If you free feed...

Most of the time I meal feed. But when my mom is watching my cats I have her measure free feed for her convenience.

I free feed grain free.
My girls are all nibblers and thankfully very good at self regulating.

My oldest is meal fed as I need her to eat less dry and more wet (CRF), but she was also a great self regulator in her younger days.

The youngest two get two wet meals a day, while the old gal gets three and I'm working on four.
I would go completely canned, but it just isn't in my budget at this time.

I free fed dry and now feed wet-as much as they want but not sitting out(pick up after hour or so)

I do this cause with as many cats as I have no food means fights start for no reason. They get along great until food is limited then they pick fights/stalk the food bowl.

This is how it works in my home, yes its nuts :

The DLH Panda is given a measure plate of wet and dry mixed together when I go to bed. At this time she is given a cup of dry food as well. The above is picked up when I wake up in the morning. She is fed in my bedroom at night. The reason for this feeding scheduled is her medical issues. Yep spoke to a licensed veterinarian before doing this feeding procedure.

The two indoor/outdoor DSH cats (Momma Cat and Shadow) are given a dish of wet and dry mixed together twice a day. Plus unlimited dry food.

Lastly the Savannah is given now a cup of dry food that he eats at night (his own doing) but it is left out all day. He is also now given one live feeder mouse a day for past month to eat as well.

Mine have one tin of wet food in the morning and then as much dried food as they want all day,I tend to have to fill the bowl twice in the day and then at about 6pm the have another tin of wet food.It just works for me and the cats are healthy and happy so it works for them too.x

We free feed dry but we don't automatically refill when it's empty. We make sure the bowls are refreshed before we go to bed and then again mid-morning. They could live off the dry morsels they drop all over the table anyway.

We do wet for the old guy Bogey multiple times a day, basically, whenever he expresses interest in eating as he won't eat dry very often. The other cats get small amounts of wet in the morning and then again before bed.

My kitties are still growing and came to me from rescue pretty skinny. So that is why I free feed the grain free dry food. I just fill up the bowl, I don't measure. But they get most of their food from canned meal times and only eat the dry for between meal snacks and in the morning if they are hungry before I wake up.

with 2 cats, I fill their bowl.. maybe 2-2.5 cups each night. It's usually empty by the next night.

They get 1 can each a day (half in the morning, half in the eve)

No, mine grazes all day. Some cats are different though

I just keep the bowl full. Neither of my cats is prone to overeating, and Christy is at the low end of normal weight. In her case, I'd prefer she had food there whenever she happened to want it, and since Tiny's sensible and doesn't eat more than he needs, there's always dry food out there for them.

I don't dry feed because Ritz tends to overeat, perhaps because she lived on the streets for the first four to six months of her life.
I also feed a cat colony of around eight adult feral/stray cats. Due to monetary constraints, I feed them three cans of low-quality (Friskies) wet food in the morning and evening, and leave out about three to four cups of dry food every day/evening. They are always hungry, but at an acceptable weight.
I also co-foster four cats, who are in a friend's house, and were originally part of the feral cat colony. We retrapped them in January 2011 and are in the process of re-socializing them; two are ready for adoption.
We had been feeding them two to three cans of wet food a day and free-feeding them dry food. We have just recently switched to measured dry feeding (one cup of dry food a day + wet). So far they don't seem too hungry; in fact, the wet food is often just nibbled at (and two of the cats could stand to lose a few ounces.) When "J.D." first came to the colony around November 2009, he was food agressive. It will be interesting to see if he reverts to that behavior in the coming month (will probably not make it as a house pet, good barn/farm cat).

I feed cynder (14 weeks old) 1/3 cup of blue buffalo kitten dry 3 times a day, he's a grazer but tends to eat the most at about 8am and 8 pm. So I just watch the bowl to see how far it gets down and refill with another 1/3 cup when needed.

We have three cats and we used to free feed dry food. We would put out measured 1/2 cup of dry food per cat, twice per day (1cup/day/cat total). After reading up on how bad dry food is for a cat we have transitioned to canned food making sure it met all of our requirements. This we feed smaller amounts 4 times per day.

I finally got Joni to eat wet food (she doesn't like certain flavors of the food I buy - picky unlike her brothers - so I stopped buying them, lol) so we now do 3 wet meals per day, 1 can each time split between the three of them. So each cat gets ~5.5oz of wet food per day. So they are not eating nearly as much dry food as they were! Yay! But at any rate, I do put a pile of kibble in their pans before I leave in the morning, and before I go to bed at night, just in case. They usually eat the kibble at night but when I get home from work in the afternoons they still have a good portion of the kibble in there.

If finances are the same, when they are all 1 year old, I'm going to put them on 2 wet meals per day, maybe one for breakfast and one before bed, with a kibble snack when I get home from work. If my finances have improved I'm going to try raw, so there will be no more kibble.

They're good at self-regulating. They really prefer the wet food so the more of that they eat, the less interested they are in dry food.

I measure and put down at night. I don't put more in there when its empty, but DH is here all day and I'm afraid he does even though I've told him not to. The reason I started free feeding is that Cindy likes to graze, she doesn't eat much at any one time, and she was waking me up several times during the night for something to eat.

They get wet food as well.

