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This guide helps you triage; it does not replace your veterinarian's exam. When in doubt, call us at 514 223-1197.
Go now: these signs cancel the clock
The time frame the rest of this page talks about does not apply here. Any single one of these is enough: you do not have to tick several, and you do not have to decide which is worst. Settle your cat into his carrier, leave, and call on the way.
- He keeps going in and out of the litter box, straining, crying, and nothing comes out or only a few drops. Most people think constipation: in a straining cat we assume a urinary blockage first, and a blockage does not keep until morning. Do not decide based on which cat you have: it is far commoner in males, but females block too.
- He is breathing open-mouthed, or fast while lying quietly, or with his belly heaving on every breath, or with his neck stretched forward. Cats do not pant like dogs. Handle him as little as possible and leave him in the position he chose.
- Yellow is showing on his gums, on the whites of his eyes, or inside his ears. This is a late sign, and it hides on a cat with dark gums: do not go looking for yellow to make your decision, and not seeing it proves nothing.
- He is cold to the touch, ears and paws, in a warm house. His gums are pale. He is unsteady, collapsing, or cannot get up. These signs come late: do not wait to see them before calling.
- His back legs will not carry him, he is dragging them, he is crying out, his back paws are cold or bluish. This is not a sprain, even if you watched him jump just before.
- A thread, string, ribbon, dental floss or elastic is hanging from his mouth or his anus: NEVER PULL, not gently, not even if it seems to come freely, and do not cut anything. Leave as is.
- He may have licked, chewed or walked through something: a lily (flower, leaf, pollen left on his coat, vase water), a human painkiller, antifreeze, a dog flea product. With lilies, loss of appetite can be one of the very first visible signs. Do not make him vomit, and bring the packaging or a piece of the plant.
- He is drooling, pawing at his mouth, dropping his food. Do not try to open the mouth of a cat in pain: you risk a bite, and seeing nothing would prove nothing.
- He is a kitten. A kitten is not a small adult cat, and the time frame on this page does not apply to him: we call now, without counting hours.
- She is pregnant or nursing: she is feeding for two and has no margin at all. We do not count hours with her.
- She is unspayed and was in heat a few weeks ago: pyometra, an infection of the uterus, often starts as a flat cat who stops eating.
- He is diabetic and on insulin: call us before the next injection, even in the evening, even if it is due in an hour. Do not decide on your own to give the dose or to skip it. If he is also weak, disoriented, vomiting, breathing fast, or his breath smells oddly sweet: leave right now.
One is enough
You do not have to work out which of these matters most. If one of them speaks to you, go. If you are unsure, call anyway: triage is our job, not yours. Outside our hours a 24/7 emergency centre answers, and describing the situation on the phone costs nothing.
A cat straining in the litter box is so often mistaken for constipation that we devote a full fiche to it: lower urinary tract disease.
For poisons, the first steps by product:
What "24 to 48 hours" means, and what it does not mean
This is the marker we publish and the one we use: in an adult cat, never let more than 24 to 48 hours pass without eating. But read it the right way round. It is not a budget of time you are entitled to spend: it is the line not to reach. And you do not need to wait until you get there. At the first real meal refused, call us: we triage together, and very often the answer is reassuring.
Counting honestly
- Count from his last REAL meal, not from the moment you started to worry.
- A treat, two licks of gravy, three mouthfuls to please you: none of that resets the clock.
- Eating clearly less than usual already counts as not eating. Same signal, quieter, same clock.
- Anything that gets added cancels the count: he vomits, he hides, he strains in the box, he stops drinking, he has lost weight. You stop counting and you call.
The cats who do not have that margin
- A kitten, and a pregnant or nursing queen.
- A senior cat.
- An overweight cat, and a cat already thin or one who has quietly shrunk in recent weeks.
- A cat followed for a disease (kidneys, thyroid, diabetes, pancreas, gut) or on medication.
- A cat on a weight-loss diet.
For them we do not wait for the ceiling: we call at the first refused meal. And if your cat is on a diet and stops eating, that is not the diet working: that is an alarm, and we want to know.
Friday evening is not a waiting room
More than sixty hours separate Friday night from Monday morning. A cat who is not eating has no reason to wait for the week to start again. If we are closed, call a 24/7 emergency centre: someone will tell you whether it is now, today, or an appointment. You do not have to make that call alone.
In cats, not eating becomes an illness of its own
This is what separates cats from dogs, and it is the whole reason this page exists. Fasting is not only the symptom of a problem: in a cat, it creates a second one.
