Hi, I am Yaiza Gomez and this is Chattering with iCatCare.
I hope you started 2026 very, very well and full of curiosity about cats because
as you may have heard from February we'll be offering feline medicine CPD
in an easier and more digestible format.
If you want to find out more, follow us on our social media and take a look
at our website portal.icatcare.org.
Today, Kelly St. Denis and Dr Sonya Gordon will discuss the practical use
of pimobendan in cats, the topic of this month's JFMS spotlight article.
But first, Sarah Ellis will interview Morgane Van Belle on her
iCatCare Welfare Research Award.
Enjoy.
Morgane, I'm absolutely delighted to talk to you today.
I'm just gonna tell our listeners a little bit about the iCatCare
Welfare Research Award, because this is only its second year.
It's designed to recognize and celebrate individuals who've
dedicated a piece of research to improving domestic cat welfare.
When we think about cat welfare, we think about the physical health and
mental wellbeing of the cat, that real integrated, holistic view and the
research may come from any discipline within animal welfare, including
behavioural medicine, ethics, and law.
Our award aims to encourage researchers from a variety of disciplines
to conduct cat welfare research and to disseminate such research
in ways that make meaningful, positive differences to cat welfare.
That's really important for us at iCatCare because learning new knowledge
is fantastic, but if we can't put that knowledge into action to drive change and
improve welfare for cats, then really it's not doing the job it was intended for.
So we're big fans of applied research at iCatCare.
The award is given at the European Veterinary Congress this year, and your
winning abstract was part of your PhD research and it was entitled Ethogram
of domestic cat intraspecific social behaviour in multicat households.
A huge congratulations again for that award and for some of our
listeners, they might not necessarily know what the word ethogram means.
Not all of our veterinary audience will have that kind of
behavioural understanding or maybe wouldn't have used an ethogram.
So can you give us an overview of what an ethogram is?
So an ethogram is actually like a list of behaviours and definitions
for a specific like animal.
So we have ethograms for monkeys or dogs but also for cats, and it's important
to have these fixed behaviours or terms because that way we can describe things
uniformly across studies or across people.
So we are like talking about the same thing by using same words.
Yeah.
Okay.
That makes complete sense because behaviour is quite complex and if we're
not calling it the same things, then how do we know we are talking about the same
thing or we've identified the same thing.
So that ethogram is like a description of what a behaviour
is with some visuals to help?
Yeah, so for our ethogram, it, it focuses on social behaviour in cats.
We identified behaviours that might be relevant in cat encounters, and we
also try to not only define them, but also provide visual illustrations via
drawings or video clips to show people how the behaviour actually looks.
Nice.
I think the video clips are crucial because behaviour is not static, isn't it?
And there's only so much an illustration can do.
I love the fact that you are focusing on multicat households because we are
seeing that they are extremely popular across the world, and we hear from our
behaviourists that inter cat tension, so problems between cats, are quite common,
whether that's overt, biting, scratching, wrestling, or more subtle stuff around
them blocking access and cats urinating outside the litter tray, for example.
So it feels very pertinent.
I think as humans, we just so often take for granted in our social
relationships if somebody walks in the house after being out for a day,
we just say, hi, how was your day?
We don't avoid them or attack them.
So it could be complex for us to understand.
So I understand that this particular study in the development of ethogram is one part
of your PhD, which is focused on social behaviour in cats and multicat households.
But can you summarise for us a specific piece of research
that you got the award for?
My whole PhD is focused on understanding social behaviour, and
social bonds in multicat assaults.
But for doing so, we need a way to describe our behaviour of the cats.
Because I'm working with videos of cats, I'm doing behavioural observations,
and we then need a tool to describe what is happening in these videos.
And for that, we needed a ethogram.
We have quite some ethograms available on cat behaviour, but most of them were
focusing on old behaviour of cats, like all their general behaviour and not like
really specifically on the social context.
And because these ethograms are focusing on every behaviour cats can possibly
do, they're also very extensive and it makes it difficult from my point of
view, for this research to use it on a day-to-day basis for these videos.
So we needed our ethogram for that.
So we decided to develop one ourselves and also try to validate
it so it would be stronger case.
Yeah.
