Transition from Dry Food

I have 5 cats; 3 of which refuse to touch any kind of wet food. Doesn't matter how long I leave it down, they would rather eat NOTHING than eat wet. I eventually wanted to get them on a raw diet, but first need to switch from dry to wet. 2 of them will eat wet, although one is very picky, and still prefers the dry, and will sneak dry from the others bowls if they are not put up. Unfortunately the 3 that refuse have been brought up since kittenhood on dry because that is what both vets at the time said to use, and it was easy and less "stinky" so I was just as happy to do it. Now I'm concerned that it wasn't a good thing to do and have been trying to change, but always give in when they refuse to eat the wet - I've tried lots of different brands and flavors, and have found one (very expensive) that one of them will eat a little of, but only in tuna, which I hear is also not good. I'm not sure how to go about transitioning them from dry to wet - any suggestions??

I'm sorry.. I'm not sure I understand why people seem to be so anti-dry.. My cats are absolutely thriving on a "complete" dry, my vet says to stick with it. Nearby I know an 18 year old Maine Coon with what the vet says are the teeth and body of a young adult cat, and he has never had wet.
Perhaps it is to do with international differences, I feel ignorant.

kathy2d2, have you read any of these four articles:

http://catinfo.org/docs/Tips%20for%2...%201-14-11.pdf
http://www.rawfedcats.org/practicalguide.htm
http://feline-nutrition.org/answers/...inicky-kitties
http://feline-nutrition.org/nutritio...-to-a-raw-diet

They have a lot of tricks and idea's on how to get finicky cats to switch over to canned

Also, below is my story of how I managed to get kibble addict Clover to switch to canned, and then eventually to raw. Clover is one stubborn kitty, but unfortunately (or fortunately) for her, I am more stubborn when it comes to them eating something healthy. Mikey was also a previous kibble addict, so his story on the switch is also quoted below. I wrote a lot of my own "raw feeding testimonials" a while ago, so these are two of several success stories that I have had personally.

Clover had been fed all dry food – mainly Purina – her whole life. I rescued her when she was about four years old and she was underweight. You could feel her backbone and ribs no matter how much quality food I tried to feed her. Getting her onto wet food was a challenge in itself. She hated wet food. Detested it. Sheâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]d eat dry food (yuck!) just fine but would not touch wet food. She is a very stubborn cat but I even more so when it came to getting her to eat something good for her. It got to the point that I was syringe feeding her a three ounce can of wet food a day and I let her eat a tiny portion of dry on her own. After a few weeks of my syringe feeding her wet food she decided that the stuff wasn't so bad after all! In fact it tasted pretty good. Once she was happily eating wet food (and on her own!) I took away her dry. But she still wasn't gaining weight even with getting twice the amount of wet food as all the other cats. By that time I had everyone eating a raw diet and wanted her to switch over as well.

The problem was that she would not touch, look at, or sniff the raw food. I tried all different kinds of raw meat – chicken, beef, pork, turkey, beef heart, liver, kidney, lamb, even rabbit. But Miss Picky Pants Clover wouldn't eat any of it; she just wanted her wet food. I donâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]t know how much later it was – maybe a month – but I put a ¼ of a lamb heart on her dish as well as some wet food. She devoured the lamb heart! After that day she was very happy to eat any type of raw meat I gave her! And you know what? She started to gain weight. Today she is a very muscular cat and at the perfect weight.

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Mikey is a 7 year old DSH cat. His whole life he has had problems with hairballs as well as keeping his food down. Up until the age of 5 he had been eating all dry food – mostly Science Diet (yuck!) and it was the Sensitive Stomach formula (double yuck!). Once I learned that Science Diet (non-presciption) is really a horrible brand of food I switched him to foods like EVO and Wellness CORE. The problem was that it was still dry food. Luckily for him I learned a few months later that dry food – no matter what brand – is bad for cats. But getting him onto wet food was a real challenge as he would only eat Fancy Feast Gourmet Chicken and nothing else. It took him about a year to convince him that all wet food is edible and actually good! In September 2010 I was able to switch him over to a raw diet. While Mikey was not overweight when he was eating all wet food after a week he started to lose weight – which was fat – and is now beginning to gain weight back as muscle. Already his plaque covered teeth are started to look white and his fur is softer than it was before. But the best thing of all? He doesn't have hairballs anymore. It took less than a week of eating a raw diet to get rid of them after him being plagued with hairball problems his entire life! So not only does raw feeding help control allergies, controls the herpes virus, helps cats gain weight, helps cats grow, and makes them act 10+ years younger than they really are – it also helps cure hairball problems! Itâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s truly a miracle diet!

