Kitten vomits night meals, help :)
Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2016 6:44 pm
Hi there,
I'm a bit stumped by some of Mochi's (my 6 months old kitten) reactions to his food. Im hoping to reduce the size of the list of hypotheses I've got for what is going amiss.
I typically feed him a large meal in the morning and two smaller meals at night. He used to eat whiskas wet food, and had no issues other than some dander in his coat. One chicken dinner can in the morning and one in the evening.
Then I transitioned him to a higher quality wet food in anticipation of eventually having him start on raw food. No issues there, so over a period of a week I transitioned him to the raw food. He seemed always hungry so I may have fed him larger portions than necessary, I'm not sure. I would feed him in 3-4 small raw portions a night along with a larger meal in the morning.
After a couple weeks or more of no issues, he started vomiting almost every night, for a week. Consistently he'd be throwing up all of his food 3-5 hours after eating it, except for the morning meal which he managed to keep down. There was usually no bile with it, but he'd meow a lot before and then his stomach would convulse, emptying itself. I took him to the vet for a round of tests, they found nothing amiss, even with X-rays. They gave him a nausea suppressant and some easy to digest wet food for the next week. They said sometimes this just happens, stomach gets upset. Then I started feeding him raw food again after, and the vomiting started again, still at night. That's when I gave up on the raw thinking maybe something was amiss with it specifically, and switched back to the weruva wet food.
Again, no issues for at least a couple weeks. Then night vomit started happening consistently again, the first couple times it was just liquid, then the undigested food. So I feed him one whole can in the morning, and 1/3 at dinner and 1/3 before bed. Feeding less in the night seems to have helped avoid vomit but it's not completely conclusive yet. I'm afraid that maybe he is not getting enough food now though, since I think theoretically he should be ingesting closer to 3 cans rather than just 1 and 2/3. So I'm working on a few changes:
1. Feeding him in an upright/standing position for the night meals
2. Feeding him from a mini muffin dish to slow him down. He eats really really fast
3. Introducing a higher calorie kitten wet food slowly to transition him to it, hopefully making his stomach less full while not starving him
Now I'm wondering:
1. if you have any other ideas for what might cause this rejection of night meals after a couple weeks of being on a new food?
2. If he is vomiting up 3-5 hours after ingesting the food doesn't that mean that it's an issue other than eating too fast?
3. Do you think I could transition him back to raw food once he consistently keeps food down, since it seems like the raw food itself wasn't the culprit anyway? Would feeding him only two meals of raw a day be feasible for a kitten?
Thanks y'all!
I'm a bit stumped by some of Mochi's (my 6 months old kitten) reactions to his food. Im hoping to reduce the size of the list of hypotheses I've got for what is going amiss.
I typically feed him a large meal in the morning and two smaller meals at night. He used to eat whiskas wet food, and had no issues other than some dander in his coat. One chicken dinner can in the morning and one in the evening.
Then I transitioned him to a higher quality wet food in anticipation of eventually having him start on raw food. No issues there, so over a period of a week I transitioned him to the raw food. He seemed always hungry so I may have fed him larger portions than necessary, I'm not sure. I would feed him in 3-4 small raw portions a night along with a larger meal in the morning.
After a couple weeks or more of no issues, he started vomiting almost every night, for a week. Consistently he'd be throwing up all of his food 3-5 hours after eating it, except for the morning meal which he managed to keep down. There was usually no bile with it, but he'd meow a lot before and then his stomach would convulse, emptying itself. I took him to the vet for a round of tests, they found nothing amiss, even with X-rays. They gave him a nausea suppressant and some easy to digest wet food for the next week. They said sometimes this just happens, stomach gets upset. Then I started feeding him raw food again after, and the vomiting started again, still at night. That's when I gave up on the raw thinking maybe something was amiss with it specifically, and switched back to the weruva wet food.
Again, no issues for at least a couple weeks. Then night vomit started happening consistently again, the first couple times it was just liquid, then the undigested food. So I feed him one whole can in the morning, and 1/3 at dinner and 1/3 before bed. Feeding less in the night seems to have helped avoid vomit but it's not completely conclusive yet. I'm afraid that maybe he is not getting enough food now though, since I think theoretically he should be ingesting closer to 3 cans rather than just 1 and 2/3. So I'm working on a few changes:
1. Feeding him in an upright/standing position for the night meals
2. Feeding him from a mini muffin dish to slow him down. He eats really really fast
3. Introducing a higher calorie kitten wet food slowly to transition him to it, hopefully making his stomach less full while not starving him
Now I'm wondering:
1. if you have any other ideas for what might cause this rejection of night meals after a couple weeks of being on a new food?
2. If he is vomiting up 3-5 hours after ingesting the food doesn't that mean that it's an issue other than eating too fast?
3. Do you think I could transition him back to raw food once he consistently keeps food down, since it seems like the raw food itself wasn't the culprit anyway? Would feeding him only two meals of raw a day be feasible for a kitten?
Thanks y'all!
