Mashed pumpkin and chopped fish.... yummy!
I had a wonderful little adventure with cat excrement this past weekend. I am pretty good at keeping up with the litter box maintenance, but every once in a while, the cat and I disagree on whether the litter needs to be replaced. (I use silica cat litter... wonderful stuff. Lasts a long time, and really does work for eliminating odor.) When she thinks I've let it go too long, she'll leave a token of her displeasure by the front door to greet me when I come home from work.
Now fortunately the spot she poops in is away from the door's swing radius. There are a few inches to the side of the door, between the swing radius and the wall, that are "free space." And she always would poop there, the few times she felt it was necessary.
But last week, towards the end of the week, she decided to poop right in front of the door. And my door has one of those thin rubber strips attached to the bottom, to eliminate any gap between the door bottom and the shag carpet. So when I open the door, all that cat poop was scraped forward into the carpet, and then scraped back when I closed the door. It was a horrible, smelly mess. Just what I didn't need to come home to, and to spend the next however-long scrubbing out of the carpet and mashing up my fingers wedging a sponge under the door-bottom strip to clean off the scraped-up poop. I also liberally doused the affected areas with that odor-eliminating enzyme solution, on both the door bottom and the carpet.
So when that was finished, I cleaned out the cat box, deodorized it with the enzyme stuff, and refilled it with brand new clean litter. All's now well in the Katt household, right?
Wrong.
I come home in the wee hours of Saturday morning after work, to find not one, but TWO piles of cat poop waiting for me. One in the usual spot by the wall, and a HUGE, SMELLY pile in front of the door again. Mashed into the carpet again by the door-bottom strip.
I was not amused.
Well, the litter box was still clean, not even cat footprints in the litter to show any attempts at use. (I hope she wasn't peeing somewhere else... cat urine is darn near impossible to get out of carpets, even with that enzyme stuff....) And when a cat stops using the litter box, and you've eliminated the question of litter-box cleanness, it usually means something is wrong with the cat.
Fortunately Saturday is walk-in day at my vet clinic, so I set the alarm for 7:30 am, oversleep by an hour anyway (what -- 45 minutes of sleep wasn't enough?), and still get in there before 9:00. And when the vet took her temperature, he spotted a bit of blood on the thermometer when he was cleaning it off. He said that can happen if a cat is really straining to eliminate. His diagnosis was an inflammation of the lower bowel, so he gave me anti-inflammatory pills to pop down her once a day, and said to feed her a spoonful of canned pumpkin every day, if I could get her to eat it. (Pumpkin is high in fiber, and stimulates the bowel to move properly. Or something like that.) Or if not the pumpkin, to dose her with hairball medicine every day, for the laxative value.
Sofia is the one cat I've had who absolutely WILL. NOT. eat her hairball medicine... she will literally leave it smeared on her fur, whether feet or face, the entire day, until I have to clean it off because it's gotten cat litter or carpet fuzz or whatever all stuck into it. The vet showed me a new trick to get her to eat it -- pop it onto the roof of her mouth against the back of her upper teeth -- but that gives her a chance to chomp on my finger if I'm not quick enough, so I thought I'd try the pumpkin first.
As I suspected, she did not eat the pumpkin by itself. I told her I had a "nummy" for her ("nummy" is the word my family always used with the pets -- "Want a nummy?" being the operative phrase, guaranteed to bring any pet running in hopeful anticipation), and she mewed into the kitchen, only to turn up her nose at the pumpkin in her treat dish and stalk away yowling at me for deceiving her in such a base manner.
Fortunately I was prepared for such an eventuality. I took out a can of Fancy Feast (which I have on hand for special occasions), and mixed half a spoonful into the mashed pumpkin. This particular Fancy Feast was "ocean whitefish," I believe.... But whatever flavor was on the label, it was literally a can of chopped-up fish bits, recognizeable as chopped-up fish bits, in some sort of gelatinized goop. I'm sure it looked (or smelled) terrifically appetizing to a cat, but it looked like the bottom of a bait bucket at the end of a deep-sea fishing expedition to me.
Nevertheless, when I mixed the chopped-up fish bits into the mashed pumpkin and put it back onto the floor, my cat was ecstatic about it. This was a proper nummy! She scarfed up the whole mess in just a few minutes, and "yarmled" happily about it to me for the next half hour.
