New Skills

[Montgomery]

It's been two years since Montgomery saw the naturopathic veterinarian who made such a positive change in his life. I started thinking about all the things he's learned to do since then...
Use the litter box by himself. He knows he needs the bathroom and goes there. No more accidents. No more reminding him. Sometimes he even remembers to cover up what he did.
Meow. At the top of his little lungs, whenever he pleases, and boy does he have a pretty singing voice. If You meow back, he comes for head bumps. Before, he would only screech if the gas got too bad. Now if he screeches, it's at his brother, who usually takes his leave.
Play. He's better at shooting marbles than I ever was.
Give hugs. He'll stand on the counter and put his left paw up, and if you come closer, he'll stand up and hug you, with that beautiful Merlin engine of his going full blast.
Two days ago, he finally learned to drink water. While he's still not sure of this water dish thingy, the past couple of nights he's had a few sips from the big chilly bowl in the kitchen. Now if he'll just teach Flapjack...
My little Spitfire will be twelve next month.
Don't ever give up, because anything is possible.

[Olesia711]

well.... i just typed a response and it disappeared!

V, this is great news that Montgomery is doing so well now.

Would you mind refreshing us on this thread, with some of the recommendations that the Naturopathic Vet suggested for Montgomery?

[Montgomery]

Sure. He recommended we take him off any vegetation in his diet, and look for a wet food or home-made or raw food without gums. I can't feed him raw because of his wacky small intestine. We wound up going home-made. Recently, we've had to revert back to commercial cat food because of his hairball incident, but we will be weaning back on to his proper diet soon. He also recommended red light therapy, which we did for quite awhile, to heal the inflammation in his gut. He loved it and it really, really helped. We used this with Mary as well, who has IBD, and it worked beautifully with her too. She is a rescue who was quite neglected and we honestly thought we were going to lose her at one point. She's a healthy, happy sixteen year-old now. That little red light panel was worth every cent. We used it again with Montgomery last year when his SID flared up.
Montgomery went into Dr. H.'s clinic weighing around six and a half pounds and now he's around nine pounds. You can see the muscles in his arms and legs. His fur is soft as satin and thick, too. He has a ton of energy. He no longer gets the black build up on his paws, and although he still gets a little more ear wax than his friends and relations, that has decreased considerably, too. His breath is good. He smells good.
The purring...Oh, I wish you could hear his purr. I'm not kidding when I tell you he sounds like a Spitfire taking off.
I see people going through a lot of the same things we went through with Montgomery and I wanted to share this because sometimes you just think it isn't going to get any better.

[Olesia711]

OMG!!!! THis "look for a wet food or home-made or raw food without gums" is in-line with what i read a few years ago regarding a world-wide study that was done and that a lot of our ailing health conditions are due to preservative/additives that are in our foods and one of the cross-overs with dog food are the gum preservatives...wow!

And cold laser and/or light and/or magnetic therapy "He also recommended red light therapy, which we did for quite awhile, to heal the inflammation in his gut".... i am a HUGE proponent of all of this. I personally struggled with lower back issues.. and both cold laser (light therapy) and especially on-going PEMF therapy has dramatically improved my back issues that i have struggled with for 18 years where as physical therapy, drugs and dr. directed exercises have not.

We also had a dog here on the forum years ago that they were going to put down, SID was totally out of control and the dog had severe IBD too...absolutely nothing helped... it was such a sad case. Since they had nothing to lose..... they agreed to try cold laser on the dog's gut and not only did they realize the dog looked forward to the treatments, after the 3rd one the poos improved and the dog's inflammation from IBD improved.. REALLY iproved!. It was amazing. that was the 1st time it was used on a dog... we connected the founder of Companion Laser Therapy with the dog's vet who was going to do the laser treatment and they worked thru exactly where and how to focus the laser, It was never done on a dog before for IBD and the premise was that theoretically it "should" work, but the problem was that the water in the body could easily diffuse the light rays- -so it was tricky....... but when the two dr's worked together they got it just right . SInce then they did studies and they now can claim that they can use cold laser on cats for this..... but with dogs, they still need to legally do a clinical trial before they can claim that it works....... (but IMHO....it does

THank you so much for sharing this with us. VERY much appreciated and thrilled that Montgomery is doing so well now! And thank YOU for never giving up!!!!!!!!!!! You give much hope to others.

[Montgomery]

I'd heard various things off and on about gums in the food perhaps aggrivating IBD, and carageenan being an ingredient that came up a lot. His usual veterinarian dismissed this as people being paranoid over pet food at the time. The diet he was eating for years was Royal Canin Spayed/Neutered Kitten 32 dry food, with Royal Canin Ultra Light and Science Diet Light wet foods, and later Purina DM when things became unavailable. The idea was that the high fibre (12% in the dry food) would firm up his watery stool, and it did to an extent, but he would get so far and then just not get any better. His gas was awful, and because he as the added complication of a severely malformed small intestine, he wound up with the feline equivalent of colic and so was on Ovol for ages. When I tried talking to his usual veterinarian about his diet and what we could change, her standard answer was to put him on hypo-diet (she always forgot that we had tried this repeatedly), shut all the windows, get a hepa filter, boil his laundry. I got frustrated. We went to Dr. H. and he had Montgomery sorted out in twenty minutes with a plan of attack and a set of instructions.
I'm so glad the light therapy helped your back. I was skeptical of it at first, but seeing is believing. There is no plascebo effect in non-human animals. I could see Montgomery and then Mary getting better day by day. Lucky for that dog, too that their humans were open-minded. I hope they had a fantastic, healthy life.
This is the clinic that was so wonderful and helpful to us. Montgomery, who is usually a force to be reckoned with at the veterinary clinic, was a perfect angel. They had this mat on their exam table that mimicked purring and calmed him right down. He didn't scream, snarl, or try to eat the doctor. His usual reaction to veterinary visits is to use his most menacing snarl the second he sees the doctor and put on a good display of teeth and claws. Usually he quite purposefully urinates on her, too.
https://holistic-vet.ca/

