UTIs and elevated kidney levels in cats

Tnyc wrote:
I am a firm believer in (except in the case of illness) a finicky cat will eat when it is hungry. A cat will not allow itself to starve when there is food readily available. If your cat is prescribed wet food and he does not like it, mix bits of something he does like into it (like chicken, the water or oil from a can of tuna, few slivers of ham, a few pinches of liverwurst) just to get him started. Give the cat 30 minutes to eat it, then pick it up. It will dive into the next meal. They just have us sooooo well trained to offer a buffet until they eat something.
Glad everything is looking up.

i used to believe this too, until we had to change our two cats' food after the one had urinary problems. the other cat refused to eat, but she was always fat, so i was like, "whatever, lose a pound." this, i found out too late, was a terrible idea. she got hepatic lipidosis. we caught it early, so she didn't die, but it did involve several weeks of force-feeding her high-calorie food mixed with water, via a syringe. not fun.

basically, cats don't metabolize their own fat well. when they stop eating for too long, their livers get backed up with fat, which makes them feel really sick, which makes them not eat. cats do die of this. plus it's completely sucky to watch your cat turn yellow from jaundice.

sorry for the long post. when this happened to us, i felt really angry that no one had warned up this could happen, since vets were always telling us to get our cat to lose weight.

(needless to say, miss thang gets whatever she wants now. sigh. but she does sleep on my feet.)