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Gothy, one of the best sites to read, when it comes to wet vs. dry food is http://catinfo.org/ Hope this helps!

Originally Posted by furryfriends50

Gothy, one of the best sites to read, when it comes to wet vs. dry food is http://catinfo.org/ Hope this helps!

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Interesting site.. But is there anything to read that's a little less biased, and lets you consider both sides? I understand people want the best for their cats, but to read pages like this would have me think I am poisoning my little friends, despite how they are doing in reality.
I'm not pro or anti anything, at the minute I stick with what the (UK) vet recommended and what has had the best visible effect for my two.

kathy2d2 - I agree with reading the catinfo.org site. I have just finished a month of transitioning my very picky cat over to canned from kibble in the hope of switching her to raw like all of my other animals.

My best tips:

Fortiflora (animal digest was my saving grace for getting Ziva to eat any canned)

Patience - it took me 4 weeks to get her onto canned food. The first several weeks were spent putting an eraser head sized piece of canned food in with her kibble which caused her to pull out each single piece of kibble in order to eat it. When I added the Fortiflora, she finally accepted a piece of kibble rolled in canned juice. We went from there, piece by piece.

Stop free feeding. Hunger can help. Just don't allow them to go without food for longer than 24 hours. You do not want to cause fatty liver disease.

Good luck! I thought it would take me a year to get her onto canned, but it was done in a month!

Originally Posted by Gothy

Interesting site.. But is there anything to read that's a little less biased, and lets you consider both sides? I understand people want the best for their cats, but to read pages like this would have me think I am poisoning my little friends, despite how they are doing in reality.
I'm not pro or anti anything, at the minute I stick with what the (UK) vet recommended and what has had the best visible effect for my two.

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Your Cat: Simple Secrets to a Longer Stronger Life, written by Elizebeth Hodgekins, DVM may seem a bit less biased. I could recommend other books/sites, but these are two of the best ones written by veterinarians who have done their research (Dr. Hodgekins even helped make a diabetic dry food formula, who later really dived into the study of nutrition).

Originally Posted by Gothy

Interesting site.. But is there anything to read that's a little less biased, and lets you consider both sides? I understand people want the best for their cats, but to read pages like this would have me think I am poisoning my little friends, despite how they are doing in reality.
I'm not pro or anti anything, at the minute I stick with what the (UK) vet recommended and what has had the best visible effect for my two.

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Since kibble is entirely species-inappropriate as a food source for cats, you're not going to find any sites - excepting those created by the pet food industry itself, of course - that explore the nutritional "benefits" of cats eating kibble. Kibble is inexpensive and easy to use, but really doesn't do anything good for the cats who are eating it (and it's low cost is very much offset by the veterinarian costs that are often incurred later on).

Dr. Elizabeth Hodgkins (mentioned in Furryfriends' post) also has an article on the Feline Nutrition Education Society's (FNES) website called, "Diabetes and Obesity: Preventable Epidemics." that might be of interest to you.

I've quite a list of veterinarians who have researched this topic and then written about it, if you'd like to get input from several sources. I don't want to hijack this thread any further, so please pm me if you'd like to continue this conversation. Alternatively, there are several threads here on TCS that discuss this very topic.

Hope this helps clear the confusion a bit!

Best regards.

AC

Hi!

I know this is an old post but I'm hoping perhaps someone might see this...do you have any updates to the above?? Has your kitty turned from the dark side?

I am also trying to convince my kitty to see the light.  She's an IBD kitty and currently on prednisolone.  She has been on dry food all her life but started vomiting about 5 years ago.  I didn't realize she had a problem until I separated from my husband and took her with me.  Her vomiting got worse and so I took her to the vet and a few thousand dollars later she was diagnosed with IBD.  The vet put her on a hypoallergenic dry food diet but that didn't stop her vomiting so I switched to grain free dry food.  This has helped slightly but she had a bad spell the other day and it scared the heck out of me.  I don't want her to get diabetes on the prednisolone.  She's 12 years old now and I want her to be with me another 5 years at least!

But my biggest problem is that she doesn't eat ANYTHING except her one dry food. No tuna, no chicken, no cheese, no milk, no forti flora - all the things kitty's are usually drawn to.  And if I give her a new dry food she'll not touch it - that's a whole nother transition!  The only thing other than her dry food she will eat are the pill pockets I use to wrap her pred in.  So I've started to taken the wet food plunge but I'm terribly scared of food aversion since she only will eat one dry food.  I'm trying to introduce her to the new smells slowly but she's already refused her dry food a few times because I put the dry food too close to the wet food and she only smelled the wet food.  She won't eat her pill pockets if I place them on the same plate as the wet food.

