Sick Outside Cats

One of my more vexing problems has been the health of my outside cats.  Some might think of these as barn cats but I don't have a barn and garage cats just does not sound as good as outside cats.  I have been feeding them twice a day with good quality cat food from Purina.  They also get a little cows milk with each meal (I know cows milk may not be the best for them but they sure do love it.)  Because they are outside cats and were here when I got here they are not the friendliest cats.  I can pet most of them when they are eating and that is the only time.  Because they would be very hard to catch and because of the expense, I have not taken them to the Vet.  I have done a lot of research and I have diagnosed them with  Feline Herpes Virus (FHV).  Basically its a cold usually not fatal to older cats, but it killed almost all of the kittens this year.  The best advice that I could find was to give the cats antibiotic treatment.  The purpose of the treatment is to get the cats as healthy as possible so that their immune system can deal with the virus.  Because of the wild nature of these cats I know that I can not treat individually them so I decided the best way would be to find something that I could put in their milk.  So I went to my local Tractor Supply Company (TSC) and bought Duramycin 10  because it was the only antibiotic that could be put in the food.  The bag had dosages for several animals but not cats and not dogs.  So back to the internet for research and I found one question about a sick cat that got answered.  It gave a dosage to use for cats.  That magic number was 10mg per pound of cat.  The 10 in Duramycin 10 means that there is 10 grams of antibotic in the bag which means that there is 10,000 mg per bag or enough to treat a 1000 pound cat in one dose.  Since the approximate weight of all of may cats together is 35 pounds I will needed 350mg per dose which means that I can get  28 doses out of a bag.  But I did not have a scale and because I could not find the Duramycin mg to teaspoon conversion I carefully divided out the entire bag of Duramycin into teaspoons and my count was 26 which according to me means that each teaspoon has approximately 380mg of Duramycin.  That is close enough to 350mg for what I am doing, so that means that each morning I am going to give my outside cats one teaspoon of Duramycin in their milk until the bag is gone which will take 26 days.  I will keep you informed about their progress.  So if anyone else out there is wanting to try and use this information to help out their feline friends the teaspoon is not level and is not heaping.  by using fractional teaspoon measures you should be able to adjust the dosage to get close to close to the 10mg per pound number.  If you decide to treat your feline friends with antibiotic be sure and not stop the treatment prematurely, that could cause the antibiotic to be ineffective the next time you need it.  I have included at the bottom of this post the links to information I found to be useful.  I would have rather used herbs but there was almost no information that I could find.  I have included a link to one article that sounded good, I just could not use it.

Have a great day today, may you and all of yours be well
Chris

Update 25 November 2009:  The cats are doing well, very little stuff in their eyes and noses, and I have not heard a cat sneeze in the last two weeks.  I conside this a success.

The page that has the 10mg per pound suggestion.
This page has some Feline Herpes Virus (FHV) information.
Upper Respiratory Infections in Cats: An Integrative Approach