THE HOLISTIC PET
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As a struggling single mother of four children, a writer, low paid astrologer, an owner of cats and simultaneously, a healthfood fan and a partisan of 'free or homemade,' I questioned the assumption that we have to spend a lot of money on our pets, and that vets know everything and we need expensive animal shots/pills and Vet visits for our furry friends.
Over 30 years of breeding cats, in tribes larger than twenty, suffering the deaths of many kittens, yet unable to afford vaccines, I was forced to develop holistic ways to prevent disease. It was a slow process. I seemed to be combining my efforts with a simultaneous effort in the cat’s antibody system and genes, and we were meeting mysteriously in the middle.
I won my side of the race by consulting books written by holistic vets and found that there were home remedies for the most frequent pet illnesses.
I've long been fascinated by the reputed disease-preventing power of healthfoods and herbs for my children and sensed this could be carried over into the animal world, but these books were was spell-binding with the possibility of longevity and better health attained through holistic herbs and foods. I began collecting holistic tips that the average pet owner could use for disease prevention to give high energy & longevity to their beloved animal 'relatives.'
The concept of holistics is that prevention prevents disease. Prevention also saves one an awful lot of money as pet surgery can approach human in cost. Prevention is based on vital foods. So-called 'health food' products for animals have already started showing up en masse and producers of such products will become advertisers. An interest in cod-liver oil, yeast, garlic, bone-meal products, pet vitamins, herbal drops and teas as well as a DISINTEREST in palm oil, cottonseed oil in kibble, meat-by- products and offal in tinned meat, may be the wave of the future.
The books I read were full of tips on live foods and herbs, and that was what was used to CREATE HEALTH as well as HEAL the body. But the third phase, was ELIMINATING anything indigestible or toxic. The absence of triggers combined with nature’s own assortment of LIFE ENHANCING minerals, vitamins and proteins, with a great deal of clean water for between meals, to assist in elimination was what health was about. One more thing. Breast feeding of milk from a MOMMA who had antibodies in her T cells. Well seems the same things work for our MAMMALIAN PETS. Who’d a’ thunk it!?
The whole concept of holistic healing to me is like the hippie sixties, basically Rousseauesque in thrust, seeming to come from a world view that promises each and every one of us a Health Paradise Now ---one that is only postponed the distance it takes us to learn to recognize, purchase and boil strange, mouth-puckering herbs---Herbs that contain the latent, invisible walloping punch of low-cost health, that flaps in the breeze as green vegies and plumes on the ground as carrots and is free as a nut hanging on a tree. I did get that right, didn't I? I didn't go through the Dionysian 60's for NOTHING if not to recognize the geist of a thing. And The geist of holistic doctors seems to be that by properly choosing the leaves fruits buds and seeds you ingest, you get to avoid the other polarity, Apollonian, high- charging, vets, doctors and their nasty fees.
Every polarity calls into play an 'On the Other Hand.' The Apollonian allopathic traditional doctor treats the nasty end result, disease and likes it that way. He is much like a priest handling your confession. If you don't believe conventional medical wisdom is Apollonian in thrust, regardez this: there is something akin to CATHOLIC guilt in disease. It seems that through vice we become ill. Through ignorance and gluttony maybe we didn't ingest the right trees that God placed in Eden or we chose the oil of the forbidden seed, PALM OIL, COTTONSEED instead of the bidden, olive, or chose the single hoof instead of the cloven and inevitably, we have fouled our carburators and plugs. The Apollonian doctor removes the offending gland in an immensely expensive surgery, and once more you are purified. But are, of course, now missing some of the original equipment that God thought to stick in there.
A few years back, my local newspaper (L.A. WEEKLY) had a wonderful health column (for humans) by Carolyn Rueben. Her research and writing led me to holistically resolve some very scary health problems with very little cost, with superb quickness and ease, (the opposite of DIS-ease, no?) via diet, herbs and vitamins. The body is a kind of reversable car. With cars you get regular tune-ups so you won't blow a gasket. With the body, when you blow a gasket, you do the tune-up and it problem reverses. My problem before I entered holism was that I didn't do my tune-ups frequently enough. Also, I liked 'STP additives' (black coffee was my favorite, along with aspirins at night to combat the insommnia the coffee produced), anyway, one day a strange mystery malady struck: constant indigestion complete with 24 hour burps. I went to UCLA where after hundreds of dollars worth of tests, doctors told me take Tums, falsely diagnosing it as acid stomach.) Two burpy months followed: constant stomach gas, then in short order, kidney pain, body edema, puffy eyes and then NO URINATION, borderline kidney failure. I was VERY ILL the day I came acorss Caroline Rueben's column and chanced to read of damaged stomachs (vinegar, coffee, aspirin) that undersecrete hydrochloric acid, thereby letting proteins ferment, especially if the protein meal floated in coke or fruit juice...and these fermented proteins ultimately 'insult' the overloaded kidneys. A clear case of the buck stopping THERE in that final organ, freezing it entirely with an overload of uric acids. I was an inch away from a dialysis machine when I met holism and holism cured me, so ever after, I worship in its temple.
