A wide variety of feline conditions can make bowel movements difficult for your cat, if not impossible.

By Tom Ewing

Constipation — the inability to evacuate the bowels easily — is a common feline malady that is attributable to a wide range of causes, including, for example, a faulty diet, traumatic injury, infection, an adverse reaction to medication, lack of access to drinking water, intestinal tumors, neurologic disease or an underlying metabolic abnormality.

About 75 percent of constipated cats do well after treatment. But about 25 percent of them are likely to have multiple occurrences due to colon damage.

Whatever the cause, the anatomic and functional signs are the same: The animal’s colon — the section of the intestine that functions as a reservoir for undigestable food, mucus, bacteria and dead cells prior to their passage from the body — becomes impacted with hard feces that refuse to budge. Or if the afflicted cat is able…

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