What do you do when your cat won’t eat? What are the causes? What are the solutions, apart from the veterinary ones, which aren’t always helpful? How long can you wait? Should you force fed your cat?

These are relevant concerns that run through most peoples minds when they are confronted with this situation. 

Healthy cats have a good appetite. They are opportunists, as in the wild the situation can be feast or famine. This means, it’s best to make the most of a feast situation. This can help them through the famines when food is scarce.

Digestion takes up a large amount of energy. When a cat is not feeling well, either acutely or chronically, they need that extra energy to help heal themselves. So they stop eating.

When they recover, which can be quite quick in most acute situations, their appetite returns.

In chronic situations, this is likely to be a slower process, so the cat is taken to a vet. In most cases, the cat is given an anti-nausea medication, which does nothing to help the cause. This is understandable to a degree, as the cause can be difficult to establish in the early days. In addition, cats are stoic so they don’t give much away.

However, an anti-nausea drug is totally disrespectful to the cat's innate wisdom of healing. In addition, it is likely to add to the existing problem, rather than resolve it. All drugs have a deleterious effect on the immune system of anyone who takes them.

It’s more intelligent to look at causes.

Most cats are fed commercial cat food. This is totally unsuitable for cats. The content is high in plant based food. But as cats are carnivores, this is highly unsuitable. Not only are the ingredients wrong for our carnivorous friends, the quality is poor. Cats need good quality food. They don’t do well on the ‘waste’ that invariably ends up in pet food.

In addition, there are synthetic chemicals to flavour, colour, preserve and address the shortfall of the known lack of nutrients. 

Cats are very sensitive to chemicals. Far more so than we are. Problems accumulate.

In effect, commercial cat food causes a slow decline in cats health. It keeps them alive, but it doesn’t keep them healthy. Since that’s all they get, they tend to eat it. Until they can’t any more. That’s when your cat won’t eat, at a chronic level.

Force feeding your cat is detrimental. It’s not addressing anything other than making you feel better because you’re doing something.

Changing your cat’s diet to one they evolved on, one that they can easily digest and assimilate, one that is naturally nutrient rich, can have a dramatically positive effect on their appetite.

Depending on what treatments your cat has received and how long this refusal of food has been going on, as well as on various other factors, your cat may not take to a new diet easily. You may still need some help. But are drugs the answer?

Drugs tend not to deal with causes. Instead, the best they can do is to mask the problem, suppress the symptoms. A better alternative is to use the services of a professional homeopath. A homeopath looks at the whole situation, your cat’s personal symptoms, which are their unique expressions of an imbalance, their past history and any possible causes.

A good homeopathic prescription will restore the health of your cat, so that now you can get on with converting the diet to a healthy one. After all, you don’t want the same thing to happen again.

When your cat won’t eat, take that as a call for help. Don’t just mask the issue with a drug. Work with a professional homeopath and together take a deep dive into causes and effective, natural solutions. The long term results are well worth it.