Holism is part religion, part philosophy. I look at it this way. While disease is neat, linear, Catholic, hence Apollonian Capitalistic and Patriarchial, (pharmaceuticals with them) --- holistic medicine is Dionysian, Rousseauesque, non-linear, hence feminine, communistic or MATRIARCHIAL. In nature it harkens back to druidic female cults, worship of ancient Persian fertility goddesses, English witch covens.
The basic philosophic concept behind the inexpensive, easily available, holistic cures is one that's basically ecological in tilt. It says, clean the body by not putting more trash in it. Feed it foods that actually are so pure they heal.
The maxim of allopathic medicine is simply good merchandising: "go on eating toxic foods that taste good but remember --for some mysterious reason, dirty disease can at any time get a hold on your nice clean body but our costly medicines come to the rescue every time." The maxim of homeopaths would be terrible merchandising: "Disease only grows where there's toxidity. Stop your gluttony, remove toxins, you remove the source of disease." This is a terrible tack for a capitalistic linear society to take because LESS products get sold that way. It absolutely stinks. It's heinous, anti-American heresy to admit that the whole downside of the body's universe is waste matter, poisons, toxins created by profitably merchandised comestible products yet that's the horrible holistic truth. Somewhere within us, a garbage barge loaded to the gills, trawls endlessly, looking for that ultimate dump site, and obviously, this barge is not turned away. A sequence of organs accept it, and in turn are dirtied, infected and destroyed.
After reading the Health column, I learned nasty black coffee and aspirins caused bad stomachs which in turn caused kidney damage, ---I immediately quit all those expensive aspirins I used for sleep. I quit coffee, and used chhlorophyll juice with oriental brain stimulant herbs, like Fo-Ti-tieng, Dong quai and Ginseng, bypassing the vagus nerve entirely so that my panic and anxiety went away, too. I quit creating toxic waste dumps by learning to eat my meat dry, (no cokes,) with greens only, (no starches which require alkaline digestion) adding only a little betaine hydrochloric acid tab, and several hours later, I would flush my kidneys, wash away waste, by drinking water all night, every night. And I stopped frying my stomach lining with other junk: canned jalapenos, (switched to raw) vinegar salad dressings, (switched to raw lemon) and stopped overloading kidneys by having only one 3 oz. meat serving a day.
Rueben also suggested taking potassium to balance excess protein and salty foods. Lack of potassium in meat eaters slows down all muscles in the body, practically paralyzes the stomach muscles which shake and turn food in peristalsis.
The result of my holistic cure was immediate. Stomach seemed to regain its ability to secrete acid and it definitely shook the food which now digested perfectly without the apple pie and coffee. I slowly cut down on the betaine hydrochloric acid. My edema disappeared. My Kidneys were no longer insulted. Distilled water Flush and plenty of back massage also backed off edema and lower back pain by creating additional circulation in the area. Balance, cleanliness and harmony were restored. And my burps were history.
Once armed with a theorem, what scientist won't try to test it elsewhere? So when Peaches, my beloved Siamese's breath got so foul I couldn't get near her, and my children began to call her 'stinker,' I'm concerned. It's on my mind.
Now we come to the concept of the power of the seeker's mind to know it needs truth (the Christ mind) and then, mysteriously, to attract or pull in the right teaching force..the 'miracle.' I tuned into my favorite public radio show, SOMETHING'S HAPPENING, midnight on KPFK and lo and behold, a HOLISTIC VET! Public radio on Monday nights had gurus, and mystics, Tuesday has holistics, and medical leftists, Wednesday has radical politics of the lst water, Thursday had Alan Watts and Baba Ram Das, but it's Earth Tuesday and Dr. Art the holistic vet is on. The very next day Peaches and I raise 25$ and go see him.
