Tag: Cat

Paws for Life: 5 Ways to Perform CPR on a Cat

As a cat owner, your furry friend’s safety should always be a top priority.

Although we hope that our cats never encounter an emergency, it’s important to know how to perform CPR on a cat in case of an unexpected event. Whether your cat has a heart attack or experiences difficulty breathing, performing CPR can save their life.

In this post, we will teach you five ways to perform CPR on a cat and hope that you will never have to use this knowledge.

1. Check for Signs of Life

Before you begin CPR for cats, check if they are breathing with a quick check. A healthy breathing pattern is slow and steady, with the rise and fall of the chest. If your cat is not breathing on their own, or their breathing is labored and shallow, it’s time to start CPR.

2. Perform Chest Compressions

Place your cat on their side, on a flat surface, and position their head carefully to open the airways. Perform compressions by pressing down on your cat’s chest with your palms, just behind their elbow joint.

The compressions should be smooth, but firm, with one compression for each second. Make sure you match the pressure and depth according to the size of your cat’s chest.

3. Give Mouth-To-Mouth Resuscitation

This procedure involves blowing into the pet’s nostrils to provide air to their lungs. To do this, hold the cat’s jaw closed with one hand and inhale deeply. With your other hand, hold the cat’s nose closed, and blow into the cat’s nostrils until you see the chest rise.

After your first breath, wait for the cat’s chest to fall before giving a second breath. Continue the cycle of breathing in and out every five seconds until the cat starts to breathe.

4. Use a Pet-Specific CPR Mask

These are designed masks that fit over the pet’s mouth, nose, and face. They come with a one-way valve to help ensure that air flows in only one direction. Using this mask, the ratio of compressions to breaths is the same as in human CPR: 30 compressions for every two breaths.

When using a pet-specific CPR mask, you must first see if there is any obstruction in the pet’s throat. If there’s no unmovable blockage, you can proceed with the compression sequence. If the compression cycle is successful, but the pet is still unconscious, try breathing into the pet’s mouth.

5. Monitor Your Cat Carefully

Once you’ve started CPR, it’s important to watch your cat’s vital signs. Check for breathing, pulse rates, and color changes in the gums to determine if feline resuscitation is working or not. Also, if possible, while performing CPR, call your Veterinarian or an emergency vet for helpful guidance. 

For those looking to learn how to perform CPR on a cat, it is important to get certified. You can check it out here on how to get certified now and become prepared to handle any emergency with your beloved furry companion.

Learn How to Perform CPR on a Cat to Save Your Feline Friend’s Life

While performing CPR can be stressful, it’s important to know how to perform CPR on a cat in an emergency. Remember to stay calm, and to perform the steps to prevent further injury to your cat.

Practice with a dummy or manikin to become more confident in performing CPR. You never know when you might need to use your life-saving training and the knowledge could save your cat’s life.

To dive into some of our topics, check out our other great articles.

All about CMAT exam

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CMAT or the Common Management Admission Test is an aptitude test conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for admission to MBA/PGDM courses in over 1,000 B-Schools across India.

Eligibility Criteria

  • The CMAT aspirant must have completed graduation in any discipline or equivalent from a recognized university
  • Final year Graduation students (10+2+3) are also eligible to apply for CMAT 2022 but they will have to present passing certificate at the time of admission

It evaluates a candidate’s ability in Quantitative Technique, Logical Reasoning, Language Comprehension and General Awareness areas. A new optional section on Innovation and Entrepreneurship with 25 questions of 30 minutes duration is also added.

