Tag Archives: Health

How to choose a healthy food for your cat

Pixie149There are hundreds of food brands for us ; cat food is sold in the supermarket, in specialized stores, or at the veterinarian.
We find wet food, dry food (kibbles), or still semi-wet. Prices can be multiplied by nine between the cheapest and the most expensive product.

In Europe, Nestlé Purina (Félix, Friskies, Gourmet, Vital Balance in supermarket, and Purina in specialized store for example) and Masterfoods (Whiskas, Kitekat, Ronron, Sheba in supermarket, and Royal Canin in specialized store) realizes roughly 2/3 of the sales ; the rest is divided between the own brands of the distributors, Procter and Gamble (Iams), Colgate-Palmolive (Hills), and some rare independent small companies.

How can the humans find themselves there ?

  • By showing common sense : quality has a price. A wet food containing less than 8 % of meat and ingredients of low quality will be cheap, but won’t have the same nourishing properties as a more expensive food containing at least 25 % of meat developed with good quality ingredients.
  • By inquiring : veterinarian, specialized literature, specialized web sites. You can give us factory feedstuffs, or prepare us yourself our meals (BARF or cooked dishes); this last option requires however good knowledge in feline nutrition. A cat is a strict carnivore, and his food has to bring to him, in percentage of dry material : 30 to 40 % of proteins, 10 to 15 % of fats, less than 45 % of carbohydrates, as well as several vitamins and key nutriments as taurine and arginine. Wet food will have a bigger proportion of proteins than dry food.
  • By making the best choice for us : your human has to take into account his budget AND your health ; he must however know that by saving up on the quality of the food, he can maybe find himself with veterinarian’s more important expenses in a few years.

Claire chose to feed us mainly with top-quality wet food ; we just get some kibbles for night, but they’re also top-quality. We’ll explain you in another article why she chose this food brand for us.
In the meantime, here are three books that we recommend you to read about pet food ; we don’t know if there are translations in your human’s language.

In French : toxic croquettes R toxic croquettes V
In English : food pets die for R food pets die for V
In German : katzen kaufen R katzen kaufen V

Enjoy your meal !

Why do cats eat grass ?

Do you believe that we play cows ? That we became vegetarian ?

Not at all !
pixie in the garden. looking above from under the tree
We eat grass to evacuate the hairs which we swallow by licking us. Indeed, the hairs we swallow by having a wash form balls ; if these remain stuck in our bowel, they can cause a dangerous intestinal obstruction.

The blades of grass we eat get involved in hairs in our stomach and form balls which we can elegantly vomit in a carefully chosen place as most great pleasure of our human. The grass also favors our intestinal transit, what can allow the balls of fluff to take out again by… uh… our other end. If your cat is very constipated or did not do his little poo daily, go at once to the veterinarian !

To chew grass also allows us to absorb certain nourishing elements which are necessary for us, as the folic acid for example, which plays an important role in our production of haemoglobin.

You can also cultivate grass for your cat if he has no access outside, he will be quite satisfied and will less be tried to chew on your house plants !
zorro sit on the trunk

How to stitch without thread nor staple

Some of you wondered to see that the veterinarian had closed my section with some glue during my spay. Here are some precision :

  • The suture with glue began to be used in the 1960s shortly after the discovery of the glue cyanoacrylate.
  • This glue has a very high adhesive power, and its residues are totally biocompatible.
  • It’s liquid and polymerizes in the contact of water (in my case, the water contained in my skin) to form a flexible film.
  • Various formulae of cyanoacrylate glue were developed for a purely medical use : better support, ease of use, flexibility raised once polymerized.
  • We use this glue to close small little deep wounds.

Our veterinarian uses it since a few years for the cutaneous sutures of sterilization of cats and for the cutaneous sutures of small animals (rabbits, guinea pigs, gerbils, …). For the sterilizations, he makes an abdominal suture with thread, then closes the skin over with the glue.

Advantages:

  • The suture with glue avoids that I pull or chew away my sutures.
  • The film of glue forms a coat of protection against bacteria and other dirts.

Inconveniences:

  • The scar is a little less attractive at the beginning, although the final result is identical to that of a suture with thread : that, it’s true, we would have said that I had a relief human navel ! But now, I have again a beautiful small belly (hair are only still missing).
  • If the wound must be reopened, it is not practical of the whole.

Here we are, you know everything ! Admire the result after two weeks : Pixie127