I'm wondering about replies here towards dry food

Don't worry about it as long as you're feeding them quality foods.

Some cats have issues with dry and do better on all wet, many more do fine on all dry or a combination of dry and wet meals. All of mine get a combination - more towards 2/3rds wet to 1/3rd dry daily.

You'll see a lot of people on here try to promote their preferred way as the only way. Sometimes that doesn't work for all cats - such as not all cats doing well on grain free, or some high quality foods (like wellness) that don't settle well with some kitties, etc.
Filter what you read through your logic and experience. Are your cats healthy? Is your vet happy with how they look? No stool issues? and so on. If they're healthy and the food you're using works, stick with it. Change, especially drastic ones, to diet can make some cats sick.

As a general rule cats don't drink as much water as they should. Wet food helps them get the hydration they need, which is why many vets and owners recommend it. Chronic lack of hydration can lead to many health problems. Dry food has all the moisture removed as the food is processed into tiny hard dry pellets. This is not a problem in raw foods or wet foods. I mix water with dry for meals, soaking it in the fridge until desired consistency. My cat will eat anything, any temp, anytime.

You have to be careful doing this. The manufacturers do not make the food with the intention of it sitting wet, so while it's stable (bacteria and mold growth) in a dry form at room temp it may not be if left wet.
In some areas where there is greater general humidity in the air, people have had problems with dry food and bacteria growth just from the humidity and saliva off of the cat's mouth. (such as a past member in Japan who used to post here. It took him a bit to figure out how his cat was getting sick)

The bottom line on the thinking is cats are pure carnivores. Dry food in and of itself is can be a problem because "in nature" cats generally obtain what moisture they need from the food they eat. They're not "genetically programmed" to drink water. Thus as cococat points out, some cats, if fed an all dry or primarily dry diet, aren't well hydrated. This can be particularly a problem in males, as this results in concentrated urine, and given a combo of potential dietary imbalances (vs what they'd eat in nature) and genetics, it can create crystals or kidney stones.

The other potential issue with dry food is that a lot of it has a lot of filler that cats wouldn't normally eat - e.g. grains. Cats don't even process their proteins that well (that's why a lot of dogs will eat cat poop - it smells like protein to them), and grains are even more of an issue. Cats don't need or require them as their systems are set up to get everything they need from primarily small rodents. Of course those small rodents are seed, grass, and grain eaters, but the cats derive those vitamins from the mice, rabbits, or whatever. That's why if you're going to feed cats a raw diet, it's actually important to provide them with meat from grass fed animals, though I don't think a lot of people think to consider this.

Something else just by way of FYI... Cats' digestive systems are "set up" to process a lot of small meals frequently, and being able to free feed on dry works for this. But they do adapt to fewer large meals less frequently (e.g. rural feral cats that are hunting primarily rabbits).

There have also been a number of debates about quality of food. I don't know if you're referring to inside-only kitties. I know you work with ferals and have a number of outside kitties and indoor/outdoor kitties. It's not as important to worry about the quality of food for ferals, because they most likely supplement human food with their natural prey, which is why feral kitties can do so well on cheap dry food.

The problem with dry is two-fold. Most cats gobble food whole, so if they do that and then drink water, the kibble bloats in the stomach, it doesn't break down. Take one kibble, put it in a small jar of water and leave it alone for a bit. When you come back- it has enlarged not dissolved. Now think of that going on in a gobbler's stomach. Not pretty.

With dry you don't have to put water on it to promote bacterial growth- if you free feed, your cat supplies the slobber. Once the cat drool is on the kibble the bacteria gets invited in.

face it, dry food is convenient and cheap for us. Is it the best for cats? no, but then neither is wet food. It's a crap shoot any way you look at it.

I don't feed my cats dry food for numerous reasons. http://catinfo.org/ is written by a vet who actually knows her stuff, it is about why wet food is better than dry.

http://www.amazon.com/Your-Cat-Simpl.../dp/0312358016 is a link to a book, written by Elizebeth Hodgekins, DVM, that deals with a lot of questions about cat food.

I actually don't even feed much commercial food either. Most of mine are fed a raw diet, explained at http://rawfedcats.org/nature.htm

Why do I refuse to feed dry?

