I have a 3 year old Bengal cat. For almost a year now I have been battling a sensitive stomach with her. She has constant diarrhea and now barely uses the liter box and goes on my carpet or in any clothes left on the floor or on my suede couch. I have taken her to the vet and spent thousands of dollars trying to fix this problem and can't seem to come to a solution. I took her to the vet when the problem got real bad last year and they did multiple tests and found nothing wrong but a larger air bubble in her large intestine. The vet chalked it up to being a gastro problem and told me the only thing to do is learn how to manage it. They put her on a series of medications incase she did have of any kind. That didnt help at all, so we tried switching her diet to a prescription Royal Canin hypoallergenic food and that didn't work. I took her back to the vet and they switched her to Royal Canin Gastro food and thats not working either. I have tried almost every food out there including probiotics and mixing that with dehydrated rabbit, I have tried a raw food diet and numerous other brands of food. Nothing is working and the problem is getting worse. If someone has any kind of suggestion please help!!

Lyndsey, welcome to the forum. I hope some members here can try to help your situation. I'm sure your kitty is overcome by stress -- due to the medical condition and the fact that you, yourself, are probably stressed to the max over this. Know that cats prefer to use a litter box. If you have only one, then get another or two more and place them around the house. Some cats prefer open litter boxes, others prefer closed. And cats have a certain cat litter they may prefer. That being said, you're blaming her litter box habits on her medical condition. How did the vet determine there was an air bubble? If every test you did came back normal, did they do a CT scan? Or some type of scan showing the insides of the cat? Personally, I'd see another vet for a second opinion. Irritable bowel syndrome is common in bengals.

Read through this article on how one woman cured her kitty: http://www.naturalcatcareblog.com/2012/ ... t-by-food/

The last thing you want to do is self-diagnose a problem and it might not be that, however, diet can definitely help or hurt a condition. You want your little girl to feel better -- it can't be easy on her. Nobody likes to have diarrhea. I wonder, too, if perhaps she has Tritrichomonas foetus (TF). Most vets do not automatically test for that. It is a parasite that only one drug can cure it. There is obviously a medical condition going on here. I would add a couple of litter boxes and I think once you get the condition under control, the litter box habits will improve.

We have 2 kittens and experienced this at age 8 months and again at 10 months. The first time the vet gave/did a medication which basically purged their digestive track of bacteria, then pro biotics and antibotics for a week, this cleared up the problem for 2 months. Then it came back, then we took them back, loose stools, all over the house, then the vet gave us metronidozol for two weeks and it cleared up everything. Going strong for 3 months now. We took them off kitten food and Dry adult food..... Not sure if this helps.....

What is the smell like when he "goes"? Does it stink up the whole room with REALLY bad odor? If so, then I would really strongly suspect either TF or giardia. The trouble with these is that the tests can be unreliable and give both false negatives or false positives. Do you know if your cat was specifically tested for TF? (if not, or you are not sure, do some searches on the forum, for lots and lots of stories of forum members who went through this).

When my cats went through this they tested negative (just regular tests, not TF tests), and my vet decided to assume that the tests are a false negative, and treat pro-actively (for giardia, and a bunch of other parasites). It did the trick. I recall one woman on this forum go through a very similar (although much more trying) rigamaroll with TF where she had to eventually persuade a vet to ok pro-active treatment for TF without a diagnosis, and that also (thankfully) did the trick.

If the smell isn't that horrible, then maybe it is a food allergy. You say that you went on two different limited ingredient foods plus raw. How did you do this? How long was your cat on each food, exclusively, without eating any other foods? And what was the result?

_________________
The little monsters 3

Great advice added here. I hope you take your kitty back to the vet and insist on some testing for TF.

Excellent reply with some pertinent info by Sherry regarding the litter box. I have had my Bengal, Deeks, since he was three months old and he'll turn three on April 30th. When I brought him home, I had one litter box, a closed-one, located on the basement floor of a three-storey home. When Deeks was in the basement, he used the box at first but it wasn't long before he started going elsewhere. My brother, who has three Siamese cats, suggested I remove the top from the litter box and sure enough Deeks began using the box on a regular basis once again. The only thing is when Deeks was on the middle floor or the top storey, he began going on those floors as well. So I ventured out and purchased another litter box and place it on the top level of our house. Have never had an issue since as Deeks uses both boxes regularly and has never had another accident elsewhere. All made purrrrr-fect sense!