  • The first option is of 3 hours Exam which is divided in 4 sections with 25 questions in each section. The sections are Quantitative Technique, Logical Reasoning, Language Comprehension and General Awareness
  • The second option is of 3½ hours exam which is divided in 5 sections with 25 questions in each section. The sections are Quantitative Technique, Logical Reasoning, Language Comprehension, General Awareness and Innovation and Entrepreneurship
  • There will be 100 questions for 3 hours exam and 125 questions for 3½ hours exam.
  • All are of objective type questions in MCQs form.
  • Question difficulty level is easy to moderate
  • Each correct answer is awarded +4 Mark
  • Each wrong answer is penalized with negative marking of -1 mark
  • No Individual Time limit to attempt question paper. Candidates can attempt any question from any section within the overall CMAT exam time limit
  • Merit Score and percentile is calculated on the basis of 4 sections.
  • CMAT score card displays Actual score obtained out of 400/500 Marks, Sectional score obtained and the sectional and overall percentile obtained in the Exam

Chocolate Poisoning: Comfort For Us, Catastrophe For Our Pet Friends

Chocolate is one of the favourite foods of human beings. A gift, a comfort food, a truce, you name it, chocolate has everything covered. And it is unanimously favourite in almost all the age groups, but more in the younger ones. All and all, chocolates’ demand isn’t going down anytime in the near future. And speaking of tasty treats, we are taught to share it with friends. But are they good for our furry, pet friends too? Actually they aren’t! 

Animals, especially the commonly domesticated ones, are susceptible to chocolate poisoning. Chocolate contains a compound theobromine (C7H8N4O2), which is an alkaloid found in the cocoa trees. Apart from chocolate, this alkaloid is also found in tea leaves, kola nut, etc.  It has resemblance to the stimulants like caffeine and theophylline, and can be classified as xanthine alkaloid. For now, the median lethal doses for the cats, dogs, rats and mices are commonly known.

Alkaloids are organic compounds with a typically basic chemistry, but they also contain some compounds with neutral, or even slightly acidic properties. They all, uniformly, have a bitter taste. In nature, bitter taste is a danger indicator, and hence, are produced in several plants, like cocoa plant, as a response to the avoid predators. Animals, under the usual circumstances, do not consume the cocoa seeds. Even if some animals consume the cocoa pods, they dispose of the cocoa seed, despite their fat content, most likely due to the high amounts of theobromine.  

But, in chocolate, cocoa’s bitter flavour is partially or fully masked by the added sugar and fats. Hence the animals, especially the ones whose taste buds can detect sweetness, like dogs, have a tendency to consume them. Cats, on the other hand, due to absence of ability to detect sweetness, are not very prone to consuming chocolates accidently. 

Even in human beings, it can cause effects on consumption above a limit. The lethal dosage 50% (LD50), which happens to be the quantity that can kill 50% of the individuals of a particular species, in humans happens to be 1000mg/kg. At a consumption level of 0.8-1.5g/day, symptoms like sweating, headaches and trembling are observed. At 250mg/day, limited effects on the mood is observed. Along with human beings, rats and mices also have a good tolerance to theobromine, with the LD50 levels being 837 mg/kg and 1265 mg/kg respectively.

But, cats and dogs have comparatively lower quantities for LD50. The dogs drop down at the 300mg/kg level, while cats are at 200mg/kg. Hence, even a small amount of cocoa consumption can be harmful for them, especially for the smaller sized individuals. Also, the type of chocolate consumed is an important factor in the theobromine poisoning cases. The dark chocolate items contain a very high amount of theobromine concentration. In comparison to that, milk chocolate contains relatively smaller concentrations (10 times lesser than dark chocolate). Unsweetened cocoa powder is the most concentrated. 

The early symptoms of chocolate poisoning include vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, increased urination and mood swings.Dogs and cats digest theobromine slower than the human beings, and hence, are susceptible to succumbing to chocolate poisoning. Clinical symptoms of poisoning can last upto 72 hours. More severe symptoms include epilrptic seizures, internal bleeding and cardiac arrests. All these can lead to an eventual death.

If identified early, chocolate poisoning is treatable. Veterinarians treat these cases by inducing vomiting within two hours of ingestion, and by administering benzodiazepines for seizures. 

But whatever be the treatment, the ordeal is painful for the animals. And as the old saying goes around, “ Prevention is better than cure”. So, the least we can do for our beloved pets is to keep them safe from accidental consumption of harmful items.

Website Reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobromine_poisoning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobromine