Smokey's Unexplained Weight Loss - Update

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Another update on Smokey's Unexplained Weight Loss

It's been awhile since I posted about Smokey's weight loss because I thought I had the answer to putting some weight on him. To bring everyone uptodate, Smokey started losing weight for no apparent reason about 2 years ago. He originally weighed a little over 16 lbs without an ounce of fat. I had adopted him at 13 weeks of age after he and his litter mates had been found in the bathroom of a hockey arena. He was the size and weight of an 8 week old kitten but had gained some weight since arriving at my vets office and was ready for adoption.

He has always had a problem of eating anything that isn't nailed down, whether edible or not, cleaning plates, eating dog food, tearing open bags of food left outside a cupboard, cat food, human food...anything he could get his mouth around. He also has been vomiting daily since I adopted him but only started losing weight 2 yrs ago. He also got along better with my dogs than my cats and earned the nickname Smoke-doggie. When I noticed the weight loss I took him to the vet, his exam was normal and a variety of blood work done to rule out anything that could be causing his weight loss. All blood work and other tests were absolutely normal then and each time it's been repeated since then. His weight at first was 13.5lbs and by the time I found the Grammy's he weighed 11.3 lbs. still with exam and all tests normal. He had always liked Iams dry (I know... terrible food) and FF wet, with no particular flavour that he would eat more than others.

To make a long story shorter, despite his affinity for anything edible, I went through a variety of canned food trying to find one, that 1) didn't cause vomiting, and 2) he liked better than anything else. I finally settled on Merrick's Grammy's Pot Pie after trying a variety of foods and most of the Merrick's canned food. He seemed to love the stuff and would eat it every day without fail. He even was preferring it to canned food and the best thing was he didn't barf at all. He gained weight and was 12.8lbs the last time I took him for a weigh in. Then he all of a sudden decided he wouldn't touch the Grammy's or any other wet food. Even if I sprinkled grated cheese or parmesan cheese on it. I went back to testing different brands without any success and he felt skinnier than he had been. Finally two weeks ago I bought some FF chicken, as he seemed to like the Grammy's and it was primarily chicken and veggies and he dove into it in a big way. However he wasn't eating much of the food, just the liquid. He also liked FF Turkey Feast. I didn't really care about the quality of the food at that point, I was more interested in getting him to eat wet food at all.

He was eating dry food but would not touch any type of Wellness dry but would eat Innova Senior dry but not the wet with or without the grated cheese. He was also barfing again on a semi-regular basis before I reintroduced the FF. He was also getting RC Urinary SO dry because one of my other cats is on it, but it definitely made him barf so I supervised his eating. Unfortunately I couldn't get him to stop cleaning human food plates nor stealing other food he happened to find, especially dog food. I also started restricting the Urinary SO to only the cat who is on it and only putting it out when the other cat was hungry.

Anyway Smokey has now been eating a small amount of FF Chicken and FF Turkey Feast for a week and it's too early to tell if he's going to gain any weight with it, but he hasn't barfed for a couple of days. I tried sprinkling grated cheddar on his FF to see if I could get him to eat more of the food and the next night I tried parmesan cheese on the FF Turkey Feast and he ate most of one can each night. So I plan to try this every night but I suspect he's going to get tired of it as he did the Grammy's.

I plan to take him back to the vet in August and hopefully he'll have gained a few ounces by then. I'm not sure what he weighs now, but I'm going by how much skin and fur I can grasp on his back and his ribs.

Does anyone have other suggestions of foods that he might like. He seems to eat poultry products but not the fish ones. During my food testing I gave him sardines, tuna and tuna juice, salmon and salmon juice from the can and none of them attracted his attention a second time. He also didn't really touch them the first time either. I also tried a small amount of raw beef and raw chicken, but he also wasn't the least interested in that.