| As some of you may know, I started a thread about my Samba's urinary tract
| infection last week. I want to thank all of you who responded to that
thread
| for a lot of useful information!
|
| I had a conversation with a friend, Clive, who had an idea for an unusual
| treatment for urinary crystals today and wanted to see if anyone here knew
| whether this might work.
|
| Clive said that a very promising treatment for the equivalent disease in
| humans, kidney stones, was to give the patient cranberry juice, which did
a
| wonderful job of balancing the patient's pH and dissovling the stone. He
| wondered if the same thing - or a cranberry pill, which apparently also
| exists - might possibly work for cats.
|
| I thought I'd ask here since neither Clive nor I has any idea if cats can
| safely consume cranberry juice. Does anyone know if cranberry juice is
| dangerous to cats or if it has ever been tried for reducing urinary
crystals
| (Struvite)?
|
| If it is safe and does work, does anyone know if cats will willingly drink
| cranberry juice or would it be a matter of forcing them to take the
| cranberry pills?
|
| I'm certainly not going to try this until I hear from people that it is
safe
| and even then I will probably double check with the vet just to be
| absolutely sure. But I don't want to waste the vet's time if cranberry
juice
| is known to be toxic to cats or shown to be completely ineffective with
| struvite crystals.
|

Cranberry juice is fine for cats - just do a google search with Cat and
cranberry in the search field.

Concentrated cranberry capsules might be better than trying to get your cat
to drink juice.