Parasites: Oh No, My Cat Has Worms!

His mood is normally very friendly, content, and pleasant. He greets me at the door when I come home, and he is very affectionate. He usually talks when he is hungry, or when something interesting is going on. I know the sound of his voice, and I know when his voice has changed.

But things were different this past week. He acted agitated, aggressive, and unfriendly. He wanted to go outside all the time. He was constantly asking for more food. He was vocalizing in a wild, desperate tone that told me something was terribly wrong.

Then he vomited. As if to show me, he vomited on the kitchen floor, loudly and with much shrieking. It was a large pile of his normal Meow Mix dry food, orange and brown in color and half-digested, looking much like it does in the box, except there was a new ingredient I did not recognize. Long, white and stringy, it looked like shredded onions mixed in with the Meow Mix. And the pile smelled awful.

As I cleaned up the mess I took a paper towel and picked up one of the "onions" for closer examination. As I stared at it I saw it move and wiggle like a worm. It was alive!

Well, the mess was not a problem. I flushed the vomit down the toilet and sprayed some Resolve on the carpet, and the stain and smell came right up.

Next I headed to my laptop to investigate. I googled "cat worms" and found a page with nice clear pictures of exactly the same wiggling worm I had held only moments before in the paper towel. It said "Roundworms - toxocara cati - are the most common intestinal parasites in cats." There were also tapeworms, which are more flat and segmented --

Apparently cats can get worms several different ways. They can get them from their mother while nursing. They can get them by eating mice and rats that are infected. And they can get them from fleas.

Junior is a hunter, and only a month ago he found and killed two or three mice. I never saw the carcasses, so I assume he ate them. Bingo!, I thought. He got the worms from the mice.

So I set out to find a veterinarian. I put Junior in the bathroom with a towel and some water, where he shrieked and cried out in that unfamiliar voice for hours while I flipped through the phone book and got his carrier ready. I found "The Cat Hospital of Durham," which looked fantastic because it was cats only, and located only a few miles away. The advertisement said "Appointments or emergencies." This was definitely an emergency.

The veterinarian, Dr. Kirsch, was amazing. She worked me right in, then explained that Junior may have gotten the worms from eating the mouse but probably had some anyways since he was a kitten, as he has never been de-wormed before. She fed him a mouthful of green cream in a syringe, which must have been sour-tasting because he made a displeased face. I took home a second helping of green cream to feed him two weeks from now.

The whole procedure was under 100 dollars, and I have decided that Junior will not eat mice any more if I can help it. I am going to keep him indoors. I am also going to start feeding him a different brand of food that Dr. Kirsch recommended, but I'll write more on that in my next article.

So watch for symptoms like excessive appetite and frenetic, wild behavior; feel for a bloated stomach, or listen for changes in your cat's voice and mood. These may be subtle signs that she has worms. Of course, the surest thing to do is get your cat de-wormed regularly, about twice a year, starting as a kitten. This is especially important if she goes outside and hunts like Junior does, or has fleas, as these are means of transmitting a worm infection.

Another sure sign of infection is if the litter smells unusually foul. That's a dead giveaway. For some reason the worms make the poop stink... Isn't that a pleasant closing thought?