How to Treat a Choking Cat

Video Transcript

Hi! I am Dr. Adrienne Mulligan. I am the owner of Camp Verde Veterinary Clinic. I am here today on behalf of expertvillage.com, and I am here to talk to you about taking care of cats with critical conditions, critical emergencies and health issues. So another emergency you might run into in a cat is choking; and the most common things that are going to make a cat choke are going to probably hairballs—that is going to be your biggest cause of that. But sometimes cats get into trouble, and they swallow strings or they swallow threads, and they will start gagging on them, and occasionally you will have a chance to see this string or thread, and if you can and you can get into your kitty’s mouth, if you see the string under its tongue or around its tongue, if you can grab the string, if you can gently pull it and it comes easily, then that is okay; but if you are gently pulling and it is not going anywhere, you want to just leave it and hold the kitty’s mouth shut so that it does not bite it in half, and get to your vet as quick as possible. So obviously, you are going to need someone to drive you to the vet. The other kind of thing, the hairball choking that is usually looking worse than it is. The hairball can be way down in the stomach, and my first cat that was this breed, you would have thought that he was choking to death, and we when we took x-rays it was in his stomach, but he just was throwing himself around like it was all in his throat and it was not. So choking can be something that is misleading. The one thing I want you to know is you really never, never should reach into a cat’s mouth trying to find out what it is choking on, because you will get bitten, and you do not need to get bitten by a cat.

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