Dr. Art was your average Mendocino woodsman from Brooklyn, the primordial spooring place of everything of worth. He was handsome, young, bearded, dark hair, with china blue eyes. A grad of Humboltd U.His consultorium is full of organic teas and traces of a wife who's a massage therapist. Peaches, my fur daughter goes on a quiet prowl, then makes herself at home on a sheepskin and I settle down to take notes. Her breath problems come from acid saliva which comes from an overloaded liver and a rich diet. Change the diet he says. How, say I? She gets tinned meats from Kal-Kan and Friskies. What better than that? Well, he said, those canned foods are meat by products. Read the label. That can be anything from bovine lips to the rendered, dead body of animals killed at the pound. This type of food will cause an immediate, invisible allergic reaction, in your pet, a drop of immune system integrity. That, in turn, invites the two, so-called 'immune system viruses' which are really opportunistic and secondary to the basic insulted allergic condition.
The FIV and FeLV so frequent in animals today has been CAUSED by that costly American diet of tinned meat by products. This diet will eventually damage one in five animals that consume it. If you love your furball, you'll give her real meat, cooked very lightly, still pink, with some grated low-starch root vegetables (beet, stringbean, collards, carrot) mixed in with it, he said. And raw chlorophyll juices in spring water, spooned down her throat between meals. Especially for Peaches who to his eye, may already have contracted the leukemia or the AIDS type virus of FIV or FeLV.
A laboratory could test her blood and tell me what she had for about 50$. If she did have it, it would be irreversible, much as AIDS is, so he thought I should just get her on a perfect diet right away. He described for me what that would be, and then went on to tell me about the most frequent disease of American dogs and cats, skin tumors, with Kidney problems next. But both are due to skin no longer functioning as eliminatory organ. Remember, skin is a 3rd kidney. Poor skin means horrid smelling urine, all from a diet of l00% meat which puts a strain on entire animal's health. He recommended adding vegies to the meat. Next, 'loofa ' your pet's pelt, massage the skin, get circulation into the whole thick layer of it. Skin is almost 1/3rd of an inch thick. And get rid of that top layer of dried, old skin with a good brushing. Use camphor, peppermint, eucalyptus, fennel, spearmint or sulphur rub on skin. Use witchhazel and Lipton's tea on hot spots. Give them exercise and massage so there's optimum circulation in the skin. Otherwise the kidneys are overloaded and the kidneys slowly die.
KIDNEY DISFUNCTION happens to all animals on high protein dried feed. It's twice the protein level of tinned, cooked meats, and because it's dry, happens to be especially detrimental to cats' kidneys. Be sure to Wet the kibble when you serve it. Use vegie broth or distilled water. Cut down on protein by adding grated carrots, collards, (raw or cooked) to kibble or other vegetables. Avocados and Tofu can be used to extend meat and kibble. (NOTE: make certain avocados are not overly ripe; they can kill if they begin to ferment and smell sour. If it doesn't taste good to you, throw it away.)
The homemade vegie addititives you add to kibble or meat will be much more laden with vitamins than even the artifical lab vitamins laded into commercial food. If you can afford meat, that might be better for the animal’s health. I NOTE that kibble is indigestible,creates mucus. SO I do not serve it. I use steamed, carrots as kibble. Mash them, then add it to meat to extend it as meat is so costly. Kibbles seem way too pricey in comparison to cheap cuts of meat extended with carrots. Kibbles are digested by ptyalin in saliva.Animals have none. They only have stomach acid to tear apart flesh KIBBLE is costly and it contains heart-damaging lard, cottonseed oils. STILL IF YOU WANT IT, make your own kibble every few days with any organic whole grain flour or sprouted grains, food processed until it's a fine flour. Then proceed just the way you make your OWN crackers. (read Chapter on Foods we can make cheaper ourselves.) Add olive or other natural oil, a natural vegie broth then roll into a large cracker. Bake at low temperature; then crumble. Store air tight and dry, and slightly cool so it won't get rancid. Avoid canned commercial meat made of meat by products. This is really nothing but ground up 'offal' an accurate sound for what it is: bovine lips, hooves, beaks and nails. Make your own meat-mush with inexpensive sale cuts. When your local super has a .79c steak sale, buy l0 lbs, chop into l lb. pieces, freeze in foil. Boil 4 .57c chickens at a time, cool, pull dangerous bones out, leaving in calcium bone-KNOBS and as much marrow as you can, freeze packages. Thaw l each morning, serve with unsalted vegies from your own table. Pour this meat/vegie mixture over kibble, stir and serve. Le Petit Pet Gourmet will love it.