1. Check out the above sites
2. Incredibly low moisture content
3. I promised Milo, my cat who had CRF, that I'd never feed dry food again
4. Low protein
5. High in carbs
6. not much meat
7. cooked to death
8. bad for teeth
9. huge cause of multiple health problems in cats
10. and several more reasons, that I don't have time to list

I take care of 29 cats, yet I find no reason to ever feed them dry food.

Haddie, Chester, Jill, Crystal, Jack, Clover, Lynx, Amiga, Shadow, Buddy, Mo, Blizzard, Missy, Storm, Matilda, Mooshu, Mikey, Morey, Mitch, and Malachi are fed an all raw diet.

Nightmare is fed all high quality grain free canned.

Jezebel, Jazzie, Jazzie's good sister, Jazzie's not so good sister, LaMoose, LaMoose's brother, the good uncle, and the other good uncle are fed grain free (though low quality) canned food in the morning and raw at night. I know, that group of cat's has quite the names

Cost per cat: $0.34 a day on average. Nightmare is my "expensive cat" and his food costs ~$1.40 a day. The kittens, who eat a lot, also bring the average way up.

All over the internet, you will come across "cat food fanatics" that think dry food is the worst thing ever invented. Her is one example: Cat Chat radio show This lady refers to dry food as "Kitty Crack." It IS a way for meat processors to get rid of some things people won't eat, and it does tend to have too much fat (to make it taste good to carnivores) and thus too many calories.

However, probably the worst house-brand grocery-store food is healthier for your cat than what it would eat in the wild, and it doesn't expose them to diseases and parasites (although there are occasionally contaminations of food, as we all know). Purina Cat Chow, for example, is looked down on, but my brother has had a long line of cats that lived 17 years or more on it, and did just fine.

Dry food is also more convenient, especially if you have to be gone for a day or two.

There are some good dry foods (Costco's Kirkland brand gets good reviews).

Another problem is that not all cats will eat wet food, and not all will eat dry food. We have one cat that is very slow to accept any new food and won't eat enough wet.

Do your best, and don't feel guilty. The cat food industry is actually a fairly recent development, mostly since WWII. Cats are living longer and healthier than they did before that.

See this thread for a more balanced viewpoint IMO:
http://www.thecatsite.com/forums/sho....php?p=3042971

My ex pushed raw food for people on us, and it can be a healthy diet, but common sense tells you it is not the only healthy diet. So I'd just recommend using a little common sense and take some of the extreme viewpoints with a grain of salt, as people can be a little passionate about a certain diet which leads to gross exaggerations and over-generalization.

Personally, my kitties right now get a wet breakfast, a wet lunch, and a dry dinner from an autofeeder. If I'm away, they get breakfast and dinner dry, and wet in the afternoon. The dry is a low-carb recipe with high quality meats and per the manufacturer is designed w/ a target urine PH of 6.0 to 6.5, and I have three waterfountains available w/ clean flowing water. My cats are healthy, fit, with shiny coats. Unless your cat has a unique health condition, yours should thrive as well.

True. That's one of the reasons I don't free feed my house cats. The other reason is because it would be near catastrophic to do so...
My outdoor cats get a bowl of food each and wet food daily. Neither of them are used to finishing a meal all at once. Even with the wet food it takes them 20-25 minutes to eat it.

Yes, I do consider dry food addictive to cats. It's not that convenient to me - I have to buy 4 different dry foods due to their health issues and pickiness. None of it can be purchased in town and in reality it makes up a small part of their diet compared to wet. But they enjoy the small amount they get.. (plus one is really limited in wet foods he can eat, the LID dry at least gives him a tad bit of variety per day) That's pretty much the only reason I don't use all wet food.

This comes up here every so often. It's my cue to say that I've successfully, in the past, cared for several cats to age 17+ with them eating almost exclusively dry food - and before quality dry food existed.

Now days I feed the best commercially made food I can find, and mostly kibble. My cats do get about 1 ounce of canned food daily, with about a tablespoon of water mixed in to increase their fluid intake. Some of my cats drink a lot, and some don't. I have 5 water bowls for 5 cats. I keep the water bowls very clean and the water changed daily - to encourage them to drink.

Robin

The one thing I do agree on is that its better to schedule feed dry than to free feed.