Does anyone have any tips on avoiding food aversion?

It's been almost a week of trying with wet food, but she still runs away when I put the wet food down.  I've tried 3 different brands but she hates all of them.  I've tried making her go 12 hours without eating, but she just stares at me like I'm crazy.  I'm so scared of the thought of syringe feeding her because I think it will traumatize her.  Will she eventually get used to this?

Thanks for any tips!

Hi Brandy and WELCOME to TCS!! Glad you found us ). Please feel free to start your own thread on this subject in looking for advice for getting you cat off dry food. Here is an article written by TCS about picking a diet for you cats, the more information you have, the better you will be able to change your kitty onto a new diet. http://www.thecatsite.com/a/choosing-the-right-food-for-your-cat Also, here is another article on why canned food is so important for our kitties - wet food. http://www.littlebigcat.com/health/why-cats-need-canned-food-2/

Also - you can try sprinkling a enticing topping on the wet food to get your cat interested in tasting the new texture. You want it to smell irresistible to your kitty. A lot of us here on site use Halo treats http://www.halopets.com/natural-treats.html and Whole Life chicken treats too Bonito Flakes is another one to help get a cat trying a new diet.

I hope this is a bit helpful and hopefully other's will come along as well with some other great ideas/suggestions for you ..... Enjoy your time on TCS

My cats were free-fed kibble their entire lives. I remember when we first offered them wet food, they hated it! We found they liked the gravy in Whiskas and Friskies pouches. so we used to feed those as a "treat." They would lick up the gravy part and leave the lumps behind. :lol3:

When we decided to incorporate wet food, we bought a little blender so we could "whip" the pate style food with water and turn the whole thing into gravy. :nod: When one of our vets basically insisted we get rid of the kibble, the cats were already eating two meals of wet food a day pretty well. The hardest part, for us, was the switch to timed meals.

But here are a couple of observations that may help you:

1) Smell. The biggest hump in transitioning a cat to a new food is how it smells. To help attract her to the food, I suggest crushing up the kibble she loves into very small pieces (a hammer and a baggie will help!) and sprinkling it on top. You may even need to put some whole kibble on top. As she tries to eat it, she'll get SOME wet food, and over time, she'll get used to the taste of it. It's not a switch that needs to be made immediately - you just need to figure out a way to get her eating with it there, or accidentally eating some of it, until she becomes accustomed to it. Even try feeding her kibble on a plate with a little dollop of wet on the plate. She'll begin to associate the scent of the wet food with the kibble, and come to think of the wet food as food.

2) Texture. When it comes to eating the wet food, texture can be a big part of whether or not they'll eat it, once you're over that hump of convincing them that canned food IS, in fact, food. :lol3: Our cats simply did not like pate style food, especially chunky food. So chunky food we blended, and pate style food we just added some warm water to and smush it up.

Hope these ideas help too!

Thank you so much for these great suggestions!!  I did get a "sniff" out of her tonight which I rewarded with a few pieces of kibble.  But then that was it.  We'll try again tomorrow!  How long did it take your babies to transition over?

Well, for me it's not really a relevant question, because I didin't decide to "switch" them. Our boys had problems with crystals in their urine, and all three of them blocked at various points over a couple month period. So we needed to increase their water intake. We put out more water dishes, bought a fountain, and started giving them wet food. At first all they ate was that gravy from the pouches. But I just started putting pouch food down at night and in the morning, and they slowly ate more and more of it, and then I started raising the quality of the wet food I was putting down - and eventually got them eating EVO, Instinct, and Before Grain canned foods. :nod: Wellness grain free is a good intermediate step - and they have pouches with that gravy too. :nod:

But when I decided to go from the two meals of wet food a day they were eating to no kibble at all, it took about a month - six weeks to get them on timed meals. And even then out of 8 cats, I had three hold outs that would just NOT eat enough food at those meals.

That was November - December 2010. I'd only supplement their food with kibble at night at that point - and I did that in a closed room so I could control who got what. Just two weeks ago I decided to switch them to raw food, and I stopped the kibble altogether. But because they were already on timed meals, eating (mostly) wet food, that's been going pretty well. For me, the hard part was the timed meals - wouldn't matter what the food was. The hard part of the adjustment for us was eating enough food at the meals offered as most of them had been free feeding for 8 years at that point.