PREVENTION comes thru diet, but Dr. Art also gave holistic CURES that involve his collection of herbal extracts. If animal is incontinent or has pain over kidney area when masaged, one must brew herb teas and slip the tea into their drinking water: plantain tea, fennel tea, carrot (any part ) in tea---ditto celery, comfrey, ginseng, mint, oregano, thyme, parsley, PLUS, and most important, all kinds of diuretic teas, cornsilk, uva ursi, or peach tree: (inner bark or leaves made into tea) Cut down on protein by extending meat with vegetarian proteins: tofu, greens, carrots, cauiflower, beets or other root vegies.
How to make tofu appetizing to pet? MIX with some meat, but give aroma thru onions, olive oil, and garlic and meat juices, tuna can juices.
Dr. Art went on to talk about other fatal CAT VIRUSES: BABY CATS grown in a group GET a most often fatal, foul-smelling DIAHAREA. Or, they get distemper, (the fatal headcold). They get these two around the time the mother starts to wean them. (When they lose their mother's milk-carried antibodies). As owner can't vaccinate a cat before 9 weeks, often they die of the diaharrea or distemper before they reach an age where they could be vaccinated.
There is bacterial as well as viral enteritus, (diahhrea) and there is viral headcold/Distemper. They're not hard to tell apart. An expert can tell the difference by noting if fever, lung congestion / foul-mucus, supperating eyes, swollen lymph glands, bad odor from mouth and in room are present. If distemper is suspected, it is highly contagious by saliva, breath, hands, other pets, even the owner's hands, also thru the area itself.
TO CLEAN AREA: Floors must be swabbed in hot water, soap with a few tablespoons bleach added to remove germs from a room or other, later litters can be affected. Remove all pets while bleaching a room and for several hours afterwards. Cat boxes contain the microbe; they must be cleaned daily, by picking up waste with plastic bag over hand. Try to use 'cat doors' allowing cats access to yard and avoid cat boxes entirely. They spread disease.
Cats with flu or enteritis symptoms have a high mortality rate. It takes kittens 2-5 days to either die or get well. Juvenile cats can live a week or more with the disease. Adults longer. The cure involves giving rice mush and acidophilis powder. You have a choice of placing the affected members of litter in separate basket and 'given to the mother for feedings or leaving with Mom. The fever makes them prone to being cold. It exhausts them, gives them chills, so the sick kittens should have a heating pad placed in their quarantine area, set on 'low,' with thick fabric firmly stretched over it as even the lowest setting is too hot for a cat. You want to avoid over heating them, not burning them. Make certain room is draught proof. Get down on floor and see what cold swirling air hides there. Blanket your your windows. Most draughts come UNDER doors. TOWEL them up.
THEN, beside mother's feedings, the attempt to heal animals will involve oral feedings at 3 hr intervals of electrolyte solution to replenish body. (i.e. a vegie broth made of celery for salt, carrots, for sugar, parsley. Then, make a pudding of rice. You toast brown rice until golden, grind it in blender, store in jar. Make enough mush for a single day by boiling with a little salt and honey, 5-8 minutes until it's like mush. This will lock up the bowels. When it is cool, stir in one capsule of acidophilis powder. Give hourly with a small teaspoon. The rubber spoons they sell in supermarkets for infants are great.
For colds, and other bacterial or viral illnesses, (but not for diaharrea,) raw chrlophyll juices, freshly extracted from parsley, celery, with a little carrot in it as well work wonders. Sick kittens should only eat solids lightly; 2 tbsp of avocado or Gerbers pureed meat and carrots mixed might be a meal. If you KNOW there is no salmonella in your egg yolks, raw yolks with warm milk might be good for a cat that was half way recovered. Meat/egg by themselves require too much chewing for a really sick cat. Someone must feed them at night, so shifts must be arranged for 3 a.m. and then at dawn. When forcefeeding kittens or sick adults liquids, do it with an eyedropper as inhaling food can give pneumonia. Go slowly.
Remember, your darling could not get such loving care at a vets, and the strangers would alarm him, give him the 'blues,' so you're probably going to have your best swack at healing whiskers at HOME. But I should still mention that cost is a factor. A vet costs 50$ a day. An animal, for all we love it, is still an animal. If the budget for humans is tight, perhaps an animal shouldn't be ON it. Save hospitals for your kid. Be holistic with The Furball.
When a cat is ill, his eyes get to secreting and he can get conjunctivitis. Clean eyes with boric acid or mild lemon water solution. Golden Seal, Yellow Dock, Eye-bright herb tea or codliver oil can also be used to clean eyes.
