Regarding the stinky wet deep litter compost, have you tried agricultural lime powder? I'm fairly sure it's hydrated lime. If it's failed and looks too deep to easily 'sow' back to health I'd remove it and start again, but it may pay to use lime and mix it through. It's also good to get some natural leaf mulch from a forest area if you have one on your property or nearby you know isn't poisoned or ecologically delicate or protected. I used shavings a couple of times but overall have stuck to nesting hay. I clean the old hay out of the nests straight onto the floor and scatter it, and just leave it to become part of the litter. Wood ash and charcoal are also useful as treatments for an overabundance of unhealthy bacteria. Of course don't use any ash known to be volatile or from treated wood, I'd guess you know that but some people don't, so just in case...
Quote: Depending on what those issues are that your vet is managing, your cat may be able to be healed. I wish you all the best with that. Cats can be such difficult patients, but they're renowned for making miraculous recoveries. My old cat's been paralyzed 5 times now, had an enormous head infection that made her temporarily mad and her head twice the size it should have been; also she's dislocated and smashed a leg and had cat flu minus vet treatment and a host of other problems. Her quality of life is good now despite all that. I wish you the same with yours. Minus the frequent mishaps of course!
With age, my once-impossible cat has become a lot wiser about letting me apply herbs to her feed and fur for whatever. She would literally do wall and ceiling runs through the house if I tried to make her swallow anything to worm her! By the time she stopped running to beg me to open a door for her to escape, there would be enormous beards of discarded foamed saliva all over the house, and one on her face. I stopped using man made products on her as a year-old cat, and amazingly enough she has lived over a decade since without being wormed once; sometimes she eats tabasco-sauced food or garlic or curry-spiced meats cooked for people, but not often enough or in large enough quantity to be counted as being assured worm removal or protection. I'd been told they must be wormed all the time, but it seems to be another common piece of misinformation.
I recently used cold-pressed neem seed oil to cure her of an almost-fatal case of blue pigeon lice. (People thought it was late stage aggressive cancer). They'd made her whole face a bleeding scab, and were progressing to other parts of her body. It looked horrific and happened in just a few months while I was living elsewhere and she was staying at my mother's. I don't know if she got the actual infection from a pigeon in the first place but she's sworn off birds now; she used to be a bird-maimer but once caged and riddled with the blue lice, pigeons got into her cage and she would not be near them, didn't even want to look at them. I had to use Levy's book to even identify what was wrong with her. I was sure it wasn't cancer. I've let her endure a lot of sub-par health due to not knowing how to treat her or being too slow to see what is wrong, and it's not easy with her being so difficult. I'm actually pretty new to using natural treatments for cats and dogs, my first dog and this now-old cat were raised to adulthood with man made wormers and flea powders. No good.
Initially I was skeptical of many of the things I read in Levy's books. (Too simple to be true, surely!) But I tried remedies she recommended and I now vouch for them. I do think however we are moving beyond her general sphere of knowledge and more layers need to be added, if you know what I mean, due to our modern medicines, genetics, the environmental situation, the pharmaceutical influences, and all the changes that have occurred to the genetics of plants, animals, diseases and parasites alike since her time.
For example it will be of limited use (or even give unpredictable results) to treat animals with genetically modified plants or ornamentally bred herbs. I know the popular and naive argument for genetic modification is that it's 'no different from what farmers have been doing for thousands of years as they selected their breeding stock' but that one's easily shot down because they could only breed what naturally bred together, not mix genes from completely divergent organisms like birds with swine and herbs with poisonous insect genes. No farmer managed to breed a goat into producing human milk proteins, nor did any farmer manage to breed a spring onion into growing an ear of corn. Today we have all these 'wonders'. Combining different organisms is not remotely anything our bodies are able to adapt to. It's literally russian roulette being played beneath the surface. New studies show GM soy proteins remain in your stomach indefinitely, having joined with your cells and replicating 'alien' DNA therein.
Each plant contains the correct balance of properties and compounds that allow the plant to be correctly and beneficially processed; now that's being altered with no restraint except what fails to be commercially viable as the guiding principle. These genetically modified plants are altered beyond trustworthy performance as nutritional and medicinal items by being combined with other plant's and animal's DNA. If it naturally combines, it's a 'coherent' organism and our organism can process it, but the artificially combined organisms we eat and feed to our animals, like most soy or other plants that are spliced with toxic plants and bacteria, are not 'coherent' nor are they able to be safely synthesized by our systems, hence some of the failures of some attempted modern herbal remedies. With the modern state of affairs very much in mind, I attempt to be careful about my plant sources, and if one herb doesn't work to cure what it always has before throughout history, I don't give up on that cure, I source a different strain of the same herb. So far that's been a very successful approach. If anyone tries a herbal cure and gets no result, I urge them to source the same herb from a different place and try again. Cats especially are good at convincing people their treatments are killing them, but they too respond well to natural care.
All the best wishes for the future of your cat and everyone else who has one too. And all the other animals.
