Is milk good for cats?

It's always given my cat diarrhea, so i stopped with the milk. :dilemma:

Cats usually do get diarrhea from it. If your cats like it, give it to them in small amounts and infrequently.

:shrug:

Cows milk is for baby cows. Baby kitties get milk from thier mothers but after that like all mammals they lose the ability to digest milk well.

Kinda strange when you think of it to give a cat cow's milk. Wonder why we drink it too. Will have to look into that...

My mother has a 17 (at least, could be older) year old cat who drinks milk all the time, and has for most of her life. I mean, like three times a day, and she eats little food because of it. She's never been vaccinated for any of the feline diseases (except rabies and distemper of course), and lives outside as much as inside. This cat is in such miserable shape that she spent all of Hurricane Katrina outside in the wind and rain (a few miles inland, so no storm surge), and all she got was a bad attitude for a couple of days. At 17, she catches mice, picks fights with bigger cats, and easily leaps onto any horizantal surface my parents may use to put something out of her reach.

So, there are the experts, and then there is Miss Kitty. Take your pick.

PS If your cat likes milk but gets sick from it, there are some pet-food brands of milk specially treated for cats. They are in containers about the size of soymilk cartoons, in the "treats" section of catfood stores. My cats like it. My daughter doesn't, so you might want to make clear to anyone too young to read that it is not, in fact, soymilk, and does not taste good to people! :)

That is a myth.

I used to keep a small cup of milk out for Roo all the time. Binky prefers to drink from my glass. Neither one of them got sick from it. But Oreo pukes it up, so she avoids it.

Honestly, if we were truly meant to have cow's milk, we'd be baby cows. My cats all love it though. However, only one of them doesn't have a gastro issue with it. So if he wants it, he'll get cheese and milk. It's not really good for him, but he likes it and it doesn't bother his stomach. So he'll get it sometimes. Oddly enough, my cats also all love Silk Vanilla Soymilk (what I normally drink) and that doesn't bother their stomachs so I'll give them a bit of that once in awhile.

I mean, she LOVED it. And would vomit it right back up.

Finally one day, a light bulb went off in my head and it occurred to me that it was the lactose, and so I bought some Lactaid milk (has the enzyme added) and voila, problem solved! But, the new problem was: how to use up the quart or pint before it went bad, with only one cat drinking it. And then another light bulb: ice cube trays! Froze the milk in cubes, always had Lactaid on hand for the old gal and she lived to be 21. The best cat ever.