If food is tolerated, give foods that are easily digested, like minced or pureed lamb or chicken in rice gruel, which cat will eat, or if diaharrea is there, and you want to 'stop' the cat up, use basmati/brown rice gruel which must be spoon or dropper fed.
Rice gruel is the healing food par excellance for diaharrea in animal or human. Toast or parch your brown rice on a thick skillet. Not too hot or it will brown. Turn it golden. Some grains will pop like popcorn. Cool. Grind in blender into fine powder. Use a large strainer to sift out the larger crumbs. Take the fine flour that results, drop into boiling spring water, as if you were making mush. Boil slowly for 3-5 minutes, til thick. As diaharrea causes salt and sugars to be excreted, add a little honey and salt to this mush while cooking. Keep extra mush covered (cats hate absorbed flavors) in fridge, heat when needed, thinning with more spring water as required.
Dr. Art also recommended goat's milk yogurt which you can make yourself with a qt. of goat milk and some culture from a container of plain yogurt and which puts the right kind of bacteria inside the cat to fight the WRONG kind which is making him ill. Cow's milk is fine if that's all you've got.
After leaving Art, I went home to look in 'Back to Eden' to find Other POSSIBLE things to do for diaharrea. This source sugests Hot astringent enemas. a mixture of geranium, ginger root, mint, strawberry leaves, comfrey, magnolia bark made into a tea, eyedroppered warm up the rectum of animal and orally, too, (but with a different eyedropper) Do this only if cat is conscious enough to swallow. Be careful if he's groggy, he'll breathe in any food or liquids. Swallowing reflex disappears.
FOR ADULT CATS: You can FAST older pets, but when animal has diaharrea or is fasting, do give an electrolyte replacing solution such as vegie broth. When animal is slightly better, try fresh, raw Chlorophyll juice, diluted. It gives high energy. Juice is made up of parsley, watercress, kale, comfrey, romaine, and other gentle greens that have none of the oxalic acid found in spinach/chard.
I brought up EYE INFECTION SYMPTOMS that go with most virus, and which can blind baby cats. Art said that boric acid wash, eyebright tea, mild lemon juice in distilled water could be used. Or if you've tetracycline caps on hand, dissolve til pale yellow, very, very diluted in the boric acid, then eyedropper in. Iodine in mild solution also works, while codliver oil, neosporin or other 'over-the-counter,' triple antibiotic ointments (but without codeine, please!) should be placed under lid, then with eyes closed, rubbed thoroughly into eye socket. Excess cottoned off.
PARASITES. When any animal gets skinny looking, suspect worms. Worms can eat every bit of food your cat eats and your cat won't get any of it. This can kill a kitten. Round worms cause mild diahharea and you'll think the cat has a virus and won't suspect round worms. ON ANY SKINNY ANIMAL, try the parasite cure, first. Even a holistic vet likes a DRONSIT pill or shot for tape worms. For round, hook or other kinds of Worms, try Green or black walnuts hulls, fresh garlic cloves, crushed; pumpkin seeds ground up in water, then soaked in that water overnight, given raw, strained and by eyedropper or teaspoon on an empty stomach. Try Toasted rice, ground up, simmered into mush, garlicked up. Pomegranate root bark is another worm killer and we all know someone with a pomegranate tree. Piparazine preparations (the active ingredient in pumpkin seeds) bought over the counter from the pet shelf, (most worming products have it) will also do the job. What ever you use, you must mark it on a calendar and repeat it l5 days later to get the hatched eggs which you couldn't GET when they were eggs. So note the moon phase. Full moon? New Moon you repeat. I actually give three meals in a row of worm killer foods and piparazine pills, wait l5 days, repeat. One cat infects his litter box mates, so dose 'em all, I say.
CONSTIPATION IN KITTIES-Constipation in kitties not necessarily true constipation. It can be from intestines doubling back into themselves closing passages; and is quite mortal. Give kittens a large box they can crawl around in, so even when little they get plenty of exercise. Don't let cats lie on each other. Give mother cat room. Do not give constipating civilized foods to a baby cat. When young cat leaves nest, starts running around house, initiate diet that has cooked vegie roughage; mix with a canned, commercial cat food that has NO meat by-products. 'Offal' is truly awful. Young cats don't know any better and will eat it. Most picky older cats are simply reacting to how 'offal' it is. Give a good diet from start; If a kitten shows symtoms of a hard, distended stomach, is constipated, and you suspect intestineal 'doubling up,' massage may help return intestines to place. Surgery is the only other alternative.
