As a loving cat owner, you have a personal investment in ensuring that your cat leads a healthy life that has longevity at its heart. There is a multitude of factors that can help achieve this such as making sure your cat has a balanced diet, making sure they get enough exercise and ensuring that your feline friend is well pampered and groomed. However, a factor that is all too often not well enough understood, or catered for, is immune support for cats and ensuring that they have the most well equipped immune system to tackle the hurdles that life throws at them.

Your cat's immunity is the cornerstone of their wellbeing and the maintenance of a functional immunity is a prerequisite to the correct function of virtually other aspects of their body. It is therefore important to consider routines and elements that you can introduce into your cat’s daily life that work as cat immune system boosters, and also preventative measures that you can take to enshrine your cat’s immune system so that their natural defences are looked after.

What Is Your Cat’s Immunity?

Your cat’s immune system is the product of a vast wealth of different kinds of cells working together to form a protective ecosystem. This ecosystem operates by working to identify, target, and neutralise foreign invaders into your cat’s body. These invaders can come from anywhere in the environment and take the form of either simple illnesses like a common cold or flu, all the way up to something more nasty. The immune system, with the help of cat immune system boosters, is essentially the natural line of defence in your cat’s body that helps repel such illnesses. However, it is sadly not immune itself, which means that immunity s boosting routines and supplements can be an essential aid in ensuring that your cat’s natural capabilities can function in all conditions.

What Are The Risks To My Cat’s Immunity?

The immune system of your cat may be a line of defence of its own, but that does not mean that it is impervious to damage that could have a negative effect on your cat’s livelihood as a whole. Some potential risks to your cat’s immune system include:

Illness

Despite the fact that the immune system fights infection and illness, the process of doing so weakens it for the span of that fight. When your cat is ill, it is important to ensure that they don’t catch anything else, as that will create further difficulties for the immunity promoting cells. This is because they will already be preoccupied with dealing with the current illness.

Immunodeficiency Disease

This kind of illness is particularly nasty for your cat’s immune system as unlike most illnesses, this kind targets the immune system itself, which can be very problematic for your cats’ overall health. Feline Leukemia and the feline immunodeficiency virus are two examples of viruses that can cause problems for your cat’s immunity. Though rare, they are worth considering and necessitate the need for you to seek the attention of a vet if there is something wrong with your cat companion that is showing no signs of improving.

Stress

Cats, just like people, can get stressed too! Stress is often overlooked as a problem worth worrying about extensively but, in actual fact, stress is a stimulus that can have a pretty devastating effect when it comes to your cat’s immune system. Stress is characterised by an increase in blood pressure, which when sustained, can lead to scarring in the arteries which then leads to inflammation and a requirement of attention. Stress also has a big influence on your cat’s lymph nodes. Lymph nodes are a system of impulse conducting components which are essential in the immune system. For this reason, it is important to keep your cat away from potentially stressful situations as much as possible.

How to Protect Your Cat’s Immunity?

Maintaining and enshrining your cat’s immunity can be achieved fairly simplistically if you just take some necessary but easy to carry out daily steps in your cat’s routine. These include:

Diet

As it is for so many other features of a healthy lifestyle, diet plays a key role as an immune system booster for cats. A balanced diet that is high in protein can be the perfect way to lay the foundation for promoting ideal immunity in your cat. The energy that your cat takes from eating is used to power the immune system among other things, and proteins are the cellular bricks and mortar that are used to construct the white blood cells that fight on the front line. A diet that isn't balanced and is too processed, on the contrary, can deliver the opposite effect, as processed foods that are high in free radicals which cause cellular damage in the body. For this reason, be sure to plan your cat’s diet carefully to ensure they get the most out of their meals.

Exercise

Exercise is an essential part of your cat’s life as it trains their body to carry out the death-defying climbs and leaps that cats do effortlessly on a day to day basis. But exercise is also great for promoting immunity as it helps to optimise functions in your cat’s body, such as protein synthesis, circulation and digestion, all of which can provide elements that aid natural immunity.

Effectively, exercise acts as an indirect cat immune system booster. However, the diet should be considered alongside exercise and the two are intrinsically linked in terms of promoting immunity. This is because too much exercise can limit the amount of energy taken from nutrition that is later available to support the immune system. Therefore you should take care to ensure that your cat is eating enough food in relation to how active they are. You can often ascertain this from weighing them on semi-regular occasions.

Supplementation

Last, and by no means least, there are also a number of supplements on the market which act as an immune system booster for cats. Supplements are often tailored to suit a specific function or target a specific area and are the ideal way to complement the lifestyle of a cat that is already active and indulging in a balanced diet. Supplements are also a very promising avenue to consider if your cat is older as their immune system will naturally be less responsive.

When choosing a cat immunity supplement though, it is important that you focus on one that is natural. You don’t want to be putting chemicals in their body as this can end up having the opposite effect! Instead, go for a supplement that is packed full of vitamins and minerals, as these are essential for the immune system. Your cat can also benefit from immunity supplements that contain certain botanicals, such as Echinacea, that are known to help protect and fortify the immune system.