Cats prone to hairballs

Author: VioVet
Published: Friday 1st March 2013

Our customer asked:

We have 2 ragdolls a boy and a girl born on 20 august 2004, they will be 9
in august. I wonder if you could help at all, we did feed our cats on origen, for
quite a long while, but the cats always used to get a lot of fur balls, and
on our last visit to the vet the girl seemed to be a little on the heavy
side, while the boy, seems to be more bony.

We changed to royal canin indoor and then royal canine indoor long hair 35,
they were fine for a couple of months, and then the boy was being sick,
until it became everyday. So we spoke to the nurse at the vet who deals with
nutritional advice, so we put him on royal canine vet diet sensitivity
control, to make sure it was the food making him sick and not anything else.
He is perfectly fine in himself, and always whining when hungry, even after
being sick within a little while he would be looking for food and whining.
So this food seemed fine for 8 or so weeks and then he started being sick
again, but just watery greeny discharge, not his dinner. That went on very 2
or 3 days for the last 2 weeks. Speaking to royal canine, they sent us a bag of the long hair 35 again to
test him, they could not see why he would vomit his dinner up on that brand,
(their thinking was the food bag we had was quite big and being left open
for too long could be the reason) !!!!! could not really understand their
thinking, so we tried it again by the second day, he was sick, and the third
day he brought up his dinner in the morning and evening.  This morning he was obviously very hungry, and we are at a loss as what to
do....
I have fed him some origen which we had left with some sensitivity , to try
and make the transition easier, although I only have a very small amount of
the sensitive left. Is origen ok for indoor cats ? and if we put them back on that what could we
do to avoid hair balls apart from grooming them which we do. Maybe this
high protein food is better suited to more active outdoor cats ?
Or should we just go onto royal canine indoor 27 or indoor +7 ( because of
their age)
?

Our reply:

If your cats do not vomit on Orijen Cat Food, but they do on Royal Canin, I would put up with some hairballs, and choose the Orijen above the Royal Canin diets. Long-haired cats are prone to hair balls, but they are not normally a significant problem. If your cats still vomit when on Orijen in future, then this needs http://www.viovet.co.uk/Katalax_HairballsFurballs_for_Cats/c4622/">Katalax or a similar product might be effective. Orijen is a good diet and suits cats generally very well.