How can I encourage a kitten to poop for a stool sample?
I always seem to have this problem.
My kitten has her second doctor's appointment coming up (second round of shots), and I still need to get them a stool sample for a checkup, preferably no older than 3 hours.
Murphy's law states that when a stool sample is required, a cat will not poop the morning of a doctor's appointment; except, of course, the one time the cat poops 10 minutes prior, in which case it states you will forget to grab it.
What can I do to encourage kitty to poop? Is there a type of food I can feed her ahead of time? Is there something I can do to encourage her to do her business in the hours before the appointment?
It's particularly important that I get a stool sample because her stool has not been tested yet (I adopted her a few weeks ago), and we do need to make sure she's off to a good start.
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You could try chanting "poop poop poop move your bowels" over and over again and telepathically suggesting that your cat empty its colon. However, I've never found this to help, it may entertain you to watch the facial expressions of others in your household as you do it though.
On the serious side, if your cat drinks and/or eats more the probability of it pooping increases, water helps lubricate the passage and food obviously pushes things along... that being said I've never been able to time pooping or peeing in my cats and generally (much to their chagrin) take them in to have the "experts" collect stuff.
Anything that you give to actively induce a bowel movement is likely going to be adverse for the cat.
A better approach would be to monitor the cat's schedule. Likely the cat will have a bowel movement a few hours after eating, and this can be encouraged with being well hydrated. So feed your cat say 5 hours before the appointment (correct for any previous patterns you have noticed) and keep water available in a multitude of locations (don't force the water, the cat might become suspicious).
Another solution would be to bring in the stool sample at a later date, when it happens naturally.
Surely she must poo the day before? Assuming that the vet doesn't necessarily need today's poo (just the most recent poo), start saving scoops the day before, and replace the previous scoop with the most recent scoop, as the poos arrive.
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