But I will write about it not pulling, because this could be useful old information for some. It is the kind of useful information that should be passed down freely, perhaps from generation to generation, even taped to a cave wall or scratched into a scroll of parchment. Ancient words of Ruthe Crillye, at the service of cat owners everywhere. Saving carpets and rugs, one home at a time.
In case you’re new to me (hello!) then let me introduce you to my cat, Mr. Bear. He’s a British Shorthair, he’ll be thirteen this month, and he’s a bit of a one-of-a-kind, in size. (As male British Shorthairs tend to be.) At his peak he weighed eight and a half pounds: I feel he’s probably lighter now, but he’d do well in heavyweight cat-wrestling championships.
If there was such a thing.
God, let it be.
For much of Mr. Bear’s life, he was a boxer. Now, before we delve into this unpleasant topic, I can emphasize that the following is not veterinary advice, nor is it a substitute for it. If your cat is vomiting, seek professional help, etc.
I had to take my cat to the vet two or three times before I figured out for myself that my cat wasn’t dying of some horrible disease, but just greedy. I’m not a fan of the Dr Google approach to healthcare (looking up your symptoms on the internet to diagnose your own ailments) and I’m not keen on Google Vet (same thing but for your animals) for the same reasons. Reasons I don’t need to go into because they should be obvious.
Even though – in the end – Google Vet was actually more helpful than the real, really expensive Real Life vet, I have to be responsible and recommend you see the real person if your cat is throwing bile around like it’s something extra . Poltergeist.
Anyway, to get back on track: for much of his life, Mr. Bear was a misfit. Big, fishy piles of porridge, tossed noisily and with what looked like a hellish full-body muscle workout, all over the carpets. Never on tiles, even if tiles were nearby, and never on easy-to-sweep wooden floors. Only on the carpet.
I swear my cat would find an area of expensive, stained, super absorbent fabric even if it was placed in a spacious room made entirely of, I don’t know, granite. Or marble. If there was a cat in the Palace of Versailles, in the time of Louis XV, say, un chat royalethen he would have followed miles and miles of marble-floored corridors which he carried in his vom until he happened to find a section of priceless, ancient, woven with golden threads, and then he would hold his curly wig to the side. and fought it.
This regurgitation had been fine for years – manageable, not too bothersome, the cat seemed “good on its own” – but in the last couple of years the vomiting had become more of a concern. Everyday, sometimes. We went to the Real Life vet so the vet could feel his stomach (the cat’s, not his) and look in his ears (same) and then send us home with a bill for eight thousand pounds with the verdict that there was nothing physically wrong with him. (The cat.)
This is where Google Vet came into play. Because there is nothing better than the internet than feeding you unverified anecdotal material and possible misinformation fed into the system by billions of people who may or may not be in their right mind: and out of this morass of brain drain has arisen something so revealing, so precise, that I really cheered.
Mr. Bear wasn’t throwing up at all: he was sucking up his food! This should have been obvious because the sick piles looked and smelled exactly like his food, right down to the exact kibble shape and the fact that some of them still had the dusty dry surface, but I hadn’t really put two and two together.
God bless Google Vet.
Once I figured it out, that Mr. Bear was throwing up his food right after he ate it, instead of slowly dying from something the vets weren’t seeing in their tests, I started to fix the problem. And here, finally, nearly a thousand words into the post, is the useful bit: how i stopped my cat from being sick.
I picked the cat’s bowl up off the floor.
know! Bloody hell. Could a fix be any simpler? At first I thought the cat was eating too fast – greedy drinker – and I got out one of those puzzle bowls to see if slowing him down would stop the vomiting. You know those pet bowls with the kind bits inside?
It didn’t work. The volume of Puke decreased, the frequency decreased, but the problem did not go away. I have to say I was very disappointed by this: “slow down feeding” seemed to be the most popular solution on Google Vet and I was sure that Mr. Bear’s enthusiastic fast feeding was the culprit. My mind turned darkly to the incurable diseases of the cat.
But then I read something else, something about some cats – especially larger ones – regurgitating food because of the angle they have to eat when a bowl is placed on the floor. There was a diagram – unfortunately now I can’t find it – that showed the cross-section of a cat’s head and neck and demonstrated the fact that food had to be pulled up the neck almost vertically to pass the bend and enter the digestive system.
I’m sure the accompanying track even said something like, “imagine if you had to eat upside down! That’s how it is for a cat when you put the bowl on the floor!’ Which seemed slightly dramatic and far-fetched, really, but it stuck with me. In the same way food stuck to the cat’s throat!
It was worth a try, anyway, and I placed five paperback books under the cat’s bowl that morning, elevating it so that it could easily leave without having to squeeze itself. Has she been throwing up since then? Almost When. I don’t think it’s been done a few times. Probably only the three times I’ve gone to write about it, which is definitely a state of frustration rather than a relapse.
Cat vomit is simply not part of our lives anymore – we have become an almost daily occurrence. (Usually happens if we’re away, actually – it’s like he goes on a hunger strike and then goes berserk once we’re back.)
Finally we bought a properly raised bowl and got the paperbacks – I bought this one here from Amazon (affiliate link) – and the only regret I have is that I didn’t do more extensive Googling earlier.
I’ll tell you something else: while I was at it, I changed his food. After a full twelve years of feeding him what the breeder had given him (Royal Canin British Shorthair) I decided to do a little research and see if this it was the best or if I had just blindly followed the advice of someone who may not have done their own research in the first place.
Side note: when my dog was tiny, he had terrible stomach problems. Fancy dog foods like the ones you get now (hand delivered to the door, no less! Using expensive cuts of fresh meat!) barely existed when we first got him and the concept of “grain free” pet foods ‘, the ones that weren’t Just filled with all sorts of junk and sawdust and whatever else they probably put in some of them, they were pretty specialized.
But he was very bad with the dry dog foods that were widely available so I spent quite some time trying to find something he could tolerate. And I came across this great site that rated different dog foods according to ingredients and percentage of useful nutrients and so on – All about dog food. I highly recommend it – you can even add your dog’s details now to try and find the right food. When I first used it, it was a very basic site.
Anyway, this site gives you a percentage rating for each dog food and tells you what’s good about it and what’s not – for example some Pedigree foods rate at 19% (which isn’t great, obviously) rate others brands, such as Aatu at 80%. Others rate it even higher. It’s worth a look if you’re looking to change your dog’s food or just curious about what’s in the food you’re using. It ended up being a really useful way to find a dog food that Dexter (the cockapoo) could tolerate and it also gives the approximate cost of food per day so you can easily weigh things out.
I remembered this site when I was doing the whole cat thing and was wondering if there was an equivalent cat food and lo and behold:
Hooray! Not exactly the same site, but quite similar and also unbiased with the helpful percentage score too. Using their information, I narrowed down the food options for Mr Bear to about five options and then calculated the cost per kilo for each. I ended up going for Orijen Original, which had the highest ingredient rating for the tastiest price. In fact, the cost per kilo for Orijen (84% ingredient score) was only marginally higher than for Royal Canin (36% ingredient score).
I tell you all this not to rule you out on the brand of food you are using or to suggest you change, I just found it all very interesting and it seemed pointless to move the cat to something more nutritious – rich and had less bulky filler , especially as he enters the Silver Fox years.
If you stuck to the end, then congratulations – especially if you don’t have a cat or don’t like it, but read on to see how it all ended. Please share this post with cat owners if they too have to endure the regression rituals I described earlier. Again, I’ll stress that this is all just personal experience and not a substitute for actual expert advice.
The comments section is open for any happy cat and dog talk – see you there!
