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Medical Catfood question.
Lucid
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Around 2 weeks ago my cat passed away. He had a stone in his urinary tract, something to do with male cats having theirs become smaller after they're fixed and crystallization occurs easier. He had heart failure during surgery. Anyways, before that happened I bought medical catfood from the vet, around a months worth of cans, and a large bag of dry stuff. It's designed to prevent urinary tract problems such as crystallization of urine, and stones, etc.
What I'm wondering is if anyone knows if this food would be acceptable to give to healthy felines. My girlfriend has a cat, and I spend a majority of my time with her and him, so I thought if I could why not some free cat food for him. A gift from one cat to another in a way. The brand is called Medi-cal, with a red maple leaf where the hyphen would be. I think I'll check with the vet, but I also thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to ask around here.
What I'm wondering is if anyone knows if this food would be acceptable to give to healthy felines. My girlfriend has a cat, and I spend a majority of my time with her and him, so I thought if I could why not some free cat food for him. A gift from one cat to another in a way. The brand is called Medi-cal, with a red maple leaf where the hyphen would be. I think I'll check with the vet, but I also thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to ask around here.
Lucid on
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If it's their urinary formula, I would return the unused portion to the vet rather than feed it to another cat. Medi-Cal's site says that they offer refunds for unused food.
It would probably be okay, but there is a chance that our friend's cat has problems adjusting to the new food (some cats have problems switching food), and there is a very slim chance that it could actually induce other urinary problems. Basically, the majority of urinary tract problems in cats are caused by the urine not being acidic enough (usually from eating too much dry cat food and not drinking enough water) but in some cases they can be caused by the urine being too acidic. This food appears to be formulated to help acidify urine (among other things), which is usually fine (and what most cats need anyway) but there is a non-zero chance of it causing problems.
Safest bet is to just try to get a refund.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
To be frank I'm a bit leery of these dry food diets formulated to acidify the cat's urine. My (very basic) understanding is, you want to get more water into cats with urinary issues, not less, and with the weak thirst drive that cats have, canned food is the most effective way to do that.
Craigslist is the other option. You're sure to find someone looking for discount cat food, it's a common medical problem like you said.
what we did was we bought one of those big airtight containers, and mix the indoor cat/hairball forumula with the urinary tract stuff.
This.
We're having the same problem with one of our two cats. We specifically asked because we have two cats and they eat together, so it wouldn't really be feasible to feed one cat the special diet and the other not.
what you should do is give them the urinary diet for a week or 2 then work in some other diet and go half and half. our long hair gets really bad hairballs so that why we do the hairball stuff (which works grea in case you are wondering)