Dry can very easily be put in an autofeeder though, and remain perfectly fresh and sanitary, with nothing more needed than to wash the bowl once a day or every other day which just lifts right in and snaps into place. The Petmate I purchased allows you to control varying amounts of kibble released up to three times a day, and it exactly holds a 10lb bag of Wilderness kibble in the container. The container is not airtight, but reasonably close to it.

Wet does have a moisture advantage, but IMO a mixed diet with attractive water fountains easily meets a cat's required moisture needs. The studies regarding mild dehydration is typically done with simple bowls of water next to the food, which many cats are somewhat disinterested in, and an exclusive dry diet w/ no wet meals whatsoever.

Something else to consider is that because most kitties don't drink a lot anyway, dry food can suck a lot of moisture from their bodies to process it and to get it to pass. This can lead to kidney problems as well as constipation, especially over time.

You will find a bazillion differing opinions on this topic. They will differ all the way from pro-dry diet to anti-dry diet and on into the fanatics who insist their way of doing things is the only way to go and any other way will do harm to your cat.

The only drawback I've been able to come across regarding a dry diet is if your cat does not drink enough water. Wet foods will help keep your kitty hydrated and help ward off UTIs and other health issues. If your cat is eating a good dry kibble with good ingredients and drinking enough water; you are probably just fine.

One has to use common sense on this issue. I have 4 cats. All of them are different and have different eating habits/preferences. I free feed dry kibble and split a 3oz can among the 4 of them 2x daily. Do I need to feed them the wet? Probably not but they like it and look forward to the "wet" feeding every day. All of my cats are healthy and have never had issues. I think all of them would be fine on a dry only diet.

Use your own common sense and use a premium or specialty dry kibble if you feel comfortable doing so.

How to know what is enough ? Two of my cats are 4 1/2 and one is 3. For the first two years I had them free feeding on Natural Balance Original Ultra Ultra-Premium Dry Cat Food. I didn't have fountains at the time, but they still were drinking what I thought was a sufficient amount. The only issues of concern seemed to be chronic ear itching and dermatitis and even so, the vets never suggested it could be anything to do with lack of moisture content.

Before getting smacked totally out of left field with thousands of dollars in vet bills from multiple UTIs/bladder inflamation, massive complications with antibiotics in one....followed almost immediately by the blockage, surgery and aftercare in another. They are now all on an all-canned, portioned feedling diet consisting of the very expensive Royal Canin SO and Holistic Select (aka "Eagle Pack"). Under which the kitties have lost weight, gained muscle tone, coat and eye glean - all aspects to be extremely thankful for. The disappearance of skin and ear issues has still been the only calculable cost savings. All for pennies on the dollar. It is a risk I NEVER would have taken in hindsight.

A cat needs to drink 1.25 cups of water for every cup of dry food they eat, in order to not become dehydrated.

Where did that number, "1.25 cups," come from?



Robin

Well, lets figure you want to get as much water into them as you would, if they were eating canned/raw food.

Canned food is roughly 78% moisture.

Dry is roughly 10% moisture.

Bear with me, cause I am not good at explaining math, but here goes.

Take a cup of water, and a cup of dry food. The water is 100% moisture with the dry being 10%. So together that would make 110% moisture, but you need to devide that by 2, because there are two things. So you got it up to 55% moisture.

So you have 2 cups of somewhat mushy dry food at that point. Take another 1/4 of a cup of water (100% moisture, being added to 8x as much 55% moisture).

Take 55 times 8 which is 440. Add 100, which is 540. Devide by 9 (which is how many 1/4 cups there are total). So it is 60% moisture...about enough to keep a cat from being badly dehydrated, but not enough to keep them totally hydrated.

So ideally, you really want a more than a 2:1 water to dry food ratio (making the total moisture content being 70% moisture at the 2:1 point).

So unless I did the math wrong, you do want the cat to drink AT LEAST 1.25 cups of water for each cup of dry food. Better yet it would be two cups of water for each cup of dry food. Not gonna happen...

Your math is right but premise wrong.

Consumption of cat food is by calories. You would need to take a fixed calorie count, preferably by a can since most cans have calorie information by can and dry food in kcal/kg. You would then have an apples to apples feeding basis to know what equivalent of "insert brand" dry food is equal to a 5.5oz can of "insert brand" to start a moisture comparison. The reason this is important is that the feeding amount of Wellness Core which is high calorie is different than a typical grocery store brand w/ fillers for example.

