Friskies and 9Lives Wet Food

Does anyone know the nutritional value of these?

We are on a low-budget and do the best we can......we were doing Iams wet but the cats got real finicky with it. We switched to Friskies because of all the different flavors, textures and cuts and they *LOVE* it. I just wanted to make sure the nutrition is good in that particular brand. I tried feeding Iams after we'd fed Friskies and they refused to switch back.

I also noticed 9Lives has similar cuts but it is really inexpensive, so I'm guessing the quality isn't that great.


Opinions???

right now I am feeding 24 cats friskies. have used it often since i got cats 10 years ago. between price, can size it works out great. Have tried whiskas(found to many bones in the larger cans...edible or not thats disgusting lol) and 9 lives they get loose stool on more often. I feed them some dry in addition...recently switched to royal canin but had used science diet for many years

Oh I'm so glad I'm not alone.


I know Friskies isn't the best (by a long shot), but I'm doing the best I can right now, and they love the taste, so as long as they're eating and not showing any signs of malnourishment or problems with their stools, I'd hope that's ok.

I feed my cats both Friskies and 9 Lives canned. They love the Shredded Salmon and Chicken from Friskies and the CHicken niblets from 9-Lives. I'mfinding that anyting that's "packed" food inthe can they only eat a little bit of, but when the food is shredded or niblet type, they eat all of it. I also feed them dry Purina Cat Chow.

It is low end but if it gets them eating wet

If you can try to sneck in some better ones...

My cats eat friskies also.

At least it's wet food... that's about the only good thing I can say about either food.

Well no. 9 Lives is COMPLETE garbage. Stick with Friskies if you absolutley must.

We feed Royal Canin (dry) and Friskies canned with no problems. I've also thrown in some cans of the Nature's Choice (about 20 cents more per can) for a little better quality.

I would not feed the 9-Lives. Even tho I love Morris the cat, I've never fed my guys the 9-Lives dry or canned - poorer quality IMO.

my cats like a few flavors of Friskies, so i buy it for them. my cats like some of the shredded & prime filets varieties and a couple loaf flavors. i also buy them Fancy Feast.

I give my cats mostly premium foods but I do occasionally rotate in a can of 9-Lives or Friskies. My cats actually seem to like them better than the premium brands. I had a cat that ate nothing but Friskies and 9-Lives canned and dry foods and live to be almost 20 yrs. old. And yes, she was healthy, only went to the vet for her annual exams and vaccinations and neven even needed her teeth to be cleaned.

I switched to Friskies wet from dry and my cats love it!

Would it really be worth trying to rotate a more "nutritious" food in and risk GI upset by changing things up?

Originally Posted by jasmine-79

I switched to Friskies wet from dry and my cats love it!

Would it really be worth trying to rotate a more "nutritious" food in and risk GI upset by changing things up?

Click to expand...

Most of the time there is NO issue with changeing wet foods ... do to high moisture content wet seems to be easily transitioned...If you need to transsition wets I would use one flavor in different brands

IMO Friskies is passable - by no means a "good" food but not the worst out there. What my friends who have 20-30 cats in their houses plus 30-50 alley cats that they feed do is feed a higher quality dry food (a combination of Nutro and Costco) plus Friskies wet. This seems to work pretty well.

I would steer clear of the "chunky" wet foods because of the high content of grains. I feed chunky Friskies to my cats as a very occasional treat because they absolutely love it, but not more than once every couple of months.

Originally Posted by jasmine-79

I switched to Friskies wet from dry and my cats love it!

Would it really be worth trying to rotate a more "nutritious" food in and risk GI upset by changing things up?

Click to expand...

I have heard this but I have never experienced this with my cat. I guess he has an iron clad belly because switching never bothered with whether it was gradual or a sudden change. If you are worried about a sudden change in dry will upset his tummy gradually mix the old food and new food together until he/she is solely on the new dry.

My three kitties all preferred a few flavors of canned Friskies, and a few flavors of canned Whiskas (no longer made), to premium foods when I tried to switch them over.

They were all runty kittens -- Sinbad the smallest of a litter of three born to a Himalayan momcat, Tiger a rescued feral kitten, Frosty a kitty abandoned by a bike trail when she was about ten days old. They all got a lot of KMR, Kitten Milk Replacer, formula when young (the canned KMR; I tried the powdered formula once and didn't try it again, though the cans were more expensive). Sinbad liked Hill's Science Diet dry cat food and got quite a bit of that till she was several years old and apparently developed an allergy to grains and could never tolerate any dry food after that. Since she was allergic to dry food by the time I rescued Frosty and Tiger, I was never able to force them to eat dry food, so they ate only canned food. Sinbad had been given more Fancy Feast than any other brand of wet food when young, but that was too expensive with three cats, so their basic diet was Friskies and Whiskas, and usually more Friskies.