What happens in his liver
Deprived of food, his body does exactly what it should: it pulls fat out of storage and sends it to the liver to be turned into energy. The trouble is that it sends more than a cat's liver can process. Fat then builds up inside the liver cells and the liver starts to fail: that is hepatic lipidosis. Nobody can tell you the precise hour it tips over in your cat, and that is exactly why we act before. Feline liver disease.
The circle that closes
A congested liver causes nausea. A nauseated cat eats even less. The longer he does not eat, the less able he is to eat. And what we see in practice is that once that circle has closed, a cat almost never starts eating again on his own. So "wait until his appetite comes back" is not a plan: it is the very mechanism that makes things worse. When it is needed, we feed the cat ourselves, and that is often what pulls him through.
A heavy cat has no safety cushion
Intuition says the opposite, so let us be blunt: it is in the overweight cat that the liver is overwhelmed fastest, because his own reserves are what flood it. And a thin cat is not spared either: the trigger is the stopping, not the silhouette.
He is not only losing fat
A cat who is not eating loses muscle too, and muscle does not rebuild over a few meals. He arrives weakened for the fight against whatever made him ill in the first place. That is a second reason not to let this run, even in a cat who still looks well.
A dog can skip a meal. A cat cannot.
"He will eat when he is hungry enough" comes from the dog world, and even there we now feed early rather than fast. In cats the sentence is dangerous: he is not sulking, he is prevented, and waiting does not fix whatever is preventing him. So never fast a cat at home to see whether his appetite returns. There are short periods without food decided by a veterinarian, before a planned anaesthetic for instance: they follow an examination, they are counted in hours, and they are supervised. There is no home version of that decision.
He eats his treats but not his kibble: sorting it honestly
This is the commonest call we get, and the most misleading: he is eating "a bit", so it feels alright. Here is how we count.
Swallowed, not approached
If he mouths food and drops it, licks his lips at the bowl, gags at the smell, or comes over then turns away: that meal did not happen. Count what was swallowed, not what was approached.
Gravy is not a meal
Licking the gravy and leaving the meat is drinking flavoured water: what he needed to eat is still in the bowl, and that meal counts as missed. Same for treats: they are a top-up, never a meal. A cat living on treats is not a fed cat.
Free feeding blinds you
If kibble sits in the bowl all day, you cannot know what he ate, and nobody could. Weigh his ration, feed it as a meal, weigh what is left. Do that while you call us, not instead of calling us.
More than one cat at home?
"I do not know which one ate" does not mean "things are fine": it means you do not know whether he ate. If it is workable, feed him alone in a closed room with a weighed portion, which gives us real information. But call first.
One observation helps us enormously
Does he WANT to eat and fail, or has food stopped interesting him altogether? The first comes to the bowl, sniffs, circles, takes a mouthful and drops it, chews on one side, swallows awkwardly, or cries while eating: that is not a fussy cat, that is often a cat with pain somewhere in the mouth or throat. The second turns his head away and does not even get up. Note what you see and tell us. If you cannot tell which one it is, say that too: both answers lead to the same call, they only change what we look for first.
Weight is not tonight's instrument
"We will watch his weight for a few days" is not a plan, it is a delay. A home scale cannot resolve, over forty-eight hours, the change that would matter, and by the time it moves enough to notice, the cat has been in deficit for days. Weighing your cat regularly while he is well, on the other hand, is genuinely useful: slow weight loss over months often precedes the diagnosis of a chronic disease. But tonight, the only measurement that counts is what went down today.
Why a cat stops eating
A cat does not decide to stop eating. When he stops, something is stopping him, and that is exactly what we go looking for. Here are the leads, sorted by what you can actually observe.
What changed all at once
- Nausea and belly pain. In cats, the abdomen can hurt badly without a single episode of vomiting: many cats do only two things, they go quiet and they stop eating. And it does not run backwards: no vomiting does not mean nothing digestive.
- A painful mouth. Chewing on one side, dropping kibble, coming to the bowl then backing away, drooling, breath that changed. Beware the reverse reasoning: plenty of cats with a genuinely painful mouth keep eating and show nothing, and a cat with bad teeth who has stopped completely has not necessarily stopped because of his teeth. We examine.
- A blocked nose. A cat who cannot smell his food does eat less, that is true. But a cat with a cold who has stopped eating ENTIRELY rarely has only a nose problem: fever, painful mouth ulcers and dehydration usually come with it. A blocked nose does not add time to the clock.
This lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
What had been building for weeks
- The kidneys. In an ageing cat, look at what changed before he stopped: is he drinking differently, are the litter clumps bigger, has he shrunk without you noticing, has his breath changed? A nauseated cat sits in front of the bowl, licks his lips, salivates, then turns away.
- The thyroid. An overactive thyroid usually does the opposite: the cat eats a great deal and loses weight anyway. But there is a quieter form where the cat shuts down and loses his appetite. So if your older cat has been losing weight in recent months and is not eating today, we want to see him: we do not put it down to age.
- The gut. An appetite that turns picky over weeks, weight coming off, soft stools or the occasional vomit. That history explains the past, it does not excuse tonight: a cat who has been declining for weeks and who today is eating nothing at all is exactly the one we want to see quickly, because his reserves are already spent.
- Pain somewhere else. In an older cat, look at what changed over months: does he hesitate before jumping, does he now sleep downstairs, is he grooming less well, is he missing the high-sided box? That explains a slow decline. It does not explain a cat who has eaten nothing since yesterday, and a diagnosis of arthritis he already has does not lower tonight's urgency.
This lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
What he may have swallowed or been given
- String, thread, ribbon, dental floss, tinsel, a hair elastic. In cats this is a surgical emergency, and most owners never saw it happen. If those things are in your home, tell us even without certainty: it changes the urgency completely.
- A plant, a household product, a pill dropped on the floor, a spot-on flea treatment, his own or one he licked off a dog in the house.
- A medication started in the last few days. Note the date, call us before the next dose, and do not stop anything on your own. Two different things can happen: the drug causes nausea, or the tablet itself irritated his oesophagus. In cats a pill swallowed dry can lodge on the way down, which is why it should always be followed by a little water or a soft mouthful.
- A recent anaesthetic or dental. In that case follow the discharge sheet we gave you and call us rather than relying on this page: we are the ones who anaesthetised him, so it is on us to tell you what is expected and what is not.
This lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
What changed around him
- Stress: a move, renovations, a new pet, someone leaving the household, a stay in boarding, a bowl or litter box that got shifted. Yes, stress genuinely blunts a cat's appetite, sometimes completely. But two things. One: a sick cat hides and snubs his bowl exactly like a stressed cat, and from the outside it is the same cat. Two: the liver does not know the difference between a fast caused by fear and a fast caused by illness. Finding the explanation does not replace the call.
- A recent food change. We never let a cat skip meals waiting for him to give in.
- Go and check the basement, the garage, the shed, the closets and the dryer, right now. A cat shut in by accident is a known cause of prolonged fasting, and he cannot call you. If you find him after several days, do not let him eat freely: bring him in, because getting a starved cat back onto food is something we supervise.
- An indoor-outdoor cat. You cannot know how long he has gone without food, and that uncertainty is a reason to call sooner, not to wait longer.
This lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
What if he has no other signs?
That is the default state, not good news. A cat who feels awful does not show it: he goes quiet, curls up in a corner, stops grooming, and that is all. No visible fever, no vomiting, no complaint: that is simply how cats are ill. A purring cat is not a well cat either, since cats also purr when they hurt. And a cat who is still drinking is not a reassured cat: if he is not eating and not drinking, that is more urgent, not less. This is exactly why we do not hand you a checklist to run through before calling.
While you wait for the appointment
These are things to get through the next few hours, not a replacement for the exam. None of them is a test: if they work, good, we will know tomorrow; if they do not, nothing changes, the appointment stands.
What can help
- Offer his usual food, a small portion, then take the bowl away after a few minutes. We do not insist, and we do not leave a bowl sitting in front of a nauseated cat.
- Warm his wet food to barely lukewarm, around body temperature: that releases the smell. Always test it on your wrist first, since microwaves create hot spots.
- Serve it somewhere quiet, away from the litter box, away from the other cats, away from the traffic.
- Just changed his food? Put the old one back, once, if you still have it. If he refuses that too, it is not the food.
- Fresh water available, never forced.
- Write down the time of his last real meal: it is the first thing we will ask you.
What hurts
- Do not introduce a new food, and do not bring out his favourite to tempt him. A cat who feels unwell links a food to that feeling very quickly and may refuse it long after recovering: you would be burning the very food we will need to get him back on his feet.
- No broth, no soup, no baby food: several contain onion or garlic, which are toxic to cats, and a small amount is enough. The juice from his own wet food is perfectly fine.