Once you know how much of a particular dry equals a particular can of wet, you can compare the water content. One is 10% water by weight, the other 78% water by weight. So you would need to add 68% of the weight of dry in water weight.

The lazy method would be to take the feeding suggestion of Wellness Core Dry for a 12lb cat which is 2/3to 3/4 cup dry and compare it to Wellness Core Wet which would be two cans on the absolute maximum suggestion or around 1 and 1/3 cups of which around 80% moisture would be a ~ cup of water, and then subtract 10% moisture from up to 3/4 cup of dry by weight. Pretty obvious that the daily difference is less than a cup of water.

I haven't taken the time to look at the math, and I am good at that. But I do know that one cat (at least one of mine) doesn't eat 1.25 cups of wet food a day (on an all wet diet), so they can't possibly need 1.25 cups of water.

I free feed the kibble, but it works for me. The autofeeders are an excellent tool to use and will also control how much your cat eats on a daily basis. If you've got cats that tend to overeat; I highly recommend them. I use the water fountains and my cats love them. I like the mixed diet of dry and wet because I know I've got the moisture issue covered AND my cats love their wet food "snacks" twice a day.

In the US, the standard cup is 8oz, so you are talking about 10fl oz.

All the information I have read before, is that a cat need 5.5oz a day of water - that includes the water it consumes in the food, plus what it drinks. That is why, when you feed a mostly wet diet, which is up to 80% water, he will barely need any extra water if all.

Question for those who keep referencing the cat's digestive system. Cats have been domesticated for what... 9,000 years+? For the truly 'domestic' cat who is a mutt, that has been coming from generations and generations of kibble eating cats, are their digestive systems really set up the way they used to be, before cats started eating kibble?

This is actually a question that comes up a lot. I'm not anti raw food or anything. But it is a question I've always wondered. Our cats and our dogs are not wild, they live in houses, they don't roam [or for those who do, they don't roam like wild animals do]. I'm not saying that kibble was a good invention or anything but for the generations of animals being fed and raised on kibble can we really say their digestive systems are the same as they used to be?

I'm also not trying to take this off topic, but the argument for wet food [which I am a wet feeder btw] seems to be based off of what a cat would eat in the wild - even though our cats no longer live in the wild.

Pet food has been around for all of ~100 years. In the same time, cats are getting way more diseases...

It takes a LONG time for them to change. Wolves and dogs differ by all of 0.2% of their DNA. In other words, they are almost the exact same, and wolves are obviously carnivores.

http://rawfed.com/myths/cooked.html is a link you may want to check out.

For me, dry food is too fattening. Bijou was 24.6 lbs so I took away all dry food and went strictly to wet. Since last June when he was weighed by the vet at 24.6 lbs, he has lost weight on wet food only and is now 19.2 lbs.

Some folks believe that dry food helps clean the teeth - nonsense! Cats do not chew (i.e., their jaws only move up and down, not side to side to chew), they break large pieces of kibble with the tip of the tooth and swallow which does nothing to help plaque. If I eat a mouthful of beef stew (wet food) it would leave little residue on my teeth but if I ate a dry cracker (kibble), when it mixed with my saliva it would get all mucky and stay in all the crevices in my teeth.

And that is my reasoning for feeding wet food.

I want to see the proof that pet and farm cats were regularly vetted 100 years ago, let alone that the disease counter parts that have only been understood the last 20-30 years in humans absolutely were not around back then. I also want to know how pet food has caused the rise of FeLV in all cat populations - including wild big cats.

In the rural area I live in current beliefs and values of animals are about 50-60 years behind, most non-house cats are left unspay, unneutered, and die early on from diseases that no one knows they have because they get no vet care. The excuse is "he was healthy, I don't know why he died" and when asked if taken to a vet, ever, they always answer no.

Just look at what processed food has done for people...this is just from the FIRST page of a google search.

"Feline diabetes is not the natural fate of hundreds of thousands of pet cats world-wide. It is, rather, a human-created disease that is reaching epidemic proportions because of the highly artificial foods that we have been feeding our feline companions for the past few decades. Without the constant feeding of highly processed, high carbohydrate dry foods, better suited to cattle than cats, adult-onset feline diabetes would be a rare disease, if it occured at all."