F.U.S or KIDNEY DISEASE is the Achilles Heel of all OLDER CATS: PREVENTION: Low Ash diet. WHAT IS THIS? Cut down on FISH. How come every generic, canned slim price catfood on the market has fish as its sole ingredient? Why isn't ash content on packages of cat kibble??? Because consumers don't scream at producers. If you love your cat or dog start writing angry letters. Meanwhile, load up on sale cuts of steak, sale chicken, (I can find 5 lb bags of drums for .39 c a lb quite frequently); sale lamb is rare, so is pork. But those little miniature chickens often come on sale. That is a treat for a cat and can be given raw, with the bones, much as they eat birds. With all meats, remove huge chunks of fat, toss away, freeze the meat in 1-day ration size packages.
Go fishing; save junk fish or bait fish. But after simmering, always de-bone fish with hands IN the soup. What you might do is boil cool, large amts of fish, then STRAIN, so you just have a big bowl of fishburger. Then, add boiled pureed carrots, vegies; package in foil or plastic, freeze in small cubes. Microwave each before serving. Be certain to get all fish bones out of final product as one tiny bone can kill pet. But fu us hassle: my favorite meat of all lately is TURKEY BULLETS, those frozen cylinders of turkey burger which cost .79c in L.A. at the Ralph's food chain. I checked and it's just as high in iron as beef. I mix all my meats with non oxalic acid vegies (so no spinach, chard). I use collards, carrots, romaine, celery, parsley, beets and cook them all together with the meat, then cut them with knives and forks until pieces are smaller, sprinkle liberally with powdered garlic, (not garlic salt), which is unpopular with fleas and worms. My cats love greens and will work a piece of collard patiently, chewing toward the end. And they eat the greens first, the meat later, so they have proven to me that cats love vegies which have been cooked with meat!
The DISEASES which are are most interesting to pet owners, due to their frequency, --the problems Vet sees most often are:
DISEASE SYMPTOM CAUSE CURE
1. SKIN visible weak kidneys water/brushing
2. Heart shortness of breath fat/sedantary exercise
3. KIDNEY incontinence overload protein real food
4. FLEAS scratching fleas combing, bathing
The diseases I have seen most often in cats are Distemper (the common cold,) and diaharrea. To cure a cold, you must catch it when the cat first starts lying around listlessly. Give different things that lift immune system: orange juice, chlorophyll juice, and a solution made by soaking rose hips and onions in lemon juice, bffered ascorbic acid & water. Strain, serve in eyedropper or teaspoon. Do all three during each day. Feed lightly; keep warm. Slip a heating pad in his litter box, set on low, several towel thickness over it, and heat the room as well. If it's an outdoor litter, arrange super market carton boxes so a multi-wind shielded home is arranged; create a floor of rags, with the heating pad underneath.
For diahharea, make toasted rice gruel. Slip diluted penicillin or sulfa pills in the Electrolyte solution (sweet and salty) you give: can be orange juice or apple for sugar, or lemon juice with added sugar, then it's mixed with celery juice for the salt required. Or, add a few drops soy sauce to each ration of his gruel. TO PREPARE GRUEL: Toast brown rice on a thick pan, until some grains pop, all is lightly toasted; grind into a flour in the blenderjar. Sweeten lightly & boil in spring water w. few drops soy sauce or salt, until thick. Store in fridge; reheat as needed. Give in a teaspoon. Will 'stop' up the cat. Give no proteins to a cat w. diaharrea. But if all this seems too much work to you, in a pinch, Gerbers baby cereals are good. Usually his own immune system will nail the nasty intestinal bacteria within a few days. If you give antibiotics, be sure to give yogurt to him when he gets well, to restore intestinal bacteria.
Now, for that big problem, IMMUNE SYS DEFICIENCY. one in 6 American cats has one of the two deadly feline leukemias, says the IDEXX Corporation of Portland who surveyed 1,500 vets in the USA. 7.4% had Feline Immune deficiency virus, or FIV and 13.3 % had Feline Leukemia, or FELV. Both cause impairment of the immune system, says Alice Wolf, a vet researcher at TexasA&M University. I've heard that cats can live fairly long lives with this disease, especially if not exposed to another sick cat.
