Mojo can has cheezburger?

Apologies, this post ended up much longer than I anticipated. Ah well.

You guys remember Mojo, a.k.a. Ratcat, right? The goofy cat who seems to think she will rule the world by simple being skittish around it? I'm happy to say the skittish-ness is all but gone now. I'm also happy to say that she is likely to be a much happier cat in the near future.

See, we were having problems with her food. We used to give her dry food, right up until we discovered that the dry food was making her... difficult to live with. Frankly, she smelled. Very, very bad. We could barely stand to be in the same room as her some days. Like good pet owners, we took her to a vet.

He immediately blamed her diet. He told us that not only was she on the wrong food, but that she was being given too much food. I would now like to point out that Mojo is a rather small cat. She was the runt of her litter, and she quite simply has not grown beyond what you'd expect of an older kitten / young cat. For the vet to tell us she was being overfed was, quite simply, weird. She wasn't by any stretch overweight. But, like good pet owners, we took the vet's advice and acted on it.

We changed her food. The only solution we found was to take her off the dry food entirely, so she was having wet food only. Of course, we became worried about her teeth - after all, if she's not getting any dry food, what kind of damage could that cause? We also reduced the amount of food she was eating.

And then the real trouble started.

She began scavenging. Not just grabbing birds and such from outside, like a normal outdoor cat does. I mean pulling food from people's bins and dragging it into the house to eat. We came home more than a few times to find the remains of some old bit of bread or something on our floor, and a guilty-looking poorly Mojo nearby. We could no longer leave her in a room with food, even covered up, for any time at all. (For example: I left the room once for all of ten seconds. I came back to discover she had pulled the pizza out of the box, dragged it to the floor, and started chomping. In ten seconds.)

We became increasingly concerned. Our cat was becoming obsessed with food. Even her own food was getting problematic, as she became so hungry that she couldn't wait for the bowl to be put down. She would rush up and try to knock the bowl from our hands and spill the food so she could get to it faster.

We finally got fed up, and decided that, quite simply, this vet we spoke to must be wrong, and we needed a second opinion. We decided to see a new vet this morning.

What a difference! He listened to all of our concerns, rather than immediately jumping to conclusions. He gave her a thorough look over, and confirmed our suspicions. She didn't need less food at all - he actually recommended we give her more, as she is on the thin side. He then recommended a new brand of dry food to try, Hills, saying that her intolerance to the previous dry food brands may have been down to one of the ingredients. (There was a whole list of other reasons this vet visit went so well, but I think this post is long and rambly enough.)

So far, so good. We're already giving her tiny bits of the dry food so she can get used to it, and have not had any problems. We also increased her food amount, just a little bit. She is a much happier (and fuller) cat now! (Although, she still eats incredibly fast. This evening she ate so fast that she was looking rather sorry for herself by the time she finished eating! I think she'll learn to slow down fairly soon...)