That said, if I'd tried to make the switch when they still hated wet food... I probably would have made the switch to timed meals first, and then concentrated on making the switch to wet food. :nod:

There's another member making the switch to raw, and one of her three won't give up the kibble. She's helping her get used to raw food by making pea-sized balls out of the food and rolling it in crushed Halo freeze-dried chicken treats. :nod: She LOVES the Halo treats so much, she'll lick it off - but get some of the raw food under it. You could do the same thing with wet food - make little balls and roll it in crushed kibble, or any freeze-dried/dehydrated treats she loves. http://www.thecatsite.com/t/239771/...lucky-bugsy-and-hope-to-raw-challenges-galore Everything Carolina is doing to get Lucky to switch to raw are tricks that can be used to get your kitty to eat wet. :nod: And if she's not on timed meals, the way she got Lucky to switch to timed meals may help you too.

Thank you!  I will stop by Petco and pick up some different treats tonight and different wet food brands.  She's still turning her nose up at the natural balance duck and pea. I do hope one of the treats works - Mario seems to like nothing foreign!   I have been looking over Carolina's post - good stuff there!!

I got into the mindset that I would find a recipe that would work and never go back to dry food.Currently I use a mix of canned Wellness chicken formula, de-boned skinned and boiled chicken thighs and a can of sardines.The chicken thighs are pulverized in a food processor with a good amount of water.I use the canned food as a source of vitamins, this is a low cost diet, chicken thighs are quite affordable.I know this is not the ultimate raw diet, I am working towards this, my time is limited to make homemade food for a Border Collie and a very special Manx cat that eats better than a lot of humans do.Sardines are typically toxin free since they spend much less time in the ocean compared to tuna She is in much better health now since the change over, you have five cats? that's quite a challenge, best of luck

What do you think about pet food? I have found many complaints about pet food, so I'm not sure if it's healthy. What would you say?

Do you mean dry food? Or do you mean pet food vs raw? 

appletree said:

What do you think about pet food? I have found many complaints about pet food, so I'm not sure if it's healthy. What would you say?

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Welcome to TCS! We've discussed this rather extensively. The fact of the matter is that since the advent of commercial food, our pets began living MUCH longer. Unfortunately, over the past decade or so, we've also seen an increase in problems like IBD, diabetes - and 40% of cats are now overweight.

For some of the discussion, here's a relevant thread: http://www.thecatsite.com/t/239691/nutritionally-complete-assurances-for-our-pet-food

Brandy Rowe said:

Thank you!  I will stop by Petco and pick up some different treats tonight and different wet food brands.  She's still turning her nose up at the natural balance duck and pea. I do hope one of the treats works - Mario seems to like nothing foreign!   I have been looking over Carolina's post - good stuff there!!

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Try Halo Freeze-dry chicken - if they don't have on Petco, get it on Amazon.....
If your kitty has IBD, I have to say, from my own experience, Raw will be your best bet for a healthy life.... There are plenty of cats successfully treated holistically through diet and probiotics only, with no medication at all, once they go on raw - very very often all symptoms disappear, or become very mild :nod:
For my Bugsy for example, it was pretty much immediate results once he went on raw - while on western medicine nothing, and I mean NOTHING else worked.
Right now it seems that he is going through a mild flare - which I believe was possible brought up by stress (I was out on a trip, and he seems to get sick sometimes when I travel), but it is very mild, he doesn't even have diarrhea.
As far as transitioning him from kibbles to raw or wet.... Laurie is right..... Lucky was a complete kibble addict..... Just putting a dollop of the raw on her kibble plate every meal (you have to put him on scheduled feeding first), sprinkled with her favorite treat - Halo Freeze-Dried Chicken, did the trick.... She would lick the halo every time, in the beginning very meticulously, to not get any of the raw..... Then one day, on day 35 - she ate the dollop - the whole entire thing. Guess what? The next day she completely refused kibbles So now it is day 38, just a few days after that first lick, and she is fully on raw
All I did was put a dollop in there, every meal. :nod:
Now I am working on making her eat more per meal, as raw is quite rich - there is no junk in it - it is meat meat and meat - but we are getting there :bigthumb:
Keep going, you are doing a wonderful thing taking your baby off kibbles :nod:

I am trying to get my cat to eat wet also. Sometimes he will eat all the wet I give him other times he takes a few bites and quits. I usually only give him 1 tablespoon of wet so as not to waste allot of it.

Progress so far:

This morning I gave him he usual 1/4 cup of dry

This evening I gave him 1.5 tablespoon of wet and mixed it with warm water. He ate maybe half of it. We shall see if he finishes it later.

My question is, How long can I leave wet food out in his bowl before tossing it?

Information really differs on how long you can leave out wet food. I never left it out for more than 20 minutes. I wanted them to understand they had to eat their meals at certain times though, as my transition included getting them off of free-feeding kibble.