Elizabeth Hodgkins DVM, JD

So whole wheat is always good for all people and so is a low salt diet because someone said so online? Both can put me in the hospital.

How many people do you think vetted their cats during the Depression? Have you even seen the "medications" used before then?

The thing is so many of you raw feeders push it as the only way to feed a cat and it's simply not feasible for everyone to do this. I can't be the only one that feels like we're being attacked for feeding wet and a little dry.
It's not a matter of convenience, either. Not everyone has sources for the meat and a spare freezer for it. Of course there's grocery store/walmart quality meat full of chemicals... Yet others couldn't do it right and would cause major nutritional deficiencies.

But please do continue to tell all the rest of us how much we're mistreating our cats and abusing them. Maybe you'll convince some people who rescue and foster to stop since they're just abusing cats.

What do you know, you hate raw feeders. So typical People like me, we are constantly attacked!

I rescue, foster, and if you paid attention to my posts, you may realize I do feed commercial food.

Rajah - a rescue cat. He died a few months ago, from a sudden heart attack, at age sixteen.

Wayward - a rescue cat. Euthanized a few weeks after I got him because he had stomach cancer.

Matilda - rescue cat. Her brother and her were tossed out of a car window. Brother died of internal injuries from that, but Matilda is thriving.

Allie and Aimee - rescue cats. Were going to be shot by landlord...left behind when their owner moved. Adopted a few months ago.

"The foursome" - rescue cats. Recently they were all adopted.

Morey, Mitch, and siblings - rescue cats. I'm a failed foster mom to Morey and Mitch (aka they stayed here) but all their siblings were adopted.

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What do I feed?

20 of mine eat an all raw diet.

8 eat half raw/half canned. The canned is grain free, though low quality, and I wish I could afford to feed them better canned!

One (Nightmare) eats all grain free canned - 1/2 high quality, 1/2 low quality.

Where do I get meat from?

I have become friends with people that work in the meat department, of two differant grocery stores. They special order things for me, like hearts, gizzards, kidney, and liver.

Some of what I get is freezer burnt meat, for free, from friends/family.

Some I buy directly from the chicken processing plant.

Some I get from the butcher.

My freezer? I bought it new from Costco. Now I'm watching for another one on craigslist, to hopefully get a cheap/good working one, because I need more room.

You may be amazed at how EASY it is to do raw right...I was!

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Why could animals die suddenly, when they appeared healthy before?

Look at them. Inbreeding, for example, obviously not a good thing.

Dairy farms, for example, are very careful to not inbreed. Some calves are still borned somewhat deformed.

I worked for a dairy farm that always wanted to know the exact cause of death. I fed calves there for two years, until the dairy farm went into a buyout, last year.

The calves that died suddenly - they appeared healthy. Lots of grain/milk reps told us we had THE healthiest calves in the three state area they worked in. The vet couldn't believe the incredibly low mortality rate we had (less than 0.5% over a two year period) for calves that got sick/died but weren't in some way deformed.

There were three calves, if I remember right, that died because they had holes in their heart. Two of them, quite literally, just collapsed while standing. Their back feet were collapsed below their bodies, front feet straight out in front, and head between the front feet. The vet was called, they did a necropsy on them, and they both had holes in their hearts. The third with that problem couldn't ever get over pneumonia...but she wasn't lagging behind in size compared to others her age...only sign was she kept breathing a bit to hard. She died, again the vet was called, and it was a hole in the heart.

The fourth calf that we had - well, that was actually quite strange (yet really fun to see inside of her). She was a really nice calf, never sick, and always finished her milk. Then, sometime overnight, her stomach exploded. Of course, you couldn't tell anything was wrong with her from the outside, except for the obvious thing of her being dead. So the vet came and did a necropsy on her...and, it turned out, her stomach literally exploded. There was a basketball size hole inside of her...which was actually quite cool/gross to see. There was nothing that we could have done to cause that..the chunks in the milk replacer theory comes up...but she wasn't given milk replacer the night she died.
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A puppy came into the vet on Friday, who had eaten some snail bait. The poor thing was having seizures, and would have easily died, if she hadn't been rushed in. All the things meant to kill rodents/slugs/ants etc can, especially if left untreated, kill an animal fast.