Then we had like multiple staff in which we assessed our face validity of the
ethogram and also if it was reliable across researchers from different people,
would you would score the same behaviour?
Are they seeing the same?
We use literature search in our first steps, and then we went to watching videos
together with multiple people to see if our definitions work, if we have like
correct labels and really try to fine tune it and after our different people looked
at it, we tested it with independent people if it was a reliable tool, if
people can use it to score behaviour and as that in the beginning, we also
wanted it to be as practical as possible.
So we tried to cluster our behaviours into meaningful categories like not
too much behaviours and illustrate our behaviours with drawings or video
clips so people can see the behaviour.
I think that really helps.
When I've looked at ethograms in the past when I was more research active and
there was just written descriptions of the behaviour and maybe an illustration,
I really struggled to tell the difference between things like a cat batting or
a cat coughing, and I couldn't work out are these two distinct behaviours?
Or are these just two researchers calling the same thing by different names?
When you see the videos that really enhances the descriptions
and you say, oh, okay, I get it.
This is the same thing, or this is a different thing, but having
that singular language, that common terminology, that we can all use just
takes away that cognitive unpicking that we have to do to go, hang on a
minute, what do they mean by this?
What is actually the thing?
And I think the ultimate goal is if we could get our veterinary
professionals and our caregivers, whether they're the owner of the cat
or somebody that cares for it in a homing centre or a shelter, for example.
If we could all speak the same language when describing cats, then that would
be absolutely a wonderful foundation on which to build our cat welfare practices.
Now Kelly St. Denis, JFMS editor, will be interviewing Dr Sonya Gordon, first author
of the article titled Use of pimobendan in cats: a practical evidence-based review.
Dr. Gordon, thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you to
you and your co-authors for such an amazing clinical spotlight article.
We don't really talk about pimobendan a lot, and there seem to be widely
differing opinions regarding the use of pimobendan and cats, its efficacy,
safety, and I wonder if we can just touch on some of the concerns or even
controversies that surround its use or application in the feline species?
I think the most obvious concern or starting point would be that we have
a species that has a disease that is characterised mostly by thick heart walls
that apparently squeeze quite well, right?
Like good contractility and pimobendan is an inotrope.
It strengthens the heart muscle and it's hard on the surface to see a role.
I think that initial part of like how is it possible this could play a role
is probably one of the controversies.
Yeah, and that's certainly one of the most common diseases I guess, that we see
in cats is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, so it's gonna be problematic.
But I guess what we're understanding is that this application is
for congestive heart failure.
So what sort of application would we use if we have a cat that's
got congestive heart failure?
Is it regardless of the cause of the heart failure or the limitations to
the use, depending on the diagnosis?
So someone in clinical practice has a cat with congestive heart failure.
Do they need to have a diagnosis of the cause before they can even consider
using something like pimobendan?
We don't always have a for sure diagnosis, medicine is acceptable uncertainty.
Having said that, it is really a drug that if we're gonna use it in the cat,
we're already trying to take advantage of some of its other properties, like
the fact that it can maybe improve relaxation of these sick hearts.
It might strengthen the contractility of the actual atrium, which tends
to get dilated in these cats and not squeeze well and puts them at risk
for thrombus as well as heart failure.
And then at the same time, as long as a little after load reduction is
tolerated lower resistance downstream.
Maybe that does make it more ideally or optimises forward cardiac output.
So I think there's a constellation of things that, it's not really just
about the fact that everybody thinks of pimobendan as an inotrope, but it actually
has a lot of other things that might benefit and it's not just obviously heart
failure characterised by obvious weak pumps where the heart does not squeeze.
And that's an obvious indication, but that's the rarity in cats
and requires echo to diagnose.
And so I think it's really about how do you leverage this medication
in the right situation clinically.
And I think for me, I would say I fit in the middle of the pack.
And I think as we wrote this, we all did, that we believe there's clear indications
and then there's probably some that are a little more grey zone and we used clinical
studies or a little case vignettes in the paper to try to show those off a bit.
But the easiest way to say it would be if you're treating a cat
with heart failure and he's not doing well on standard treatment.
He may never get an echo by the way, but he's getting Lasix and his
pleural effusion keeps coming back, or he's even got large volume pleural
effusion at the outset and he doesn't tolerate the high diuretic doses.
