Dry vs. Wet Food

I have my kitties on an all dry diet, but I have read alot about y'all feeding them wet food too. Is there any beneifit to this? I have never had any luck with wet food with my late kitty Tink, RIP, she always got the runs from it so I never interduced it to any of my other kitties. Also I have them on Imas is this considered "junk food". I just want the best for my kitties!! Thanks!

If you put in wet vs dry in the search function you will get a lot of reading material ...

IMHO Iams is very$$$ for the quality and contents .. ie the ingrediants are very close to many grocery lower end foods at 50-75% less ...

here is a very broad search of wet food or dry food

http://www.thecatsite.com/forums/sea...archid=1783705

Thank you much!

I do not allow dry food in my house. Although I have cats seem to do fine on it, once one of my cats got iabetes and i have seen the negativfes, I stopped. It's the dry food that I consider junk food and I would rather feed a medium quality canned food over the best dry.
Here are a few links

http://www.catinfo.org/

http://www.blakkatz.com/dryfood.html
Best to you

I feed both wet and dry to mine. I recently changed the dry to Royal Canin, and the condition of their fur is superb!!

Dr. Elizabeth Hodgkins has written a book titled "Your Cat". She is a vet with 30 years experience in practice and research. She strongly recommends against feeding dry food to cats. She says many of the chronic ailments seen in cats can be caused by feeding dry. She even "treats" many such ailments by just having the cats diet changed. She recommends raw and/or low carb canned foods.

She never says anything about a combo wet/dry diet. I'm sure that would be better than an all dry diet.

Tink may have had an intolerance to something in the canned foods you tried with her.

Check out the book. It is really interesting and an easy read. Especially if you are interested in the dry vs wet issue.

I have one kitty who really doesn't like wet food. Every time it's offered, she turns her nose up at it, unless it's something fishy. She has kidney issues, so I have to be careful what I feed her. She's on a prescription dry which she likes.

My other cat has feline herpes and we're in the process of transitioning from grain-food to no-grain foods and incorporating more raw into her diet. She LOVES wet food, so she's primarily fed canned food. She gets a few crunchies (dry food) a few times throughout the day, but the total amount fed is less than 1/4 C a day.

I see so many more healthy benefits feeding the canned over the dry. Overall health is so much better for my girl who eats the canned food. When I can get my older kitty to eat canned, she does better as well.

Stephanie

IAMS used to be good, but the majority of breeders now feed Royal Canin since IAMS changed the formula to a cheaper kind.

We feed Royal Canin dry in the morning and canned at night (Max Cat, Iams Beef, or Natural Balance). I don't feed fish (like tuna or salmon) cause the cats don't like it - they eat mainly chicken, lamb, beef, venison and duck.

Feeding any living organism any kind of food will cause numberless health problems. Eating what we deem "health food" today might one day prove deadly. There is unbeatable convenience in feeding dry, but the health benefit of feeding wet is undocumented and anecdotal at best, and probably is a result of marketing hype by cat food manufacturers seeking to swindle more money out of you.

http://www.littlebigcat.com/index.php?action=library

http://www.catinfo.org/

Both of these are written by veterinarians. The FDA consulted one of them as a nutritional expert in the pet food recall, if my memory is correct. (?)

I think it comes down to giving your cat the best quality food you can afford that the cat does well on and will eat. Just reading the ingredient labels will be telling.

Originally Posted by plar

Feeding any living organism any kind of food will cause numberless health problems. Eating what we deem "health food" today might one day prove deadly. There is unbeatable convenience in feeding dry, but the health benefit of feeding wet is undocumented and anecdotal at best, and probably is a result of marketing hype by cat food manufacturers seeking to swindle more money out of you.

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I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say. I read it as we shouldn't feed them any kind of food in order to avoid numerous health problems????? That would certainly avoid health issues as they would be dead from starvation. I get the convenience of dry but am not sure what you mean by the comment that wet feeding is undocumented and anecdotal and is marketing hype. I believe there is a large amount of information by respected persons to indicate a wet food diet is much healthier for our pets so I'm not sure where you get the "undocumented and anecdotal" parts. Do you have some references for your information that we can check out for ourselves?

Originally Posted by plar

Feeding any living organism any kind of food will cause numberless health problems. Eating what we deem "health food" today might one day prove deadly. There is unbeatable convenience in feeding dry, but the health benefit of feeding wet is undocumented and anecdotal at best, and probably is a result of marketing hype by cat food manufacturers seeking to swindle more money out of you.

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Cat food manufacturers make most of their money and have the biggest margin for profit from dry food (that is documented) so this doesn't hold

If you want to see the health detriment of feeding dry food and talk to a thousand people who have seen and made the switch to wet go here
http://www.felinediabetes.com/
If you want to see what is published in javma, go here
http://home.earthlink.net/~jacm2/id1.html
remeber that 95%+ of dry foods contain hiogh carbohydrates. The only one reasonably love in carbs may be evo . Even wellness core is on the upper end of what may be acceptable to a cat's body
Let me point out a key passage in this published paper

(I edited out the text - please link only unless you have permission of the author to quote them.)


'

Originally Posted by plar

Feeding any living organism any kind of food will cause numberless health problems. Eating what we deem "health food" today might one day prove deadly. There is unbeatable convenience in feeding dry, but the health benefit of feeding wet is undocumented and anecdotal at best, and probably is a result of marketing hype by cat food manufacturers seeking to swindle more money out of you.

Click to expand...

Wet food is a better match for the diet a cat would naturally eat. Surely it's up to the proponants/manufacturers of dry food to prove that a) their food is not harmful to a cat's health and b) it offers some benefit to the cat, rather than the other way around. For a long time, manufacturers of dry food have claimed that dry food is beneficial for dental health (and have persuaded many vets to perpetuate this myth) but I have seen no reasearch that proves it. The benefits of feeding wet don't need to be researched and documented - any understanding of feline physiology will support the need for water in a cat's diet. Individual ingredients are another matter, but the importance of water for a cat is the main reason for choosing wet food over dry, imo (that and the generally lower carb content in good wet foods).

I use wet food and leave dry stuff out incase flash gets hungry through the day but she never touches the dry stuff turns her nose up it and tuna haha

she wolves down the iams stuff but always wants twice as much, so been sticking to the whiskers kitten wet