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

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