Cat Won't Eat = Danger

How Starvation Should Work

In theory, animals are designed to accommodate periods when food is plentiful and times when it is not.

When food is plentiful, the animal eats more and stores the extra away as fat, distributed around various parts of the body.

When food is scarce, the body fat can be "burned" to provide fuel. Body fat is like saving your money in the bank for a rainy day.

In extreme cases, when the fat is gone, muscle mass may be "burned" to keep the animal going long enough to find more food.

At least, that's the theory.

When Starvation Goes Wrong

Cats can get liver damage from not eating, even for just a day or two. Basically, some cats don't starve properly.

When a cat stops eating, the body will start to use its fat stores as fuel. The old body fat stores are mobilized to the liver, which should initiate fat burning. But when the fat arrives at the liver, the liver does not burn the fat efficiently and fat often accumulates in the liver.

The resulting liver disorder is technically known as "hepatic lipidosis", commonly known as "fatty liver disease" (it may also be called "fatty degeneration of the liver" or "fatty infiltration of the liver"). This condition may be suggested when blood tests show impaired liver function. It is often confirmed by taking a needle biopsy of the liver.

Getting fatty liver disease as a result of fasting is not isolated only to cats. And fasting cats don't always get this condition. Cats just seem more prone than most animals to getting fatty liver disease when they don't eat.

Prevention

The best way to prevent fatty liver disease (hepatic lipidosis) and other problems associated with not eating is to keep your cat eating.

We have some suggestions on getting a cat to eat, but if you don't have success right away, you need to get to a veterinarian fast.

Cure

If you get the cat eating in time, you might not even know how close you came to unpleasant consequences. In cases where fatty liver disease is established and the cat is not eating enough to reverse the problem, you may have to insert a feeding tube.

Cod Liver Oil For Fatty Liver Disease?

Occasionally a neighborhood stray like Bandit presents me with problems that I have to solve without the professional help of a veterinarian. [I have learned over the years that catching him to take him to the vet is not an option. The only way I'm going to get him to the vet is if his condition is so poor that the vet is unlikely to be able to help.]

In the spring of 2005, Bandit stopped eating as a result of a mange infection. I had some small amount of luck getting him to eat, but worried that he wasn't getting enough food. This multiplied my worries to (in order): fatty liver disease, starvation, and mange.

Then I stumbled on an article then describes an experiment on genetically engineered mice that developed fatty liver disease when they were deprived of dietary fat. The research suggests that the liver must be supplied with some amount of new fat, in order to properly burn old fat.

If this is true, then getting Bandit to eat some fat might help his liver burn fat so that he will "starve properly". But how to get him to eat fat?

Then I remembered a correspondant in India who managed to get her cats to consume Ivermectin by mixing it with cod liver oil. She said that they loved it. And I remembered that when my friend David was young, he had fed his cat cod liver oil. The cat loved it and developed a fine coat.

So I have formed a theory that cod liver oil should be an important part of Bandit's diet while he is recovering.

cats should like it
it may prevent, slow down, or reverse fatty liver disease
it has a lot of food energy (calories)
it is high in vitamin A
it contains some vitamin D and E

Cod liver oil should probably not be given as a regular supplement, as it risks overdosing the animal on vitamin A.