard of that one before’. She eventually said that while there didn’t seem to be much in the literature, she was pretty sure that a couple at a time wouldn’t hurt him; so whenever I refilled the coffee grinder (mine holds considerably more than I grind at a time) I gave him a coffee bean. But I had to be really careful to clean them up if I spilled any.