Updated On October 1, 2019
Jonah is an American shorthair, brown, classic, bullseye tabby with symmetrical markings, four white feet, a white chest, and a very pretty face with very big, light grey-green eyes. He's called a bullseye because of the circle on both sides. He was born on April 1, 2012, and we brought him home 2 months later on June 1, 2012. On his first visit to the vet, we had the PetLink ID chip implanted. In the first picture, Jonah was one year old and weighed 14 pounds. We quit feeding Jonah any dry food after he was one year old because we discovered that he had a genetic predisposition to developing Struvite crystals in his urine due to a lack of water in his diet. These Struvite crystals caused the lining of his bladder to become irritated and this caused the cells in the lining of his bladder to slough off and encapsulate the crystals. These clumps of cells blocked the urine flow from his bladder to his urethra and he almost exploded and died. Male cats have a longer and narrower urethra and are more susceptible to problems with Struvite crystals. Cats are carnivorous animals and I discovered that they are supposed to get about 80% of their moisture from their food. The bottom line is that dry foods exist for the convenience of the owner and not the health of the pet.
We have a motorized fountain filled with reverse-osmosis water to encourage him to increase his fluid intake. We feed Jonah an exclusive diet of Weruva human-grade wet cat food. We give him two 6-ounce cans every day and rotate between over 20 of their flavors. Weruva says that their human-grade food tastes so good that you might want to feed it to your cat. I put Alaskan Salmon oil on his wet food every morning and his coat is unbelievably soft and shiny. If you stroke his coat 50 times, not even one hair will come off on your hand.
I had already bought the CitiKitty toilet training system before we brought him home and started training him to use the toilet on his first day. CitiKitty recommends using a non-scented, wheat-based, kitty litter (We really like Swheat fast-clumping kitty litter) so it can be flushed without damaging the sewer system and Jonah wouldn't miss the perfumed smell of the litter when he completed his training. The tray holding the litter was placed under the toilet seat and, over a period of five months, larger and larger holes were cut in the tray until there was a very little piece of the tray and no litter remaining. Finally, the tray was removed and the training was finished. The secret is incrementalism. As the old saying goes: How do you eat an elephant? The answer: One bite at a time! We didn't set an arbitrary time limit but proceeded to cut larger holes in the tray when he was comfortable with the last change. We bought several terry-cloth covers to put on the seat so that he would have something to grip with his feet. Jonah is six years old and still gets really excited when he sees the toilet flush. We could get a motion sensor that would automatically flush the toilet but Jonah might use it too much and our water bill would skyrocket. Also, for Jonah’s health reasons, we like to monitor the quantity and quality of his pee and poop.
As soon as Jonah does something in one of our two bathrooms, he pesters us until he gets his treat. Jonah is a little con-man and sometimes he wants to get paid when nothing happens. We haven't been able to teach him how to point and so we have to check both bathrooms in order to verify that he deserves to be paid.
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