I've collected stray cats and tried to find them homes for two decades. I never could afford to have them neutered or even to have a vet treat a disease. I could only attempt to put free ads in the papers, & give them away to good homes. Before meeting Doctor Art, I'd never gone to a vet. Even with Art, I couldn't afford to do more than have a chat, seeking to sharpen my own vet skills. Once I had successfully performed a boil-lancing surgery complete with 2 stitches. It drained clear and healed. Since then I've learned that cat boils are very easy to treat with wet-heat poultices to the point of bursting. They heal easily. But this Immune System Deficiency seemed to be in our tribe; genetic and prevelant. In all these years, I've become aware that many of our cats have had lifelong viruses that may have been a manifestation of ISD. I couldn't afford to have any of our animals lab tested & diagnosed, so I'm not certain. I know that whatever virus it was exploded into action, killing many kittens, at weaning time, when they become most suceptible to other, opportunistic infections.
When there were survivors, some localized infection often settled in some specific body part, like the ear or eye or lung causing life long organ infection, complete with exudes. The eyes or ears supperated, and resisted all treatment. I do believe these cats had damaged immune responses and could not produce antibodies. Many of these infected cats slowly wasted and died taking 2 or 3 years to do it, while some cats who had never been ill, lived with the infected cats yet did not seem to have the sickness at all. Healthy, adult cats didn't seem to be able to catch it, and mind you, these were unvaccinated cats.
Vets maintain ISDV's cannot be transmitted to humans but I'm not so certain. Never get within sneezing distance of a sick cat. Don't put your hands to your eyes or nose after handling a cat or get too close to their breath. Wash hands and dispose of all kleenexes, cotton balls used on them. Viruses LIVE for a considerable time on dishes so don't use human dishes for cats. And obviously, don't invite clawings or admittance of their body fluids into cuts on your hands. There is a great deal of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Epstein Barre appearing now in humans, mystery viruses of lengthy duration that damage the human immune system. I have been sneezed upon by cats, had my throat glands swell up within the hour, and stay swollen, keeping me feverish and in great pain, immobilized for l0 days. First time, mystery malady segued into a very phelgmy lung infection, which was nothing like any human disease I'd ever had in my life, but which was identical to a cat syndrome. Subseqyent times my immune system beat it, but it took a few days. I hear now that this is Mycoplasma, the same bacteria that the Iraquis gave to our Desert Storm warriors!
Naturopathic Doctors detected a mystery virus in my thyroid, on and off for the last 4 years, one which caused my thryoid to become enlarged, over-secrete, giving me insommnia. At the time, I was scanned for only one virus, Toximplasmosis, and there was none there. I couldn't afford to do scans on all the viruses there were. So I let it go, and worked on my own immune system with raw juices. It went away, but 5 years later, it returned briefly, when I was run down, which is true of cats. You have a resident virus which appears when you're not taking care of yourself or when you are over-indulging in toxic foods.
A final word for that last problem that bothers pet owners most: fleas. Buy a few Essential oils like citronella, pennyroyal, (never on skin, only on fur!) cedarleaf, teatree, eucalyptus. Or make by boiling leaves, cooling, pouring off the fragrant oils which rise to top of water. Fingered thru coat, placed on all four paws, and different pulse spots on the body, they will actually repel fleas. Also, Mash a garlic clove and Vitamin B-1 tablet into every pet meal. If you are bitten, put itchy part under hot water faucet 5 seconds. Removes itch. Vacuuming the house regularly and throwing bag OUTSIDE is #1 way to prevent flea infestations. Also, shampooing cats. Get two sinks of body temperature water ready; one for soaping, another with clean water. Set up a towel or two and floor heater full blast, get bathroom warm. You will be using either diluted dish detergent, diluted human shampoo, diluted pet flea shampoo or plain old bar soap. Immerse him slowly, talking in a friendly voice, soap him all over. Caress the spots his mother usually licks so he realizes this is a grooming exercise. Use an old toothbrush to loosen flea refuse, which accounts for that red color that comes off the cat at base of tail, on spine. Rinse him in second bucket or sink, or tub. A two sink kitchen basin is great. After rinsing him, squeeze him off, towel him dry, and plop him in front of heater and rub him dry some more. Or, if it's a sunny day, on porch table where fleas glow like amber jewels in the sunlight and can easily be picked out and smashed, as they can't run in all that damp fuzz. Use a dry brush to fluff his fur. I do one cat after another while I've got the set up, changing the water every few cats.
A kitten will usually float happily in the warm water of this bath. An older cat who has not been bathed regularly all his life is an anxious customer, and you should wear old, torn dishwashing gloves that you've saved for this, and talk calmly but be fairly quick with the two dunk-scrub-rinse-scrub movements.
