Seasonal Change of Coat Promotes Healthy Vomiting in Your Cat

Cats, as do all furry animals, change their coats in spring and autumn. The old coat moults out as the new, more appropriate coat grows.

However, as cats are fastidiously clean animals, spending many hours each day grooming, they ingest a lot of fur normally, but much more at these seasonal changes.

This results in more vomiting than usual. Vomiting up the ingested fur, often as a hair ball, but also as loose fur, is a natural and normal way for the cat to expel this.

Frequently, people panic about their cat vomiting (as someone delightfully put it to me recently, she is a worrying cat slave:)) and rush their cat off to the vet, often to be given a toxic medicine.

When all the cat was doing was expelling something she didn't want.

By learning to differentiate between when vomit is a normal, healthy cleansing process necessary for a healthy cat, and when it is a cause for concern, you can save yourself a lot of money and anguish, and your cat unnecessary medication, not to mention the stress of the vet's visit.

Other natural and normal vomit for a cat is when they eat grass and then bring that back up, accompanied by saliva. When they bring up shards of raw bone when fed a natural diet is also normal. A cat who is suffering from food poisoning will have vomiting and diarrhoea for about 12 hours. If it eases after this, your cat is coping well. If it continues, appropriate homoeopathic treatment can quickly resolve the problem.

Learn to inspect the vomit before deciding what to do.

Six Reasons Your Cat Vomits and What You Can Do

When a cat vomits, it may be normal, or it may indicate a problem. How can you tell which it is?

Let’s explore the reason a cat vomits in the first place.

1. Cats groom themselves regularly, ingesting fur as they do. The normal way they get rid of this is by vomiting up fur balls. This is normal and natural. And the vomit looks like a small, moist parcel the colour of their fur.
2. A cat often vomits after they have eaten grass. They will throw up saliva (or food if they ate immediately after eating the grass). This is a natural cleansing way your cat has, is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about, if it occurs occasionally. The vomit will just be saliva with blades of grass.
3. Vomiting in food poisoning is the normal way to rid the system of something unwanted in the stomach. In an acute situation, this is normally over in a matter of hours or days, if the cat was successful at dealing with the problem. The vomit will be the food they recently ingested.
4. Vomiting, along with diarrhoea and skin eruptions, is the best way the body has to rid itself of toxins. The toxic preservatives in commercial pet food will make your cat very toxic. Constant vomiting is helping your cat dump some of the overload.
5. Vomiting can also mean that your cat may have a health problem and the last thing he needs is the burden of digestion. Digestion takes a lot of energy and if your cat is dealing with a health issue, digestion would direct too much energy away from the task in hand. So they dump the food, to allow all their spare energy to focus on the problem.
6. When a cat is switched from a commercial pet food to a quality raw one, vomiting is likely to occur for a short period initially. This is a normal cleansing and should be left.

A healthy cat will be able to deal with most situations, so careful monitoring is the best thing to do in the early stages, if nothing sinister, such as rat poisoning, is suspected.

If your cat’s immune system is very low, then it’s likely that they can’t deal with the problem, and so it lasts long enough to be concerned about the possibility of dehydration and the lack of eating.

Cats need good quality food. Sadly, most cats have to exist on the poor quality commercial cat food that comes in a packet or a can. This is the most likely reason your cat vomits.

If you change your cat’s food to a healthy raw meat and bones diet, it’s likely that the chronic vomiting will stop, allowing for the initial de-toxining period.

Being guided by what your cat vomits, you can reach the logical problem, and so solution.

Why Does Your Cat Vomit?

A cat vomits for a variety of reasons. Lets look at what vomiting achieves.

First of all, your cat will normally and naturally vomit up hair balls. This is a perfectly natural part of her life and you need to be more concerned if it doesn’t happen, particularly at seasonal changes when she malts. These times will vary, but are normally at the end of summer and winter.

Your cat will eat grass to help her vomit. Again, this is perfectly normal if it is occasional. If it is regular, there could be an underlining cause.

Digestion takes up an enormous amount of energy. If your cat has a health problem, she will not want to waste valuable energy on digesting. A well fed cat can fast for many days without coming to any harm.

That energy is needed elsewhere.

So the number one thing NOT to do is to try to force her to eat.

In many cases, a few days fast is all your cat needs to bring her health back into balance. Cats have remarkable self healing powers, if left alone to do so. It’s not unusual for cats to survive a poisonous snake bite, when they are left alone to deal with it themselves.

Another reason your cat vomits is that her liver is compromised. This is especially so if the vomit it yellow, but it doesn’t have to be.

Your cat is particularly susceptible to toxins in her diet and her environment. Whenever she ingests a toxin, it goes straight to her liver so it can be slowly and safely released into her system for excretion.

When her liver becomes overloaded, she’ll start to vomit regularly. This is a purging. She needs to cleanse her body. It may be accompanied by diarrhoea, too as this is also a sign of purging. It may also come out in a skin eruption. All of these can be a sign of purging due to a toxic overload.

So what are some common toxins she may be reacting to? In order of importance, these are probably the worst offenders:-

• commercial pet food which contains preservatives (almost all do, despite the label)
• medication, most of which suppresses her natural healing abilities
• vaccinations, which contain a variety of toxins
• proprietary flea and worm medication, most of which are highly toxic
• household cleaning products
• garden pesticides, fertilisers, fungicides, etc
• atmospheric toxins released from furnishings

If you can eliminate some, or all of these from your cat’s life, you’ll find that not only does your cat vomiting stop, but she is also much healthier and can shake of health problems more easily.

Finding the cause and eliminating that is more likely to have a happy ending that simply suppressing the symptoms with medication.