Thread: Probably should have posted in "diet & nutrition" but hey ho...poop problem!

I am sure the vet will be very impressed with your forward thinking.....x

Just a quick thought - your older cat with the tatty coat, thin but hungry - have you had his thyroid function checked out? Sounds like a perfect description of our old moggy. There are treatments that are useful as a dodgy thyroid can be rather serious.

Our MC Sidney has a very delicate constitution but we have had great success with Orijen dry food. As long as he doesn't have anything else, all us well. A week ago he was making the most dreadful smells... We discovered half a blackbird in the garden shortly after!

Originally Posted by Weasel

Just a quick thought - your older cat with the tatty coat, thin but hungry - have you had his thyroid function checked out? Sounds like a perfect description of our old moggy. There are treatments that are useful as a dodgy thyroid can be rather serious.

Our MC Sidney has a very delicate constitution but we have had great success with Orijen dry food. As long as he doesn't have anything else, all us well. A week ago he was making the most dreadful smells... We discovered half a blackbird in the garden shortly after!

Hi there. Actually, I was talking to my friend yesterday about the old tatty boy, Gizmo, and she said her own golden oldie had been diagnosed with thyroid problems causing exactly the same symptoms. So it's off to the vets with Gizzy Whizzy!

We've experienced similar frustration with Sterling. The first vet gave her a de-wormer, which did nothing. Then they sold us some Hills Science Diet dry food, which did nothing. The next step was £300 worth of allergy tests, so I switched vets to get a second opinion. Right away they took blood for a blood test, gave her an antibiotic and steroids. The steroids did the trick.
I don't love keeping her on pills, but they're just tiny things (and I only give her half of one a day) and she's been so much happier and healthier. There were a couple days where she was just sitting curled up in the corner for hours and I thought she'd died, and not having those worries is so nice. She's a healthy weight, her poos are perfect, and baths are kept to a minimum.

I hope you find a solution you're happy with; it's a very frustrating problem!

Originally Posted by Weasel

Our MC Sidney has a very delicate constitution but we have had great success with Orijen dry food. As long as he doesn't have anything else, all us well. A week ago he was making the most dreadful smells... We discovered half a blackbird in the garden shortly after!

Typical! Armageddon in the litter tray today - I think it was mouse this time. Well, he stuffed a live mouse up my pyjama top at 3.30 am the night before... I sent them both out to "play". Probably a dim thing to do, but, hey, it was the middle of the night and I wasn't thinking straight! Sid came in at 8pm, so I dread to think what he'd done with the mouse in the meantime!

Originally Posted by Weasel

Sid came in at 8pm, so I dread to think what he'd done with the mouse in the meantime!

PLAYED! as instructed! ;-)

Hi teejay, poor Neo and poor you. Sound like you have a right dilemma there.

From my knowledge ( having a very mucky Weimaraner once upon a time) I can offer the following advice.

Get to the vet (again) with your poo sample and get them to run a Bacti culture for Salmonella Clostridium Campylobacter, as well as check for parasite burden. However My feeling is you are dealing with a case of inflammatory bowl disease. Then it's about controlling the diet unless you want to go down the steroid route.

When controlling the diet your going to need to separate Neo from the rest of the troops at feeding time. Basically stop him from eating any of their food. I know you've had trouble getting him on to raw food, but it is a really good bet at calming the inflammation down. If you can get hold of natural instincts then try that. As Neo is a bit fussy you'll need to change him over gradually by adding a tea spoon of the new raw food with his current food over the period of one to two weeks. Keep him on pure raw food and don't introduce anything else for two weeks after the cross over period. If the new diet works, you'll be seeing improvements by then.


I have seen this type of treatment work on 5 different breeds of dogs and 4 cats (including my own pets).. Granted, not many, but every time some one has tried it it worked for their pet. The trick is to do it slowly, to stick with it a while during the acclimation period, and to stop access to other food types. Make sure you get a cat approved raw food so you get the correct ratios of meat, bone, offal etc. if you don't want to go down the raw diet then get a grain free high protein food. I hope you and Neo find a solution xx

Hi there, sorry for the radio silence, but we've had a mad-mad-mad summer! We run a small animal boarding hotel and - of course - the summer is our busiest time, so no time whatsoever for forum-chatting....or socialising, or sleeping, or eating for that matter

Many thanks for the replies

After the crisis-point-weekend-of-a-thousand-baths, Neo was seen by our (excellent) vet who said she'd start off with the most conservative investigations, so we collected poop samples over 4 days. The results were positive for Feline Coronavirus and positive for Clostridium perfringens. Ironically, the latter could have been caused by us feeding Neo raw meat (although the raw food experiment was started in response to him having diarrhoea, so it's unlikely to have been the cause).

We therefore started him on a short course of Metronidazole (5 days) which was like a miracle cure! Almost overnight, the poops went back to almost normal (and definitely the most 'normal' we'd ever had from Neo). Neo continued to improve, until, by the end of course, he was 95% 'normal' (there were still occasional soft poops and the smell was still pretty offensive).

So the vet decided on another, longer course of Metronidazole (10 days this time), of which we are about 3 days in.

The improvement is amazing.....we now only have one or two poops per day (normally one, whereas it was half a dozen before the treatment) and the poops are pretty solid. The smell is horrendous though, but then I suppose poop will never smell of roses, will it!

Neo is very happy cos he hasn't had to have a bath since he started the treatment

So, we're going to see if this longer course of Metronidazole sorts out the problem, and if not, then a blood test for an inflammatory bowel condition is the next proposed investigation.

Fingers crossed!

Tracey x

Originally Posted by Alekto

PLAYED! as instructed! ;-)

I have it on good authority that the mouse was stuffed inside the lining of the hall curtain...
Why am I even considering a kitten?

Sid's got mad skills!