We adopted Lilli less than 2 years ago. She was under a year old, had been living wild for a bit, (suspect her family had tossed her out when they realized she was pregnant, as she had definitely lived in a house with people for a while, based on behavior) had four kittens and was rescued when they were a day old, and she was very sick with a respiratory illness and a huge abscess, and was just bone-skinny. The rescue did a miraculous job of getting her healthy, and reuniting her with her kittens after 2 weeks to finish raising them to weaning, then had her spayed. We adopted her a couple of weeks later.
She was still so skinny you could feel every angle of every bone in her body. Weighed about 7-1/2 pounds, despite being well fed on expensive food, was still smaller than an average adult cat.
But...the expensive food was designer name dry food and canned food, and when I looked it up was about 40% carbs. I looked this up because right away I noticed that, while she ate a staggering amount of food, ravenously, she also drank lots of water very frequently, and of course then peed great amounts, also.
So we quickly converted her to the same diet as our other cats, only canned food, Fancy Feast classic pate turkey & giblets; our other four cats include a diet-controlled borderline diabetic, one with chicken allergy, one with fish sensitivity, and one who can eat anything, including sheetrock off the corners of the walls (okay, so Charlie is another story altogether...).
Lilli stopped drinking water pretty much altogether, the excess peeing stopped, and she finally started gaining weight and growing. At first she was eating 5 cans of FF a day, and would inhale it in less than a minute (obviously those months of being pregnant and homeless left an impact.) She gained weight rapidly now, and we gradually cut back to just under 2 cans a day because she was finally heading towards plumpness.
She is now our largest cat, weighing over 13 pounds, huge, fluffy, longest fur I have ever seen. She is still learning to "cat" properly, she must have been dumped into the wild early, as her social skills are not up to par, according to our other cats (except Charlie, who is social and physical chaos himself.)
But, I wonder if it is more likely she will develop diabetes in the future?
Clearly the life she was leading up to getting saved by the rescue put extreme stress on her young body; she really is lucky to be alive after all of that. She is probably about 3 years old now.
Do I just keep watch for the obvious signs of weight loss, increased thirst, etc?
Or should we have extra bloodwork done, maybe yearly, to make sure we don't see diabetes or something else developing?
We were thinking when the oldest cat passes (expected soon-ish, probably, he's had so many issues in his past, thyroid, bladder, etc and he's over 18 now), we were thinking we could relax the extremely strict low-carb diet, to a less-limited low carb diet, but considering Lilli's past symptoms, I wonder if we should just stick to it?
(Photos of Lilli when we first got her, and now)
She was still so skinny you could feel every angle of every bone in her body. Weighed about 7-1/2 pounds, despite being well fed on expensive food, was still smaller than an average adult cat.
But...the expensive food was designer name dry food and canned food, and when I looked it up was about 40% carbs. I looked this up because right away I noticed that, while she ate a staggering amount of food, ravenously, she also drank lots of water very frequently, and of course then peed great amounts, also.
So we quickly converted her to the same diet as our other cats, only canned food, Fancy Feast classic pate turkey & giblets; our other four cats include a diet-controlled borderline diabetic, one with chicken allergy, one with fish sensitivity, and one who can eat anything, including sheetrock off the corners of the walls (okay, so Charlie is another story altogether...).
Lilli stopped drinking water pretty much altogether, the excess peeing stopped, and she finally started gaining weight and growing. At first she was eating 5 cans of FF a day, and would inhale it in less than a minute (obviously those months of being pregnant and homeless left an impact.) She gained weight rapidly now, and we gradually cut back to just under 2 cans a day because she was finally heading towards plumpness.
She is now our largest cat, weighing over 13 pounds, huge, fluffy, longest fur I have ever seen. She is still learning to "cat" properly, she must have been dumped into the wild early, as her social skills are not up to par, according to our other cats (except Charlie, who is social and physical chaos himself.)
But, I wonder if it is more likely she will develop diabetes in the future?
Clearly the life she was leading up to getting saved by the rescue put extreme stress on her young body; she really is lucky to be alive after all of that. She is probably about 3 years old now.
Do I just keep watch for the obvious signs of weight loss, increased thirst, etc?
Or should we have extra bloodwork done, maybe yearly, to make sure we don't see diabetes or something else developing?
We were thinking when the oldest cat passes (expected soon-ish, probably, he's had so many issues in his past, thyroid, bladder, etc and he's over 18 now), we were thinking we could relax the extremely strict low-carb diet, to a less-limited low carb diet, but considering Lilli's past symptoms, I wonder if we should just stick to it?
(Photos of Lilli when we first got her, and now)
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the pictures!
