Moving away from free feeding - Need advice

ninacaliente

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Here's my situation. I have always free-fed dry (regular Innova - tried Chicken Soup for awhile but recently switched back) and fed about 3oz wet to each cat daily. (Wet is a combination of Innova, Wellness, and sometimes California Natural - depends on what the pet store has in stock.)

I have 2 adult cats (Delilah and Blue) who are at normal, healthy weights. I have Piper, who is 8 months old and overweight at 8.4lbs. I also have Bastian and Griffin (12 weeks - but vet thinks Bastian might be younger). Griffin is growing well, but I had trouble with Bastian not gaining and getting quite skinny. He's doing better now after putting him on high-cal wet food and kitten formula.

My concern right now is Piper. I knew she'd been getting chunkier over the last month or two, but when I picked her up from her spay yesterday the vet tech was concerned about her being overweight. She said she's not "obese" right now, but it seems like it's something to get control of now before it gets to that point.

So... I figure I'll have to stop free feeding so I can portion control. I searched through some posts on this forum, and found this recent post by Sharky in a thread on a similar topic:

"canned food is IMHO better ... 1/2 oz to 1 oz per lb.. so ave 10 lb kitty 5oz-10 oz per day if wet is only food .... 50 /50 wet dry is more realistic for most ... so 10lb kitty would get 3oz can and 1/3-1/2 cup dry ..."

I'd probably be going with 50/50 wet/dry, so those guidelines would probably work for the older kitties to maintain their current normal weights. For Piper, it seems to make sense that if I want her to lose weight, I should restrict her calories a bit and feed her a little bit less. But I'm concerned about doing that since she is just 8 months old and still has a bit of growing and developing to do. So would it be better to give her the normal adult amount and just try to keep her activity level up?

And with the little kittens... How much do you offer tiny growing kittens at each meal? Would letting them eat as much as they like for 3 meals a day be sufficient? I'm afraid they won't be able to get as many calories as they need. I've already been feeding Bastian his wet+formula seperately from the other cats, but he also has had free access to the dry and I certainly don't want to restrict his calorie intake.

Anyone have any thoughts or advice? I'm bringing the boys in for their next check-up next week, so I'm planning to discuss all this with my vet then. But I thought you all might help me brainstorm some ideas and questions before then. Thanks for reading this long post!
 

sharky

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Free feed the under a yrs //// dry with maybe three wet meals a day
 
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ninacaliente

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Originally Posted by sharky

Free feed the under a yrs //// dry with maybe three wet meals a day
So you think I should continue free-feeding Piper (8 month old) even though she's overweight?
 
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ninacaliente

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Yes, the vet tech told me when I picked her up from her spay yesterday that the Dr. is concerned about her being overweight. He was with another pt at the time, so I wasn't able to speak directly to him. I'm going to talk to him at my appt with the little guys next week.
 

jennywhite686

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This isnt practical for everyone, but when I asked my vet about keeping my skinny cat fed whilst keeping my fatter cat restricted, he said build a 'cave' somewhere with an enterance just big enough for kittens, but too small for adult cats. Leave dry food in there all the time so the kittens can graze, but the adult cats cannot. Personally I never actually did this because my 'fat' cat started to grow bigger in structure and lost her wobbly bits
but it seemed like a good idea if you have the space/materials to go building caves for your kittens x
 
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