Sinbad went from a tiny kitten, only 2/3 the size of her littermates when she was five weeks old, to a huge kitty, nearly 15 lbs most of her adult life, and she lived to not quite 17, older than her momcat and other cats related to her that her momcat's owners knew of. Tiger unfortunately lived only to 13-1/2 before dying of cancer of the jaw, but she'd been a tiny, thin feral when I rescued her, and I don't know what she'd been exposed to during those first weeks, and as much as I hated to lose her to cancer, a few weeks after the diagnosis, she was never sick during those 13 years except for a few days when she sneezed, and she had those respiratory infections only a couple of times. Frosty, apparently a couple of weeks younger than Tiger, went from that tiny 10 day old baby to a fairly small (8 lbs, actually average but small next to Sinbad and Tiger, who weighed over 10 lbs) grown cat who was very solidly muscled and strong most of her adult life. She's now hyperthyroid and thinner, getting transdermal methimazole every day to control the thyroid problem, and gaining weight again. Because of a vet inadvertently injuring her jaw a couple of years ago, I started giving her Hill's a/d via syringe, and while that didn't work very well, I discovered she'd lap the food from my hand, so since then I've handfed her about a can of a/d a day and she eats some Friskies off a saucer. Now that she's older and has some health problems she gets supplements in the food she's handfed: vitamin C (sodium ascorbate crystals), Coenzyme Q10, salmon oil, and vitamin E. She'll be sixteen in a couple of months.

I feel guilty at times because they weren't on premium foods, but I didn't know as much about cat foods then as I learned later. But I know a lot of people who fed their cats only premium foods, whose cats had more health problems. So I don't think Friskies is a really bad brand of cat food, and I was glad it wasn't one included in the recall.

One of the worst things about feeding canned foods is that the risk of hyperthyroidism is increased, due to the effect of the liner in the cans. OTOH, I've read that feeding dry foods alone will make kidney disease as well as problems such as FUS more likely.

[font= "Comic Sans MS"]I understand being on a budget, and IMO, feeding low-quality wet is better than no wet.
I would stop feeding the 9-Lives, it's pretty bad... Friskies is okay, and I would feed Fancy Feast in addition, not the 9-Lives. I like to rotate between "healthy" and "yummy" foods, so that she gets nutrition and deliciousness. If you can find it near you, Natural Life is an excellent wet for the price, I get mine at my local Wal-Mart along with Friskies and Meow Mix. I also feed mine Nutro and Chicken Soup and soon, Natural Choice. [/font]

i feed my cats 9 lives and i have a very large cat a little bit overwight but just overall big and he eats ALOT but we cant even keep dry cat food from him hell break in the bag and pig out and decide to take a cat nap in his comfort zone of meat flavored X's and O's this happens too many times he loves his 9 lives so much he will choose it over human food

Friskies isn't the greatest but it has one thing that NO dry food has - water! That's a positive point in my book. If it came down to money and/or finicky cats, I would feed the Friskies rather than put them on an all dry diet. For what you get vs. the price, I think Friskies is one of the better grocery store foods.

I think Chicken Soup is in the price range of the IAMS that you were feeding. Natural Life would be in that ballpark too. Both of those are still roughly double the price of Friskies but they are better foods IMO. Just depends on what you can do and what they will eat.

Originally Posted by Ping

I have heard this but I have never experienced this with my cat. I guess he has an iron clad belly because switching never bothered with whether it was gradual or a sudden change. If you are worried about a sudden change in dry will upset his tummy gradually mix the old food and new food together until he/she is solely on the new dry.

Click to expand...

Jamie has an iron-clad belly, too. Actually, I've never had a cat that had an adverse reaction to a change in foods, so I suspect that it's a lot less common than people think. I've always suspected that it was a myth perpetuated by the pet food producers in an effort to "enforce" brand loyalty. Look at all the different things they hunt and eat, with no tummy upsets.

Originally Posted by jcat

Jamie has an iron-clad belly, too. Actually, I've never had a cat that had an adverse reaction to a change in foods, so I suspect that it's a lot less common than people think. I've always suspected that it was a myth perpetuated by the pet food producers in an effort to "enforce" brand loyalty. Look at all the different things they hunt and eat, with no tummy upsets.

Click to expand...

Amen. I've changed Bijou and Mika several times over the past couple years and have never had an issue to date.