A week ago today, my beautiful orange and white tiger boy, just 11 months old, died.  His name is Sampson and he had a horrible start in life.  Last summer a neighbor threw him out (with his brother, Jonas) at about 4 weeks because she thought they were dying.  Somehow Jonas made it safely to my yard and I took the boys in.  They were very, very sick but we worked hard all summer to get them stable and healthy.  In spite of horrendous worms, anemia, fleas, tons of medicine, bloody diarrhea, etc they were the most lovable, happy, playful babies.  In the fall I took them to live with my niece because one of my cats will be very aggressive with new cats.  My niece told me last Saturday that the boys had been tearing around, the 4:00 am "crazies" and they heard a loud sound.  A bit later, they found Sampson dead.  He must have fallen and died.  It is truly breaking my heart.  He fought so hard to get well and never complained about anything to have this happen.  I just cannot believe he's gone.  I miss him so much . . .  He rests under a big oak next to a pond in a beautiful area.
Thank you for giving me a place to share Sampson's story.

We're still with the Cal Nat.  They all seem to like it really well, eating it enthusiastically.  Gracie, the barfer, had another round of vomiting but it definitely was food and had a bit of fur in it.  She is a long haired tuxedo and that's probably part of it.  Poor girl sees me coming and dives under the couch, I've been fussing with her so much.

I am going to have to trust Natura that they are being honest with us!

Purina is still going strong in the midwest.

Don't know if this is the place to ask this, but I contacted Natura about phosphorus levels of the Cal Nat.  The ingredient list on the website said .79% and today she emailed me another, much higher, percentage.  Of course I emailed her back immediately about the discrepancy.  Is there a formula or other statistical glitch that I'm not aware of?  .79 is reasonable for a recovering ARF kidden, but over that is not!  If you don't know, any ideas who might?  I printed the information from the website for my vet to look over and she said it looked okay (at .79%).  YIKES!!!  I'm running out of patience here and I really don't want to get into home cooked for 5 cats (and I'm a vegetarian so don't even have meat in my house).
Thanks

That's the vomit ~ clear but frothy that my ARF kidden had and massive amounts of it.  The date was 12.2?.07 so it's a different batch from yours.  When I fed the cats tonight everyone has eaten some and no problems.  Hope it was just an upset tummy and that a little Pepcid has helped.
Regardless, I was impressed with the way that Natura handled my concerns.

[large]

There was a small speck of orangish frothy vomit and a large area of partially digested food with some chunks, but not the whole chunks like when they eat too fast (with five cats we have done lots of different vomits :[ ).  I picked up all the food dishes ~ with five cats looking at me with a "what now?" look. 

Just got off the phone with Veronica at Natura and explained the situation. She said they have not had any other concerns, calls or emails.  Again, she reassured me that they test ALL ingredients(before and after processing), do NOT use the same supplier as Natural Balance and took all the information off the bag with instructions to save 2 cups for them to test.

I am going to exchange the Cal Nat for a bag with a different code(batch) and give it another try.  Also gave the sick kidden some Pepcid and hope that it's not anything in the food.  I am living with a recovering ARF cat right now, so have done the kidney failure/anorexia/anemia/tube feeding, etc for 5 months now.  I hope and pray that this is not happening again.

Will keep you posted.

I just posted on the Cal Nat thread - one of my five cats has vomited a huge amount this morning and I opened a bag of Cal Nat chicken and rice this weekend.  This scares me to death!

One of my cats vomited a large amount this morning ~ fairly new bag of Cal Nat.  I have a call into Natura.  I am simply running out of options here and  I'm going nutso trying to feed my cats a safe, healthy food!

On PetConnection.com someone talked about contacting Natural Balance to find out what was going on and she was told it was the rice gluten that was the problem.  So I called Natura and was assured that they buy only US ingredients, make the dry in their own plant in Nebraska and that they do extensive testing of all ingredients.  The woman I spoke with seemed very knowledgeable and was sympathetic to my concerns.  So I'm going to stay with Cal Nat . . . unless I have reason not to.

Hi,
I'm new to this but thought I'd share my experiences.  My 11 year old cat was one of the earlier victims of the food recall, going into acute renal failure the end of  November.  She had been eating Nutro Natural Choice, Purina One (wet) and some pouches and cans to "whet" her appetite.  Now that she has survived her ordeal, I wanted to find something other than the Eukanuba prescription diet she was given.  We have started Cal Natural and all five of my guys seem to like it really well. I chose it for a lot of reasons~ not Menu Foods and the assurance that they will pull their wet foods from MF, ingredients seem better than some others, and the phosphorus level is lower, which is important for my renal kitty.  For what it's worth . . .
Catmom5