Ashton’s Exercise Routine

Ashton: Did you hear that I’m on a weight loss plan? The vet said I need to exercise. Can you believe it? So I wanted to share my exercise routine with you.

Here comes my exercise equipment now. You have to act fast when it shows up. Make sure you schrunch your nose up when you go for it to burn extra calories.

Streeeeetch… and got it!

HEY! What the ceiling cat are you doing with my exercise equipment, Newton?

Where are you taking it? Newton? NEWTON!

Well, that’s the end of my demonstration, since my exercise equipment has been stolen.

Bravo Pet Foods Feline Cafe Giveaway

Recently, we have said a lot about the benefits of feeding raw, but the truth is that we know feeding raw isn’t for everyone. It’s not even for all of the cats in our house! So I was pretty excited to find out that Bravo Pet Foods, one of the original names to make raw pet food available, was making a new Feline Cafe line of canned food for cats.

You’ve got to feed what’s right for you and your cat. For Pierre, that’s canned food. At 11 years old, Pierre is set in his ways and never met a raw food he would touch. But as a senior cat, he needs plenty of protein from species-appropriate sources.

What Pierre doesn’t need are all the crazy ingredients in some other cat foods. He eats around visible vegetable chunks in his food, and when vegetables were puréed into pate food, the food came back up no matter how good it tasted going down. Veggies weren’t going to be on the menu for him. Pierre needed what is sometimes referred to a limited ingredient diet.

Bravo Feline Cafe canned food is exactly what Pierre was looking for! It is made with the same quality muscle meats and poultry that is in Bravo’s raw foods. That means the food is full of the good stuff a cat’s body needs. What is missing from the ingredient panel are fillers, preservatives, artificial flavors, grains, and meals that Pierre’s system was never made to digest. Perfect for a cat’s fussy palate… and in Pierre’s case, his fussy stomach, too. It goes down and stays down.

We also love that Bravo is straightforward about where their ingredients come from. You can get a full list of the source of every ingredient in the food right on the Bravo web site. Most of it is from the US, but if it isn’t, they give you a full list of where each ingredient comes from. After some of the unhealthy ingredients from China that have ended up in pet food, the transparency of being able to look up exactly what is in Pierre’s diet and where it came from is really important.

Pierre: Check it out! This food has folic acid that’s from France, just like me. Oui! Oui!

Newton: You aren’t from France, Pierre. You’re from Florida. You don’t even have an accent.

It can be hard to find GMO free food for humans, much less for animals, but Bravo delivers GMO-free nutrition made of meats with no added antibiotics. No funny stuff, just the good nutrition your cat needs.

Did we mention that Bravo Pet Food is also making Canine Cafe? Yes, the same goodness, only in a recipe made specially for dogs. Our buddy Oz the Terrier is telling everyone about the recipe for dogs today.

Learn More about Bravo Feline Cafe and Canine Cafe… and Win!

Join in the fun #BravoPetFoods Twitter party April 21 at 8 – 9 pm to lean more about Bravo’s new Feline Cafe and Canine Cafe canned foods as well as their frozen and freeze-dried raw diets. Representatives from @BravoPetFoods will be chatting with us, and you will have chance to win Bravo food and treats for your cat or dog. Be sure to follow us, @catsherdyou, as well as our co-hosts, @Oz_theTerrier and @SugarTheGoldenR, as well as @BravoPetFoods so you don’t miss any of the fun!

Don’t forget to RSVP for the Twitter party using your Twitter handle so we know to expect you. Be sure you put your @handle on Twitter in the Name field so that we can be sure to follow you for the Twitter party!

Want to Try Bravo Feline Cafe or Canine Cafe at Your House?

Pierre loved trying Bravo’s new canned food so much, he wanted you to be able to try it, too. We’re co-hosting a giveaway with our friend, Oz the Terrier.

The giveaway is open through April 19th, and you can win a variety of Bravo Feline Cafe or Feline Canine Cafe dinners to try at your house! There will be one winner of Feline Cafe and another winner of Canine Cafe, so you aren’t in competition against your dog friends. Winners must be 18 years old and ship to a US address. Enter through the rafflecopter widget below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclaimer: We were compensated for this review, but this didn’t influence what we said. All opinions in this review are our own and not influenced by any outsider. We receive no additional benefits for talking about the product or company.

Ways to Pill a Cat Roundup

Pierre: Did someone say give the cat a pill?

He even looks skeptical at the thought of getting a pill, doesn’t he? I had that same look on my face last week when the vet told me she was prescribing Pierre a ten-day course of pills.

