Feeding for weight gain/appetite stimulation in the middle-aged cat

[Renn_aissance]

Bartholomew, 9 or so, healthy Maine Coon mix. Prozac helps him to be a happy, well-adjusted fellow, and it also depresses his appetite. Some days he eats all his food and some days he doesn’t. I’d like to put another half pound on him. His weight is not ideal but it isn’t unhealthy, so he’s not a candidate for prescription medications. The catch: it can’t be a high volume of food (he’s a grazer- he won’t eat it all in one sitting and his brother will take it,) and he doesn’t like salmon oil. Yes, I know. He eats salmon just fine, especially if it has Old Bay, but he doesn’t want a nice salmon oil top-dressed on his food. I think it’s a texture thing.

Currently eating:
approx. 1/2 cup Orijen Adult dry food- available for grazing throughout the day
heaping spoonful of Weruva Mack and Jack wet food (the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down)- there are limits to what he’ll eat in a sitting, so although I can increase this, he’ll leave it when he’s done, and then his brother will eat it.
Greenies, lysine treats, and Dasuquin (he’s not arthritic, he gets it because if he didn’t have his own he would eat his brother’s. The fastest way to get one of these cats to eat a thing they’re ambivalent about is to pretend the thing is for the other cat.)

He’s not a huge fan of things that come in a gel formulation. I’m willing to try them if you tell me that every cat in the world has licked it down and asked for more.

Ideas I’m looking at: bonito flakes, Lexelium powder, salmon oil soft chew. Although the you-don’t-need-this Dasuquin should be taking care of any early stage arthritis he has, I’d love to get him on some omega-3’s as he’s getting into middle age.

Experiences with these or other ideas?

[Simkie]

Have you tried him on famotidine? That’s 100% my first go-to for inappetence.

[Renn_aissance]

Vet doesn’t think we need to go to the prescriptions at this point and his overall clinical picture points to the Prozac as the cause of inappetance- no reason to worry about his digestive health.

Vet’s first recommendation was salmon oil and the second was simply increasing his food, which both struck out.

If he were a horse I’d put him on APF.

Cat tax.

[SusanO]

I can see why he won’t eat the salmon oil made for pets. I have bought it and my cats HATED it in spite of it being pretty pricey. I smelled it - smelled old and rancid to me. What they do like is people canned salmon mixed with their food. It can be the cheap brand too. And it costs less than that old nasty salmon oil which probably has been sitting on a shelf for at least a decade.

[SMF11]

I posted about the cat food with mouse as an ingredient in another thread:

Muridae Pet - Mouser Pet Food

I cannot say enough good things about it. My 17 year old cat, who is hyperthyroid, with end stage kidney disease, and recently a serious bout of pancreatitis is thriving on it (mixed with some prescription food, which he had been refusing to eat). Not only does he LOVE it, I credit it with keeping my cat alive. My vet looked at his recent blood work and said “I can’t believe this cat is still eating” – but he is!

My logic for trying it just is that cats are meant to eat mice, and therefore it was likely mice would be both tempting and easily digestible. That seems to be the case with my cat.

[Simkie]

Famotidine is OTC. You don’t need a script.

I’d really recommend it.

[JB]

Forti-Flora is kitty crack around here, lightly sprinkled on food to entice eating

We have a CKD kitty who’s just not fond of his Rx food, though he eats enough to at least be nutritious-ish, and even then sometimes we sprinkle the F-F on that to get him to eat a bit more . We get split chicken breasts and cook them on a pan, then diced, mostly to mix a bit into the dog’s food, but since kitty developed CKD I chop some up more finely (he won’t eat bigger chunks, yours might), and nuke a couple of tablespoons-worth for 7 seconds. He eats all but the smallest of those pieces (not worth the effort? lol) and it helps keep his weight on.

I think the breast bone plus skin just gives this kind of chicken more flavor than the basic boneless skinless breasts. Thighs might also work.

[SusanO]

Mine like poached chicken thighs. And poached chicken livers and gizzards. But what a mess in the pan to clean up. I don’t know if organ meat is good for your cat’s condition though.

[chestnutmarebeware]

I’ve been following this thread with interest because my senior cat, Peach, also has days when she doesn’t want to eat. She has severe nerve damage in her spine and is on liquid gabapentin twice daily and liquid prednisolone every other day for pain.

I do give my small dog famotidine once daily so I have it on hand. He weighs about 12 pounds and gets half of a 10mg tablet every morning.

Peach weighs about 7 pounds. How much of a 10mg tablet would you recommend trying with her?

[Simkie]

Kitties get 2.5 mg once to twice daily. It doesn’t seem to have any flavor, and mine don’t notice it if I powder into their food, or even drop the quarter into the bowl (as long as the original pill is small, my preference is the generic from Walgreens, because it is teeny!) Or you can wrap it in a little scrap of pill pocket.

I find vets are often very quick to dismiss inappetence as “pickiness,” especially in cats. Cats seem to be just as likely as horses to go off food because their belly is bothering them, and famotidine is such a cheap, easy, and low risk thing to try.

It’s the first thing I go for when one isn’t eating as much as I’d like, or for vomiting. I even had a cat with really persistent diarrhea that I just could NOT figure out…tried famotidine on a whim–he was a great eater!–and damned if it didn’t clear that up, too. I also proactively treat in times of stress (just like how an ulcer prone horse gets Ulcergard!)

Anyway, I highly recommend. I hope it helps Peach!

[chestnutmarebeware]

It may be a total coincidence, but Peach ate almost nothing last night, including the Churu Bisque with ground-up famotidine sprinkled on it, so I just pilled her with a quarter-tab. This morning she ate like a horse and I pilled her with another quarter-tab!

Fingers crossed that this could be such a simple solution! Thanks again!

[Simkie]

That’s great! Yay for Peach!

[BatCoach]

very interesting! I’ll have to try on a can on my kits and see if anyone takes to it.

[SMF11]

Good luck! Both my healthy cat and my sick cat LOVE it.

[Rackonteur]

Ummm … when it says “whole mouse,” does that mean a whole mouse, fur and bones and all, or does it mean the meat of one whole, deboned and skinned, mouse? I would like to try it for my kitty, just want to be prepared for when I open the first can.

[SMF11]

It looks like any other pate-style cat food. No bones or fur visible.

[Rackonteur]

Whew! Thanks.
I’ve read about some cat food specialists talking of the good nutrition in bones, etc., but I’m a little squeamish. My cat – probably not.
I want to let her try this Mouser food.

[SusanO]

This is interesting because my cats’ (n=4) “bush meat” review goes like this:

Rats - “EWWWW. We don’t eat that stuff. It was fun while it lasted but I ain’t gonna eat it. Throw it out for the crows”

Mouse - “Better than a rat but not all that good. Probably will ingest and barf it all over your car”

Vole - “Now you are talking. Pretty tasty if we are hungry”.

Squirrel - " Yum yum! A rare but tasty treat. Gonna lick the bones clean".

Chipmunk - " OMG gourmet meal tonight. Chipmunk tartare is the best ever!"

So I don’t know if they would eat mouse cat food. And cat food cans with pictures of cute squirrels and chipmunks would be a hard sell.

[Simkie]

To be fair, the mouse cat food has mouse as the second ingredient, following a more traditional protein source, like chicken. They make no claims on how much of the meat is mouse.

[Rackonteur]

I don’t know that my cat has ever hunted a rodent in her life.
Lizards? Yes.
Spiders? Bugs? Yes.
And I think she may have killed a teeny tiny snake in the living room one morning.