Monday, January 18, 2010

Cats With Gingivitis and How to Resolve it Naturally

Cats with gingivitis are all too common. Gingivitis is the inflammation of the gums. One of the main reasons for this in cats, is the lack of raw bones in their diet. A cat who has daily bones, such as chicken necks or chicken wings, to crunch up, rarely has gingivitis.

Raw bones in a healthy cat’s diet serves at least four purposes:


  1.  bones keep the teeth clean, preventing tartar building up
  2.  bones massage the gums, keeping them healthy
  3.  the crunching of bones keeps cats happy - it’s how they evolved
  4.  ingesting bones are a natural, balanced mineral supply for building healthy bones

Sadly, many people don’t feed their cats a raw meat and bones diet, so mouth problems are rife. The normal treatment of antibiotics and teeth removal does nothing to enhance such a cat’s already badly damaged immune system.

Once the problem has started, it seems an endless round of continued and regular damaging treatment.

Is there an alternative? Is it too late to introduce a raw meat and bones diet?

There are always alternatives to everything. And it’s never too late to try anything.

Cats with gingivitis often respond very well to homeopathic treatment. The medicine Mercurius is almost a specific for this condition in both humans and other animals.

But, as with all homeopathic medicines, it’s best to have more than one strong symptom which matches the medicine, for a positive resolution. A homeopathic animal practitioner may be your best option, if you are new to homeopathy. But if you already know a bit about it, you might like to try Mercurius, as long as you can see some of the medicine’s strong keynotes in your cat’s gingivitis.

The strong keynotes of Mercurius are:


  •  symptoms are worse for heat or cold (so food straight from the refrigerator is likely to be refused)
  •  symptoms are worse at night
  •  your cat may have excess saliva which feels slimy to the touch
  •  your cat’s breath may smell foul, offensive
  •  a history of repeated antibiotic treatment

Once your cats gingivitis is sorted out and pain is not experienced on eating, then you can start introducing a raw meat and bones diet. In the early stages, it’s best to cut up the necks or wings into bite size pieces. This makes it easier for an older cat, or one entrenched in old ways.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Healthiest Dry Cat Food - Is There Such a Thing?

Trying to find the healthiest dry cat food is liable to lead you down a blind alley.

Admittedly dry cat food is very convenient to the person providing the food. Things don’t come much easier than opening up a packet. But as you are asking the question, I know you’re not necessarily looking for just ease.

You’re also looking for a healthy and nutritious food for your cat.

Can you get that from dry food?

Let’s examine one of the ingredients of a typical dry food.

All dry food has a long shelf life. Despite the label on the packet, this can only come about with some form of preservatives. And the pet food industry uses some pretty toxic preservatives, that would never be allowed in human food. Do carbolic acid, ethoxyquin and formaldehyde sound harmless to you?

That’s what many (possibly all) dry cat food contains.

The reason the packet can claim otherwise, is because the manufacture may not have put the preservative in themselves. It may have been the food supplier who put it in. So the manufacturer can legally claim “no added preservative”, because they didn’t add it themselves.

Whether or not they put it there is irrelevant to you in your search for the healthiest dry cat food. Toxic preservatives are toxic regardless of who added them.

Another claim is that vitamin E is used as a preservative.

That may be true. But the amount would most likely have to be in such high amounts as to be totally unnatural to your cat.

Any isolated vitamin or mineral is always in a synthetic form. Apart from the fact that your cat never evolved to eat synthetic nutrients, or in high quantities, nutrients need to be in combination with their co-dependent nutrients.

This is only possible if the source is a whole food.

Even the healthiest dry cat food is liable to cause your cat some serious health problems.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Feline Vaccinations Aren’t the Best Way of Disease Prevention

Feline vaccinations generally include either three diseases (F3) or five (F5).

Commonly, depending on the country and area, the F3 will include respiratory diseases (calici virus, herpes virus) and feline enteritis.

The F5 includes the first three plus feline leukemia, clamydia (a bacteria) and possibly feline AIDS.

Many people believe that feline vaccinations are necessary to keep their cat healthy. But, in my opinion, this is not the case.

Vaccines contain toxic ingredients. Such as mercury, aluminium, formaldehyde. How can it be considered healthy, by injecting heavy metals and other poisons, directly into the blood stream?

In truth, the best way to keep your cat healthy is to make sure her immune system is in tip top order. There are several ways you can do this, but essentially it boils down to almost one thing.

And that is to keep your cat toxin free.

Cats are very sensitive to chemicals. They react badly to them. So by keeping poisons out of their blood stream, by eliminating flea and worm preparations (nerve poisons) and by feeding them a quality raw food diet, you are contributing to a healthy immune system.

Anyone with a healthy immune system will be able to prevent disease. That’s its function.

I said almost one thing. One of the other ways is to ensure her diet is raw. Cooked food destroys enzymes and other essential nutrients.

And the final way to keep your cat’s immunity strong is to use homeopathy for any ailments. Homeopathy only works by boosting the immune system. Then the cat takes over and cures herself.