I have given thousands of pills to cats. It was so easy that I once gave a thyroid pill to the wrong cat because he was so placid about it. (Yes, that was pretty mortifying afterward, but no harm was done from one errant pill.) So it’s pretty embarrassing to admit that I now share a home with cats who I dread having to give pills. I have become that veterinary client who vets assume won’t comply with the prescribed course of treatment.

The main problem is that Pierre doesn’t like to be restrained in any way, and he starts growling immediately when you do. It escalates from there. His idea of being held or carried is to climb up onto your shoulders when you pick him up.

It’s really cute to walk around with a cat on your shoulders, but you can’t give him a pill up there.

Ways to Pill a Cat

So what are your options for pilling a reluctant cat? I turned to YouTube, the treasure trove of how-to videos, for suggestions.

Just Give The Pill

The vets and technicians in videos always make it look easy. I liked this demonstration because the cat didn’t look quite as compliant about the whole process as some of the other videos, even though it was demonstrated by a veterinarian. She even drops the pill the first time. Just goes to show that it isn’t entirely easy for the professionals, either.

Make a Kitty Burrito with a Towel

You can use a towel to create a tidy kitty burrito that helps hold your cat in place. This video shows you to make a burrito where the open ends of the towel all end up in the same place so you can hold it with one hand while pilling your cat with the other.

I tried to give Pierre a pill the old-fashioned way, and I couldn’t do it. The growling, hissing, spitting, and struggling left me bleeding and frustrated, but after he walked into the next room and spit the pill out, I decided that wasn’t going to work.

There’s actually a bag you can use to serve as as a kitty burrito, too, which is a lot more sturdy and doesn’t require a hand to hold it shut. I was pressed for time and didn’t want to put Pierre in the bag without having a little longer to ease him in, so I reserved that as a fallback for later in the day if all else failed.

Use a Pill Popper

If you think you can hold your cat, but you are afraid of putting your fingers inbetween kitty’s teeth, they make pill poppers (also called pill guns), that help put the pill in the right place in the cat’s mouth without endangering your fingers.

This might have solved the problem with my not getting the pill in the right spot for Pierre to swallow it. I ransacked my house and couldn’t find my pill popper when I needed it, so my bonus tip for this is to not just make a cat health kit, but actually put your relevant gadgets and things in it. I did find my pill popper, five days after I needed it, so this was a fail on my part, not Pierre’s!

Hide the Pill in Food

Mashing up a pill and hiding it in food is an option if you know you can get your cat to eat the whole thing. As Dr. Susan Little said, “Yes, you can put the meds into the food if you don’t mind the meds getting into the cat.” Pierre isn’t a very food-motivated cat at the best of times, and he had gone to the vet for poor appetite, which made this a bad option for him.

This video includes an interesting method in which you administer the meds and food directly to the cat.

I actually like this idea a lot, but as soon as I pick up Pierre, he climbs up onto my shoulders, so that won’t let me administer the food the way the video demonstrates.

Hide the Pill in a Treat

You can get special treats that are the consistency of cookie dough but are apparently full of some kind of cat crack. This works if your cat is food-motivated enough for the treats or if whatever they put in them is enticing enough. Especially bitter pills may be hard to hide even in these purpose-made pill treats or pastes.

The nice, peaceful music in this video made me smile, because that’s exactly how I hoped this method would work as opposed to the struggling, growling, and scratching that happened when I tried earlier.

Pierre’s favorite flavor of anything is fish flavor, and luckily, they make salmon-flavored pill pockets. The pills he needed to take were mostly coated, so I thought it would keep the pill flavor contained so he would eat it.

How Did It Work?

I three pill pockets from the package and hid the pill inside one of them, being sure to mash the pill around it so that it was thoroughly surrounded by the soft treat. I gave Pierre the first one empty and he ate it right up. Then I gave him the second one and held my breath. He ate that, too. I’m pretty sure I heard the Hallejuah Chorus playing in the distance at that moment, the relief was so strong that it worked! Pierre got one more treat without a pill to be sure that he swallowed everything, and pill time was over.

I know that there are other options for us, including getting the medication compounded into a liquid form, getting it compounded into treats itself, or for some medications, purchasing transdermal gel that gives the medication through the skin. But I thankfully don’t have to go any of those routes to get medication into Pierre. For now, at least, he is eating his daily pills and is happy about it. Hopefully he won’t be in on this secret for a long, long time.