Dr. Art didn't like the idea of flea collars as these deadly pesticides put a terrible load on your cat's immune system. Putting poison next to the breathing orifices for 24 hrs a day is toxic on the liver too and may account for rising cat cancers.
I remembered all that Dr. Art told me and put as much as I could into practice. When Spring came and my many female cats began to have babies, many kittens would, upon weaning, get either the diaharrea disease, or the fever and phelgm lung disease, I would spring into action. Heating pads, raw vegetable juices w. lemon, avocado as a meal. I do not believe one can fast a kitten. They are growing at too ferocious a rate. I have given chlorophyll juices to convalescing kittens and mashed avocado, making certain this fruit is never overripe, in which case avocados can be deadly. Muellin leaves from the healthfood store, boiled into tea with onions was my own discovery, good for lung expectoration in cases of those fevers and that lingering phlegmy lungs cats get. I fast the phelgm lung in adult cats and do not resume l00% meat diet right away. Or give milk. Just as for humans, these are overly acidic in reaction and very mucus producing. I might use meat as a flavoring for other vegie/tofu grain mixtures, when I resume food, however. For kittens a true fast is not a good idea. They are growing rapidly, even when ill. That's why 'food-lite' is a good idea: mashed carrots w. avocados, brown grains finely pureed with meat blood/broth/marrow even if you have to tear apart a chicken with a claw hammer. By the way, for adult cats and dogs, chicken bone FINIALS are great, but bone shafts splinter, so don't give them. Crack them, get the marrow out, bag and discard shafts.
Always seek protein foods that are pureed & don't involve husks or indigestible skins. Gerbers babyfood-meats stirred half and half with Gerbers pureed carrots is also excellent. But I found most cat foods caused allergic reactions in healthy cats!
Keeping cats well is work, and seeing that work, my friends ask: are cats worth it? I wonder. I have sacrificed many trips around the world because of cats. Cats have made me very ill. I've been forced to rent HOMES instead of apartments and earning that huge rent has kept me from my favorite leisure time activities, fishing, travel, screenwriting, so perhaps it's true. They aren't worth the candle. I wish I'd never been given that first pregnant female cat. I actually do not recommend that any family go LOOKING for animals. On the other hand, during lonely times, SOME cats are great companions. But if I had a third hand, I'd say that lonliness has a lot to recommend it too. Lonliness might attract one a HUMAN companion which would be the best bet of all; Someone to share some rent & food & vet bills which no cat I EVER saw would do. And someone who likes holding my hand, watching Discovery Channel at three a.m. Well, come to think of it, ONLY my cat would do that!
More and more I became like an ancient witch, sitting up nights with a candle, reading ancient cobwebby tomes on the power of foods and herbs, my lair strung with fragrant, drying buds and branches. By day I strolled the herb shelf at the healthfood store buying herb tea leaves bulk, by the ounce, storing them tightly wrapped in foil, then in an old 40's flour cannister which I kept in the freezer, so they'd stay potent. Like a modern, techno-witch armed with puree/blend machines, eyedroppers, and freezeers my cats fattened and multiplied as their mother wandered the ancient avenues of shamanism, brewing tisanes by the full moon. At night we wandered in the garden, Clarise Athena, Homer Odysius, Peaches, Siamo, Megan, Petunia, Blanquito, Annie, Tizzy, and Jack, John, Carmen Cha Cha Cha, Mario Andre, Graybe, Rebecca, Pascuale, and Starbuck, and the kittens I didn't give away thru Recycler ads, Schizy and Puffer. What a crowd of smart, friendly, able little souls. Nights, we'd lie on a rug in the garden and we'd lift our heads, look up at the midnight sky and realize that the immense potency of those fiery stars overhead was exploding out of the tiniest atoms of the foods that grew beneath our feet. We'd go back into the kitchen and then they'd hear the blender whizzing and I'd get out the eyedropper and come after them ---and this explosion of paws as they'd all stampede under the bed and huddle together, their emerald eyes balefully glowing at me. The final impasse for which the final holistic trick is ---grab them ruthlessly, as if they were helpless human babies, but as you cram this stuff down their throats, talk intelligently and peacefully about what good you're doing to them, as if they were human adults. But dose them. Feed them, prime them. Stuff their little fanged orifices with holistic goodies the Gods intended for life and eschew the canned by products that vets and multinational corporations tell you is good for them, and which continues to line somebody's pockets. Any cui bonum must end first with the owner, and lastly with the pet. So make your own decision, do the homework, then do the work.