Alleviating feline stress with nutrition and supplements

Christopher Pachel, DVM, DACVB, CABC, sat down with dvm360 to discuss the role of nutrition and supplements in reducing stress in felines ahead of his lecture Top Tips for Stress-Associated Conditions in Cats, to be presented at Fetch Coastal in Atlantic City. In this interview, Pachel highlighted the importance of reducing stress in cats through targeted dietary strategies and palatable supplements that these felines will actually take.

Below is the interview transcript:

Christopher Pachel, DVM, DACVB, CABC: I love thinking about both nutrition and supplements, especially for cats because, you know, yes, we can look at the environment, we can look at enrichment, we can look at training, we can do all of those things, and when we're seeing that level of stress for those cats, anything that we can do to help their body shake off some of that stress and actually relax and be more comfortable while they're learning through those other strategies is super helpful.

And when it comes to providing some of that support, we're only going to...well it's only going to make a difference for those cats if we can get it into them, right? And so sometimes the process of trying to give them medication, even if we go down the pathway of compounding—and yes, we'll talk about that in the lecture as well—but if it's something that is palatable enough that they're willing to take it as a treat, or there are ingredients within their food, for example, that we're already pre-supplementing with ingredients like alpha casozepine or L theanine or tryptophan, some of those stress-reducing ingredients, we can get it into the cat in a way that's really meaningful. And by all means, we may also need to use some sort of medications or other supplements but making it as palatable and easy to administer as possible, for me, is one of the real attributes for some of our supplement and nutritional based approaches.