Feline Leukemia Virus (FeLV)

Hey OP

Sorry to hear your mog has FeLV.

In order to beat the virus, the cat needs a strong immune system. The best place for an immune system boost is diet and supplementation. This may be helpful alongside whatever the vet is prescribing to treat the cat.

First, you will need to keep your cat indoors only if you're not already doing that. He needs to be indoors or in a restricted outdoor enclosure for the rest of his life, otherwise he will pass FeLV on to other people's roaming cats.

The two supplements I would try with his food are two amino acids: L-lysine and Taurine. Both are available quite widely - L-Lysine is usually on the health food shelves, and Taurine is a little more specialist but again body building shops often have it.

L-lysine helps the cat fight the symptoms associated with the feline herpes virus and it boosts recovery from respiratory tract infections, sneezes, snuffles and runny eyes. It can also help protect from reinfection. I'm not sure if your mog is suffering herpes along with everything else but he may well be, and that's what could be working in tandem with FeLV to give him the permanent snufflies.

Taurine is an amino acid that is vital for cats to live. It comes from muscle meat, and is heavily supplemented in manufactured petfood (because a lot of petfood protein comes through plant material which contains no taurine and they have to supplement.)

L-lysine is usually sold in tablet form, about 500mg per tablet. Taurine is sold in powdered form. In both cases, initially I'd supplement about 1/3 of the L-lysine tablet and 1/3 of a teaspoon of taurine over the cat's food once a day. Crush the tablet with a spoon and mix through the food.

Also consider what kind of food you're feeding your boy. With the kidney problems and everything else I'd consider going right back to basics - but you'll need the support of your vet. I feed mine a daily mix of a small amount of top quality kibble with few fillers, a medium amount of good commercial wet food and a large amount of raw meat with fat, sometimes with bone and skin if I can get it.

For kibble I'm currently preferring Royal Canin - they have types that don't use any corn as filler. Commercial I buy anything that lists beef or chicken as the main protein source, with no fish in it. Raw I feed beef, veal, lamb's hearts, mutton, kangaroo meat, ox hearts and raw chicken carcasses for bone (calcium and phosphorous).

I have to say I wouldn't feed an underweight cat that's struggling with his kidneys a kibble-only diet. I'd see if I could persuade him to move to raw as much as I could. (There's an argument that too much protein is bad for kidneys, but I still think that a source of species-appropriate protein - e.g. not corn on the cob and rice - is far better for your cat than vegetable by-products).

I used L-Lysine extensively with a few of my cats when I got them first because they were shocking snufflers with weeping eyes, sneezes and coughs. The L-Lysine did something that repeated courses of vibravet just didn't do - it built up their immunity and stopped the symptoms. At the time we had a three-cat household and every time one of them improved, they'd pass the virus on to the other two. The L-Lysine treatment initially took about three months total to have a considerable effect (lots of symptoms to none at all) and a further three months to really seem to kick the virus away for good. After that I would supplement L-Lysine before an upcoming stressful event - a move, for instance. Now the eldest cats are almost three years and have had no snuffling symptoms since we finally kicked them two years ago.

The taurine supplementation appears to do only good things. Bright eyes, shining coats, good muscle tone.

Good luck with Jasper. I'm a firm believer that excellent diet, appropriate supplementation where needed and enforced stress-free rest and lots of love does a whole lot to improve the health and wellbeing of our animals.

No worries - just an aside, as you mention your dogs eating tinned meat and putting aside for the cat too, never feed a commercially produced petfood designed for a dog to a cat, and never feed catfood to a dog either.

Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they have to eat meat to live. Many of the proteins, amino acids and vitamins a cat needs to maintain its body, it can ONLY get from eating meat, organs, skin and bone. For instance, I've read up that cats cannot synthesise vitamin A from beta-carotene - so in other words, while if humans eat carrots, they can get a lot of vitamin A from them because our bodies can use the beta-carotene in carrots to make vitamin A, cats can't do that. They have to have vitamin A, so they have to eat liver.

There is a lot of offal in petfood - hearts, livers, tongues, cuts that aren't so commercially viable for the retail industry. Also cats have to have taurine, arginine, phosphorous, calcium, vitamins A and D, so on... All of those things will be added to a commerical petfood in different proportions for a cat as than for a dog.

Cats evolved eating rodents, birds, lizards and insects. Dogs evolved eating rodents, rabbits, and medium to large mammals. The proportion of skin to bone to organs is different in those animals, and over hundreds of thousands of years, evolution to maximise benefit from those food sources is what has given us our modern day cats and dogs.

The upshot is that if you feed dogfood to a cat over a long period, or catfood to a dog over a long period, you will create imbalances in the animals' systems, namely deficiencies in some things and excesses in others.

You can feed the same raw meats to both animals (in different proportions and volumes), but don't switch species-specific commercial wet food or kibble between your pets.

(As a random aside - cat food can be a lot higher in calories than dog food. I've heard of a vet asking someone who owned a tiny teacup sized puppy - extra mini yorkie or some abomination like that - to feed it catfood in the short term, because its stomach couldn't get the sustenance it needed from the volume of dogfood it was able to hold.)

Sorry to hear about Jasper - but it's good news that the remaining fuzzball is FeLV-free so I wish you and the other cat much happiness going forwards!