And I'm happy to report that it seems to be working. Three days of mashed-pumpkin-and-fish-bits later (not to mention the anti-inflammatory meds), her litter box has been showing the daily evidence of a properly-functioning kitty colon.
Or, it all came out right in the end.
Now fortunately the spot she poops in is away from the door's swing radius. There are a few inches to the side of the door, between the swing radius and the wall, that are "free space." And she always would poop there, the few times she felt it was necessary.
But last week, towards the end of the week, she decided to poop right in front of the door. And my door has one of those thin rubber strips attached to the bottom, to eliminate any gap between the door bottom and the shag carpet. So when I open the door, all that cat poop was scraped forward into the carpet, and then scraped back when I closed the door. It was a horrible, smelly mess. Just what I didn't need to come home to, and to spend the next however-long scrubbing out of the carpet and mashing up my fingers wedging a sponge under the door-bottom strip to clean off the scraped-up poop. I also liberally doused the affected areas with that odor-eliminating enzyme solution, on both the door bottom and the carpet.
So when that was finished, I cleaned out the cat box, deodorized it with the enzyme stuff, and refilled it with brand new clean litter. All's now well in the Katt household, right?
Wrong.
I come home in the wee hours of Saturday morning after work, to find not one, but TWO piles of cat poop waiting for me. One in the usual spot by the wall, and a HUGE, SMELLY pile in front of the door again. Mashed into the carpet again by the door-bottom strip.
I was not amused.
Well, the litter box was still clean, not even cat footprints in the litter to show any attempts at use. (I hope she wasn't peeing somewhere else... cat urine is darn near impossible to get out of carpets, even with that enzyme stuff....) And when a cat stops using the litter box, and you've eliminated the question of litter-box cleanness, it usually means something is wrong with the cat.
Fortunately Saturday is walk-in day at my vet clinic, so I set the alarm for 7:30 am, oversleep by an hour anyway (what -- 45 minutes of sleep wasn't enough?), and still get in there before 9:00. And when the vet took her temperature, he spotted a bit of blood on the thermometer when he was cleaning it off. He said that can happen if a cat is really straining to eliminate. His diagnosis was an inflammation of the lower bowel, so he gave me anti-inflammatory pills to pop down her once a day, and said to feed her a spoonful of canned pumpkin every day, if I could get her to eat it. (Pumpkin is high in fiber, and stimulates the bowel to move properly. Or something like that.) Or if not the pumpkin, to dose her with hairball medicine every day, for the laxative value.
Sofia is the one cat I've had who absolutely WILL. NOT. eat her hairball medicine... she will literally leave it smeared on her fur, whether feet or face, the entire day, until I have to clean it off because it's gotten cat litter or carpet fuzz or whatever all stuck into it. The vet showed me a new trick to get her to eat it -- pop it onto the roof of her mouth against the back of her upper teeth -- but that gives her a chance to chomp on my finger if I'm not quick enough, so I thought I'd try the pumpkin first.
As I suspected, she did not eat the pumpkin by itself. I told her I had a "nummy" for her ("nummy" is the word my family always used with the pets -- "Want a nummy?" being the operative phrase, guaranteed to bring any pet running in hopeful anticipation), and she mewed into the kitchen, only to turn up her nose at the pumpkin in her treat dish and stalk away yowling at me for deceiving her in such a base manner.
Fortunately I was prepared for such an eventuality. I took out a can of Fancy Feast (which I have on hand for special occasions), and mixed half a spoonful into the mashed pumpkin. This particular Fancy Feast was "ocean whitefish," I believe.... But whatever flavor was on the label, it was literally a can of chopped-up fish bits, recognizeable as chopped-up fish bits, in some sort of gelatinized goop. I'm sure it looked (or smelled) terrifically appetizing to a cat, but it looked like the bottom of a bait bucket at the end of a deep-sea fishing expedition to me.
Nevertheless, when I mixed the chopped-up fish bits into the mashed pumpkin and put it back onto the floor, my cat was ecstatic about it. This was a proper nummy! She scarfed up the whole mess in just a few minutes, and "yarmled" happily about it to me for the next half hour.
And I'm happy to report that it seems to be working. Three days of mashed-pumpkin-and-fish-bits later (not to mention the anti-inflammatory meds), her litter box has been showing the daily evidence of a properly-functioning kitty colon.
Or, it all came out right in the end.