Not long ago, I did a local tour of the catteries. I wanted to know which ones accepted cats for boarding who had not been conventionally vaccinated.

One very friendly owner who accepted homeoprophylaxis (HP), which is the oral immunisation by homeopathic medicines, told me that she had never had a problem with the cats who had been immunised by HP. But she frequently had problems with the conventionally vaccinated cats. They commonly showed signs of the disease they were supposed to be protected against.

If you focus on keeping your cats immunity in excellent order, that will do all that is necessary in preventing disease.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Most Cat Ailments Are Caused By a Toxic Overload

Cat ailments are on the increase. Why should this be the case? After all many cat people do what they consider to be all the right things to do. They vaccinate their cat every year. They feed their cat the most expensive brand of processed cat food recommended by their vet. They use the recommended flea and worm control.

What more can they do?

Last week, a distressed family brought their rabbit to me. They had used the flea preparation Frontline. Frontline is not recommended for use on rabbits and the rabbit was now having seizures.

I did a quick search on the internet to see what ingredients Frontline had. I was shocked, but not surprised, to see that cyanide was one. And yet Frontline is considered to be low in toxicity. Even WHO approves it.

This begs a very big question to me. Can you trust others with the health of your cat? If you use Frontline, is it acceptable to you to be putting cyanide into her system?

So next, I searched for the ingredients of Advantage, another popular cat flea control preparation. Advantage contains imidacloprid, which is a neuro active insecticide. That means it affects the neurological system. The nerves. So seizures would not be an impossible side effect for this one, either.

Imidacloprid causes thyroid problems in rats. It’s not a million mile jump to conclude it could also cause thyroid problems in those animals who are treated with it.

And yet, it’s the easiest thing in the world to control fleas naturally. The reason for fleas is because of the pH of your cat’s skin. A processed diet is not healthy, is not in line with their evolutionary history. It alters the chemistry of your cat’s body. Fleas love the skin of a cat fed processed food.

A raw meat and bones diet, on the other hand, keeps the cat’s pH in perfect balance. Fleas are no longer attracted to the skin. And resolves a host of other cat ailments.

If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself. You’ll need to try for about a month, perhaps two depending on the age and health of your cat.

Isn’t it better to find the cause of the problem and deal with that, rather than treating the effect?

Sadly the rabbit didn’t survive. But the family had a huge learning experience.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Diabetic Cat Food Firstly Needs to Be Nutritious

If you want to find a good diabetic cat food, then I ask you to pause for a moment. Think. Why has your cat got diabetes in the first place? Cats never used to get this disease. It’s something that had happened in the last decade or so.

And wild cats don’t get it.

So it’s something that humans do to cats.

One of the most unnatural things many cats are subjected to is a nutrient poor diet.

Cats have evolved on eating freshly killed small animals. They usually eat the whole carcass. So they are getting very fresh meat, mostly muscle meat, some organ meat, lots of raw, crunchy bones and the skin.

Now lets look at typical commercial pet food. It contains predominantly meat that is not wanted in the human market. Foods such as fat, heads, hooves, intestines. And some manufacturers add road kill and euthanised pets and zoo animals.

Can you see the difference in the quality of the food?

And bear in mind that commercial pet food with contain preservatives, despite what it say on the label.

Are preservatives a health enhancer?

So, by switching to a healthy, human grade raw meat and bones diet, I suggest that you will most likely be able to cure your cat’s diabetes. In the unlikely event that this change won’t cure it, then I guarantee it will improve your cat’s health in some way, in the long term.

Think about it. A good diabetic cat food, should be a healthy cat food.


Sunday, December 13, 2009

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.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

The Best Moist Cat Food for a Diabetic Cat Doesn’t Come in a Packet

When you go searching for the best moist cat food for a diabetic cat, I suggest you pause for a moment. Think about why you cat is diabetic in the first place.

Holistic health professionals, both for human and for animal are well aware of some of the most common causes of diabetes. If you can address the cause, the problem disappears.

Diet is critical to health. Feed a bad diet and the heath of the recipient will be poor.

Processed and commercial cat food, whether it comes in a can, a packet or any other way, is nutrient poor.

No quality food goes into pet food. The quality food all goes to the more lucrative human market. The left overs, which are out of natural balance, goes into pet food.

Things like all the unwanted fat, hooves, intestines, heads. And that’s not all. Road kill, euthanised pets and zoo animals also go into the mix in many pet food manufacturers.

Then a cheap filler is added, such as sugar, melamine, crushed nutshells, sawdust or anything that is cheap on the world market.

Moist cat food is notorious for the toxic preservative it contains. Formalin. This is normally used to embalm dead people.

Does this list of ingredients sound health promoting to you?

Is it any wonder your cat has diabetes?

Why not change your cat’s diet to real food? Human grade raw meat and bones. That’s how they evolved.

There is no doubt that the best moist cat food for a diabetic cat is a raw meat and bones diet.