EMERGENCY CIRCUMSTANCES: Low Humidity & Your Pets

A local vet clinic here has seen a dramatic uptick in the number of cases of cats with urinary and kidney problems since Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2009, some requiring surgery. They hadn't seen any cases in 8 months, then suddenly, over the last 3 days, there's apparently been nearly a dozen, one of them being one of our cats, Arlo!

In bringing Arlo home to recuperate last night, getting him to drink is not much problem, but urinating is another thing.  You can't pee if you don't have enough to go through your kidneys in the first place.

Where's it all going?

We realized that this problem may correlate to excessive low humidity due to the recent extreme cold temperatures, and dry beautiful skies as we have here.  The humidity in my home is 30%, and that's with humidification techniques, best as we can manage.  It's just 32% r/h outside right now as well.  Everything is still frozen.  Even if I boil hot water, it won't vaporize and disperse, it just evaporates, so a humidifier won't work any better for now.

The best way to keep yourselves and your pets hydrated is to simply drink more water.   Unfortunately, that's not so easy to get your pets to do.  Here's the recommendations from the vet:

• Place multiple bowls of fresh water around the house, and keep changing them out a couple of times per day.  You'll be surprised at how they'll drink from a new bowl more readily than the same old bowl they usually drink from!

•  Put the stoppers in your bathtubs and sinks, and fill sinks and tubs with a little water for evaporation.  If you can place a tray of water in the sun, or in front of a fan, this will create some evaporation.  Evaporation is based on the surface area of the water, so more surface area, more opportunity for evaporation. 

• Use a syringe if you have one, to gently force a little water into your pets, every hour or so until this weather breaks.

As for Arlo, when I did the syringe, I thought he'd have a cow. He wanted more, and quite happily took three more syringe-fulls right away.  The other cats were just as cooperative, once they realized it was just water.  And Charley the Wonder Dog too.

Good luck - I know many of you all over the country are dealing with similar weather conditions, I doubt many of us realized that this could be a problem for our pets in this manner.

If you have any questions, leave a comment, I'll try to help in any way I can!