it's a good thing i'm not very superstitious

[firecat]

Otherwise I might be a lot more freaked out about having had to spend New Year's Eve at the emergency vet with Angus.

He refused food and was straining and producing a couple of drops of urine each time. I know urinary tract blockage is a serious condition for male cats so I took him to the emergency vet. But they couldn't find a blockage, so they took an X-ray. It turned out the problem was with the other sort of elimination - he was chronically constipated.

They gave him an enema. Then they had to wash him. Then when I got him home, I had to wash him some more. Poor guy. I also have to switch him to high fiber food now, or add pumpkin or metamucil to his food.

I had no idea how lucky I was with my cat Selkie, who never had a single health problem until the last couple years of her 12 years with me. Both of my cats have chronic problems now. At least Biscuit's vomiting episodes seem to be staying under control with application of allergy pills.

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

We were actually just talking about this the other day at our New Year's Eve party. We'd recently brought Brucey in to the vet because of his lingering sneezing (diagnosis: Just a cold, ride it out and if it just doesn't go away, bring him back in) and Bean because of the insulin overdose, which ended up being totally fine but cost a fortune in tests and overnight monitoring. In talking about it, everybody said that at some point they've had to bring their cats in at huge expensive for stuff we totally don't remember ever being an issue with the cats our families had as kids. I'm not even totally sure if my family brought our cat in for regular checkups / shots when I was a kid.

On the one hand, it's possible that I just don't recall it all, because my parents would have handled it. But I think that there used to be more of a tendency to just not get medical attention for pets unless it was ridiculously serious like a broken limb or something. I think my parents would never have dreamed of bringing a cat into the fet for a lingering sneeze. I don't know what they would have done upon finding out the cat was diabetic, but I think it's likely they would have never found out. I imagine cats then pretty much either made it or didn't on their own.

The flipside may be that we overtreat cats and a lot of these situations are ones that they could have survived on their own, or that something is happening in response to breeding or cats having access to medical care (and the alleviation of evolutionary pressures) that makes cats more sick than they used to be.

I don't like those latter options, but there may be something to them to some degree. Certainly most real-world answers seem to me to blend several explanations in varying degrees. I like to think, though, that extra hassle and expense aside, cats have a better life due to the additional medical care.

Have you tried the high-fibre food on them before? Would it be bad for Biscuit to eat it too? It's much easier to feed special diets if you can feed them all the same food. Some dietary changes end up not being bad, though. When we had to put Brucey on tooth and dental food, it turned out that he was nutty in love with the stuff and was thrilled with the change.

[firecat]

I'm quite sure that the bar has been raised on health standards for pets. Vets offer procedures and options they didn't offer before. Also some vets are much quicker to suggest procedures than others.

I do actually think I was lucky with Selkie, because I've noticed since working at the shelter that shelter animals, especially the ones that were stray for a significant amount of time, are quite likely to have health problems. I doubt that this is evolutionary pressure per se. Other shelters have fewer resources and might euthanize a larger percentage of their older animals or animals that got sick in their care.

I think animals bred by responsible breeders are less likely to have health problems but that's at the expense of euthanizing the ones that test as carrying genetic problems of the breed.

I'm sure some people overtreat their animals. I don't think it's unreasonable to take a cat to the vet if it has a cold or an insulin overdose though.

I'm not going to have them on different foods if I can help it. I haven't tried high fiber food yet; I am switching them to more wet food and less dry food, and giving angus hairball remedy. It seems to be loosening things up a bit.