I think as a rescue treatment, little to lose, but as a first line, that's
where people get a little twitchy.
So as a rescue treatment then, and some of these cases, I've noticed that it's
with client awareness that you're using something that is a rescue treatment that
may or may not be effective, presumably not necessarily harmful though, is
that, would you say that's correct?
Unless we have certain situations happening with the heart?
Yeah, I think, like I said, the safety data is pretty good.
The concern around safety would be that if you take a heart and make it squeeze
harder, and it's already squeezing anyway, the contractility is good and
you make it hyper dynamic, can you exacerbate or even cause obstruction of
the type we see in cats with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, so the obstructive form
where they have abnormal mitral valve motion, systolic anterior motion of
the mitral valve, or they even have a segment of their wall at the base of
their heart, there's, at the base of the septum there that's quite thick.
As soon as you make them squeeze excessively, perhaps
you can exacerbate that.
So that's the concern.
The problem is, it's hard.
I think if you echo a cat and you show that he has that obstruction,
you know he can do it, but it's very hard to rule it out in any
given cat because it's situational.
And that's why cats can have murmurs that are louder and softer, or
one of the reasons they can have murmurs that are louder and softer.
So if you're being the safety person and you're like, you want some, ability to
assess this cat is tolerating the drug.
It's easy to do by measuring a blood pressure after you dose them or a few days
after and listening to see if the murmur gets louder or a new murmur develops.
But I think if they tolerate it and that they don't show any tachycardia
or new murmurs that are louder, I think you should have confidence
in the chronic dosing, at least Like I said, with the safety.
Many of these retrospective studies that we talked about that that have
people reported using it do include cats that have had obstruction and
a primary hypertrophic phenotype, and they certainly didn't seem to
show any adverse effects, but that is the concern that surrounds this.
That's that conundrum, that controversy.
Right.
Echocardiogram is not available for everyone.
I live in Northern Ontario.
We don't have a cardiologist at hand, and not everyone can go for referrals.
So sometimes we're basing it on pocus or no echocardiogram or
ultrasound of the heart at all.
So I appreciate that list of things that you would be looking for if
you were gonna try to use it to see if it was making things worse.
So heart rate, blood pressure.
New or louder murmur.
We know enough about dosing that the oral dose is available quite quickly.
So if you were quite nervous, you could literally give the first
dose in the hospital and before you release them, re-listen and I
don't believe that a single dose is gonna be detrimental anyway.
So if that's your concern, it's easy to, couple hours, two three hours
after the first oral dose to listen.
And if you're really worried, measure blood pressure and such.
We tried to show people where we thought a good stepping off point
was, but showed them that there's a lot of places where you don't
need to consider it at the outset.
Yep.
I really appreciate that, and I certainly would say to our readers,
like when you're using this, I love these clinical spotlight articles
as resources in my practice too.
This one's a gem from that perspective because we are confronted with these
things and in the middle of a day and we don't always know what to do.
So it's really good to have access to just even those case studies
pimobendan aside, which is, I found them very helpful and interesting.
I think sometimes if you can read something, and I thought like the clinical
studies at the end that I really felt strongly about including in this paper
were really just to show an application of what they read in a way that was
probably digestible for a clinician.
Yes, and very much so in that good thinking process of, like you said,
going through, is it a first timer?
Have they relapsed?
What do we know about their heart?
Do we know anything situation so.
What do we know about the owner relationship with the cat
and the ability to medicate?
Yeah.
This is so much more than we, I think I've been a, a vet for 25, 26 years
now, and we've really gotten good at thinking about spectrum of care
and that caregiver and caregiver burden as well as the patient, right?
So I think that's, those are really important considerations
to, to take into as well.
Glad that you guys touched on that.
So I just wanted to say thank you.
I think I could ask questions all day about not just
pimobendan, but cardiology.
So thank you to you and your authors for giving us this clinical spotlight article.
I really appreciate it, and it's gonna be very well received.
We enjoyed the opportunity to put it together and the chance to talk about it
with
you
today.
Did you like it?
Join us again next month and listen to more interviews about
feline medicine and welfare.
In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment wherever you're
listening to this podcast.
We're always happy to receive feedback.
We'll be back in February.
Until then, you take care.