- Do not fast him, for any reason, even if you think something disagreed with him.
- Do not stop or change any current treatment without speaking to us.
Force-feeding is a veterinary decision, not a home remedy
Do not force-feed your cat and do not syringe food into him. A cat being forced can inhale food and develop pneumonia, and the cats we are most tempted to force, the ones who are nauseated, sore in the mouth, or struggling to swallow, are precisely the ones most likely to inhale. He struggles, he is stressed, and the amount that actually goes down is nearly always too small to matter. Above all he learns to associate food with feeling ill, which makes everything afterwards harder. And there is one more reason nobody thinks of: what your cat eats on his own is the information we use to judge whether he is improving. Force-feed him and you erase that signal. If he licks a little food off your finger by himself, let him and make a note, but licking is not eating. If you have to hold him to get food into his mouth, stop. If we ever do ask you to feed your cat yourself, it will be after examining him, with written instructions for him specifically.
Already tried it tonight? Read this
No blame: that is the reflex of someone trying to help, and plenty of people do it. But watch him closely over the next few hours. If he coughs, if his breathing turns noisy or fast, if he breathes open-mouthed or with his belly, if he drools, gags, or goes flat after an attempt, this is no longer an appointment. That is a leave-now.
What about appetite stimulants?
Yes, there are medications that support appetite and settle nausea, and we use them often. But they are prescribed after the examination: they make the cat comfortable enough for us to find the cause, they do not treat the cause, and they work poorly while pain, nausea or dehydration are untreated. A cat who has stopped eating is not fixed with a trick to open his appetite.
Get your call ready (2 minutes)
- When was his last REAL meal? Not the last treat.
- Is he eating nothing at all, or clearly less? Is he drinking?
- Does he want to eat and fail, or has food stopped interesting him?
- What changed: food, a move, a new pet, a medication, a recent anaesthetic?
- Has he vomited, strained in the box, lost weight? Is there still stool in the litter?
- His known illnesses, his current medications, and the time of the last dose.
Give no home medications
Faced with a cat who will not eat, the temptation is to give him something "to open his appetite" or "to ease him until tomorrow". Cats are a species apart: their liver does not detoxify like ours, or like a dog's, and several utterly ordinary products kill them.
Acetaminophen (Tylenol)
Fatal to cats, even a single tablet. There is no safe dose. If your cat swallowed any, it is an immediate emergency.
Ibuprofen (Advil), naproxen (Aleve), aspirin
Toxic: digestive ulcers, kidney damage. Never a human anti-inflammatory, for any reason, and least of all to "settle" a cat who is not eating.
Dog flea products
Several contain permethrin, a violent poison for cats (tremors, seizures). Never a "for dogs" product on a cat, even a small amount, and watch the cat who rubs against a freshly treated dog.
Gravol, Benadryl, antacids, leftover prescriptions
Never without direction. A cat "settled" blindly is a cause still advancing while everyone relaxes.
Another animal's prescription
Same apparent problem, same weight, same household: none of that is ever enough. What relieves a dog can kill a cat, and a dose calculated for another patient is not a dose.
What about making him vomit?
In cats, there is no safe way to induce vomiting at home: hydrogen peroxide can be fatal to them. It is a clinic procedure, under sedation if needed. If your cat swallowed a toxin, call us or head straight in: the first steps by product are in our poisons guide. Toxic foods and dangerous plants
Frequently asked questions
The questions we hear most on the phone, and one people do not always dare to ask.
He ate a treat this morning. Does that count?
It is the evening and you are closed. Do I wait until morning?
We just moved and he is snubbing his bowl. It is the stress, surely?
My cat is old. Is eating less not normal at his age?
I syringe-fed him last night. Did I do the wrong thing?
He has started eating a little again. Do I cancel the appointment?
Has he stopped eating because he is dying?
Also worth reading
The honest triage, in one sentence
Straining in the litter box, open-mouth breathing, yellow gums, cold to the touch, string hanging out, a chewed lily, a kitten, a diabetic cat: go now, the clock does not apply. For everyone else, never more than 24 to 48 hours without eating, and you do not have to wait until you get there: at the first real meal refused, call. And keep the sentence that sums up this page: a dog can skip a meal, a cat cannot.
Your cat is not eating and you hesitate to bother us?
Stop hesitating: hesitating to call is already a reason to call. We will triage together, and if an appointment is enough we will say so right away.