Finicky Cat Owners, Unite

There are finicky cat owners, and then there are seriously finicky cat owners. If you fall into the latter camp, Jennifer A. Coscia’s The Holistic Cat includes a recipe for homemade cat food that will make your cat’s coat glossier, her eyes brighter, and her stomach happier. The recipe is fairly involved, with ingredients like raw organic ground turkey, brown rice, peas, garlic, flaxseed oil, and vitamin E.

However, if you have limited time and resources and can’t even manage to feed yourself that nutritiously (much less Fluffy), The Holistic Cat is full of sensible advice, workable compromises, and tried and true remedies to make your feline friend happy and long-lived. Because that whole nine lives thing? Pure myth.

Drawing on Coscia’s experience as a holistic nutritional consultant and the founder of an animal rescue agency, The Holistic Cat targets the other side of disease: prevention. Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are common (and commonly fatal) diseases amongst older cats fed a conventional diet. Trust me, you don’t want to know what really goes into a can of turkey and giblets dinner. But by understanding and improving our cats’ nutrition and living situations, and by balancing holistic with conventional treatment, caring cat owners can make a difference — without spending an hour preparing raw organic cat food.

Inspired by Coscia’s sensible tips and affectionate anecdotes, I decided to try the suggestion for kidney disease prevention on Naomi, my elderly but well-preserved tortoiseshell. Kidney failure is a major concern in older cats, and Coscia’s remedy was as close as the freezer or the yard: peas or dandelion leaves. A little doubtfully, I defrosted a few frozen peas, mashed them with a little gravy from Naomi’s canned food, and clanked the spoon against her dish.

She came. Sniffed suspiciously at the blobby green things in her bowl. And then, to my surprise, bolted them with the enthusiasm she usually reserves for meat.

We weren’t in the clear yet. When you have a cat with a delicate stomach, there’s always a good chance you’ll wake up to the sound of cat being sick on dryclean-only comforter at 3am. If I ended up with half-digested peas on my bed, I wasn’t about to repeat the experiment.

12 hours later, my comforter is still pea-free. I’m ready to call it a success. It’s too soon to say if peas once or twice a week will keep kidney disease at bay, but with my bag of frozen peas in one hand and The Holistic Cat in the other, I’m feeling optimistic.

CLICK HERE to read more about The Holistic Cat.

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