[Olesia711]

i was so impressed with cold laser long before i tried it with my back.... i broke my shoulder twice in the same place. the first time, i went traditional treatment... the 2nd time i broke it ... i had read about a study on rats where cold laser healed broken bone in almost half the time (depending on when you applied the cold laser after the break). So i asked my chiropractor who was a friend too, if he was willing to try it on me. He said yes, and we did. WHen i went for my 1st month check up with the surgeon after the break, they took xrays and when the dr started reading them, he thought he had someone else's x-rays cause he said the break that he was looking at was almost healed.... that is when my faith in cold laser blossomed

After that we used it on my mom's dog who was attacked and his wound healed also in just short of half the time... The vet took progress pictures of the extraordinary shortened wound healing time and posted the pics in her vet office lobby...... because of these personal experiences.... i am a very firm believer in cold laser ..... and i am SOOOoooo glad when i hear of someone else (or their pet) that benefits from using light therapy too!

FYI....Here is the research article on food additives and autoimmune ailments .. if you cross reference the "gums" etc... you will recognize many of these are also used in dog food
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 7215000245

[Montgomery]

These treatments are amazing and I wish they were more mainstream because they could be helping a lot more patients, of almost every species. I love that the cats enjoy it, too. It isn't a fight with them to get them to take their medicine. All I had to say to Montgomery was "do your lights" and he'd go to his sleepy cube and wait for me to get the box with the light panel in it.
Gums are thickeners and binders so it doesn't suprise me that there is overlap between cat and dog (and people) food. Actually, if you were to compare, say Performatrin Ultra Chicken Stew cat food with the dog version, there isn't a huge difference in igredients. They've largely balanced it differently for the two species and I believe there are larger chunks in the dog version. Nature's Variety chicken pate may be fed to either cats or dogs as it is balanced for both.
Tiki Cat, I believe, does not use a lot of these gums and binders in their wet foods. They also make dog food. It costs a fortune and it's cheaper to cook. Actually, cooking for Montgomery has allowed me to really customize his diet to his own peculiarities.
Both Doris Bryant and Ann Elizabeth Blochin, a cat and a dog expert respectively, suggest commercially available pet food only as a supplemental meal. Doris Bryant wrote in the sixties, Ann Elizabeth Blochin in the forties. I really have begun to think these wimmyn were correct, despite the advances in pet nutrition since then.

[Olesia711]

Interesting V..... i too have "evolved" from using solely commercial pet foods.... for the longest time, well since dealing with EPI, i have read so much research that little by little i have started to shy away from using all commercial food and for years did 80% fresh food with 20% commercial kibble.... but recently now that i understand how to be sure to include all the vitamins and minerals naturally and safely.... and with those damn recalls or unexplained deaths....i have actually switched to all home-made with my current dog.

However.... when Izzy was alive and we had to deal with not only EPI but also Diabetes as one of her other of many health concerns.....i couldn't keep the weight on her with just all homemade with out increasing her blood sugar if i fed her more food.....so the combo that worked for her was the 80% homemade with 20% compact/concentrated kibble to keep the weight on............... it must have worked, cause with everything she dealt with health wise... she lived a very happy, joyful life until 15 years of age. And as much as i enjoy my new dog Cody, who is now almost 3 yrs old.... i still miss Izzy something fierce................

[Montgomery]

Yeah, I hear you. I feel the same way about our Minnie May and Morgenne, the dynamic duo. They made it to seventeen and a half and nineteen and a half respectively, but it doesn't feel like anywhere near long enough. Actually, our experience with Minnie May's early years really helped us when it came to Montgomery. We already had a few tricks up our sleeves, and had some good supplies on hand. We never did find out why our little May was so sick though. Aside from only having one normal kidney, the veterinarians couldn't find an answer. It didn't stop her from doing things like making Kleenex confetti or opening, spilling and rolling in an entire tin of goldfish food. She just got better one day and stayed better until that wonky kidney went south on her.
I don't know if we'll ever get to the truth of the situation when it comes to pet food. The FDA thing was a lot of confusion with no real answers. How can they say that it's everything and nothing? They didn't seem to run a very good study, because, unless I'm wrong, they didn't question how long Lassie had been on Food A and what else was in her diet, right? It should be fairly straightforward to feed the average dog, so what's going wrong?

[Olesia711]

even if we can't fix the past......maybe... if we continue to question things going forward......maybe someday we will ger answers.... or at least i hope so!