The 7 Pillars To Double Your Cat's Lifespan Naturally | Thrive: The Feline Wellness Summit With Penny Wood - aka Dr. Zoolittle

Welcome to the cat dad show. My name is Scott Colby. Today I'm going to share with you a clip of my interview with Penny Wood. She is also known as Dr. Zoolittle. She is an animal welfare zoologist. This is a brief clip of my interview with her for the feline wellness summit. You can hear the full interview as well as with 20 other feline wellness experts over at felinewellnesssummit.

com. You can grab a free ticket there. Penny talks about how we can double our cat's lifespan naturally through seven pillars. So this clip will give you an introduction to that as well as Uh, things that we as cat parents may be doing inadvertently to shorten our cat's lifespan. Again, if you want to hear the entire interview where she shares the full seven pillars, go to felinewellnesssummit.

com and tune in there. But for now, enjoy this clip.

Um, great. I mean, huge questions to start off with, so it's going to take a minute to sort of unpack some of that. The double your healthy lifespan of your pets comes from the statistics that we see about animal longevity. And the oldest cat on record had a lifespan of 38 human years. Wow, okay.

Like 38. Yeah. Like we see a cat getting to 20 and we sort of get a round of applause going, which is great. I mean, don't get me wrong. That's fabulous. But 38 is another ballpark entirely. Um, excuse me. So. When, when we look at the average now, what is the average cat living to, you know, in human care, a pet cat?

And the answer's around about 15. It varies, of course, but this is the average. So when we look at what's possible, if, if, if cats, and just to clarify, that 38 year old cat wasn't the only cat to go up into the 30s. That's seen in other places as well. So the cat that reached 38 is an outlier. That's an exceptional number. But they're not the only one who's gotten into the thirties. So even though it's uncommon, it's not impossible. And when we can control some of the environmental, um, uh, conditions under which our cats live, we can promote their health when we promote their health.

And I'm not talking about. Health as in we don't see any symptoms. I'm talking about really optimising health and giving that full biological and metabolic freedom to live life to the full, to have high quality of life. When we do that, we not only improve quality of life in that particular moment, but we also push into the future the date where diseases start to take an effect.

We push into the future where cellular decline starts to have an impact on the body. we push into the future any kind of, um, you know, reduction in quality of life. So the two things go very much hand in hand. Prevention of disease or pushing forward into time disease and pushing that into the future and then the actual expiration date.

So, when you are addressing one, which you want to be doing on a daily basis, the quality of life, good quality of care, making sure we give the right kinds of food, the right kinds of environment, the right kinds of, um, of toys or any of those factors, then we are by default improving on the, on the, the quality, excuse me, the quantity of life, the lifespan.

So can we guarantee every cat is going to make it to 30? No, we can't do that. There are some genetic things at play, but in fact the majority of, um, of a pet's health destiny, the majority of control over whether a cat is going to live a long lifespan or not, actually comes down to their lifestyle factors.

The genetic play is around about 7%. which is really tiny when you think about that means 93 percent ballpark is going to be in our control if only we knew what to do right so this is where I step in and say well this is what you can do in designing that care routine that lifestyle how you are looking after your cat to, to maximize the power or the effect of that 93 percent control so that then we do have that positive effect of a longer lifespan and higher quality of life.

Yeah, I love it. And I know we're going to get into the things that we can do to extend their lifespan. the most common thing that pet parents are inadvertently doing that's shortening their cat's lifespan that they may not even know about?

Great question.

The Importance of Hydration for Cats

So it comes down with cats. We, we often think of them either as little dogs or little people.

You know, we, we, we pamper them when we do all these things and we think of them, we treat them like we would treat ourselves or another family member, which is beautiful because it comes from that place of compassion in our heart, but it's not necessarily species specific, best quality care. And so one of the big things that we find in cats is that they suffer from chronic, um, dehydration because they're not a natural free drinker.

A dog will naturally free drink. You put a bowl of water in front of a dog and they'll go put up and splash it around the place. But most of it's going to go in and they're going to hydrate. If I get thirsty, I'm going to drink from my glass of water here. I'm a free drinker. Cats typically speaking are not good free drinkers.

They can, right? And some of them will be very fond of doing that, but others will just be like, I don't, I don't do that. Right. And so what. what happens in the wild, they get their moisture from their live prey. Well, they've just killed their prey. They're from their fresh prey.

So

the moisture quantity of a mouse is about 72.

The moisture quantity of a zebra, if you're a big cat, is about 72 percent. So, cats are getting their glass of water, if you like, from eating live fresh food. When we give them processed food, dry food, some kind of other food that isn't fresh, moist prey, Cats can end up being in a state of chronic dehydration because they're just not getting that input of water That then regulates their whole body and they need to be about 72 percent body water as well, right?

So any animal has that ratio in their body? So chronic chronic kidney disease arises from, from the kidney having to work too hard, too much, too long. But if we just gave the body sufficient amounts of water throughout the cat's entire life, then the kidney wouldn't have to be on overdrive all the time, trying to extract every little piece of water it can possibly save.

to keep the body at the right hydration levels and then protect the other cells and keep them operating optimally. So it would operate on its, on a, on a kind of the status quo level of work, right? Every organ is operating on the same level. And so now we have prolongation of that organ's health because we have enough water in the cat.

So I always like to say to people, Make sure that if you're not giving a raw species appropriate diet, then at least what you're doing is adding extra water into the food bowl. So as they're taking their food, they're getting their moisture the way that they would in the wild.