I measure free feed, because both cats are grazers. It comes out to about 1 cup of dry food per day. And they get a half 5.5oz can in the morning, which sometimes they finish, sometimes they don't. If they do finish all the wet food, then I'll put down another 1/4 can in the evening. They rarely finish all the dry food in a day too, it really seems like they don't eat a lot, especially when I read what other people feed their cats! However, neither has lost weight since I've had them (except Genever lost a pound due to giardia 2 years ago and never gained it back), and Dorothy actually gained a pound in less than a year of her being here. So, whether it's 'right' or 'wrong', it works for us.

Across the board, those cats would probably begin to lose weight if they began eating canned, and the higher the ratio of wet food to kibble, the better able the cat will be to shed those pounds. LittleBigCat.com has a great article about the various causes of obesity and the best way to help cats reduce their weight. Here's a couple of paragraphs (Feline Obesity):

Animals may consume excessive amounts of a food because they can’t digest it properly, there aren’t enough of certain nutrients, or some nutrients are not in a “bioavailable†form–that is, they can’t be assimilated properly. This is a concern with some of the most inexpensive and generic foods, as well as with some “diet†foods that contain excessive levels of fiber.

Dry food is actually where the most dangerous calories are. The feline is uniquely adapted to get energy from protein and fat; the cat’s natural prey contain very little carbohydrate. For most cats, carbohydrates are converted to fat, rather than be burned for energy. Clearly, this is the opposite of where we want to go!

Commercial pet foods tend to contain poor quality fats; this is especially true of dry food. Therefore it is important to add the right kind of essential Omega-3 fatty acids–even though it seems a little peculiar that to lose weight in a healthy manner, more fat is needed!

AC

Not to preemptively judge anyone here... But I've come to realize that about 75%+ of owners don't even realize that their cats are overweight. Let alone obese. So just because people may say it's working, doesn't mean it actually is. And the proof is in the cats you see at your work.
Adding canned to free-fed dry is actually one of the reason's why when some new members join they say 'Oh, I don't want to feed wet, I heard it makes cats fat.' You have to attack it at both ends to start weight loss. More wet, less/no dry.

I free fed dry because all four like to eat at different times and Im an indulgent parent. All the cats and the dog are nibblers they dont like to sit down and eat an entire meal at once. I have one big dish of cat food that I fill every morning and I just fill the dogs dish when its empty which is about every three days. None of my cats are obese but Herc could probably stand to lose a pound or two hes so darn short that he looks really chubby even though if he was a normal sized cat he would look normal. LOL As long as none of them get as big as Fatman was I wont change the way they eat but if they start getting huge then it will be diet time for everyone.

For what it's worth, I don't plan to free feed (if you can call what I do free feeding - I think that's pretty misleading as it conjures images of a completely full bowl 24/7) past kittenhood, and if I could afford to go all wet/raw now, I would. I agree with Minka that too few know what an overweight cat looks like - and they think healthy cats are too skinny. Somewhere there is a chart for judging weight health by body profile and I think that's a good way to tell.

I hate to generalize, but in my experience with friends & family who own cats and free feed, every single one is overweight and many are obese. And the owners either refuse to acknowledge it or - in one case, acknowledge it but think there's nothing they can do about it.

I know what you mean. Cats can get overweight with free-feeding of dry food. I don't keep the food in 24/7. I fill it once a day, and by the time the day's half over, the bowl's empty. I am so paranoid about my cats being overweight, I even had a vet's opinion and they said Monet's fine. He even dropped a few lbs since I got Picasso too

Oh, they get 1 can wet food each a day, half in the morning, half at night.

SweetPea, to help you with organizing your thoughts about your work at the hospital, I think we should make a distinction between free-feeding, which in my eyes is "the bowl is never empty, Fluffy can go to the bowl at any given point during a 24-hour period and there is food to eat," and what it seems like most of us do - maybe we could call it "free-grazing"?? lol! A diet that includes wet food at least once per day, in which a measured (or eyeballed) amount of dry food is put in the bowl at a given time, and is not refilled until the next scheduled time.

It seems to me that that's what many or even most of us on the thread do, which is likely why we don't have obese cats the way you see at the hospital.

My step-grandma puts out two PILES of dry food and at least one wet food and that's out 24/7. Her poor kitty is turning into a balloon. :[

Oh and the other half feed 'weight management' foods. :/

Hi guys quick question for ya. We all know cynder by now as lord knows I have posted enough on him but if not here's the run down: 15 weeks today and mainly eats a small amount of wet and mainly a dry diet. i know mainly dry is not good but I will worry about that in the future. So when should i stop free feeding him the dry and only put the required measurement of food down. he is obviously still a kitten and he needs his nutrition,but he is also quite the grazer when it comes to the dry and seems to run back to the bowl for a few nibbles and thats it. Right now i put 1/3 in his bowl in the morning and check when I get home from work and usually put another 1/3 in there,but sometimes I end up refilling it for a 3rd time cuz he has eaten all of it.

I'd say between 10 months and a year, which is generally considered the end of kittenhood as a stage of development. (I somehow have a feeling that personality-wise, Garfunkel will be a kitten forever.)

The only reason I keep food available (put down dry food for later at the same time I feed wet) is because my three are kittens, so I definitely understand about Cynder. I want them to be able to eat when they are hungry because their stomachs are smaller and they also seem to poop like 3x as much as adult cats! (Sheesh!) I could be gone upwards of 12-14 hours if I'm working both jobs or if I have to do something in the evenings - too long, in my opinion, for a kitten to go without food available. But I'm very inexperienced with raising kittens so I could be exaggerating the issue. If you have the funds - I don't, or I would do this - you could get an automatic feeder that times meals.

I'm going to stop feeding dry except (possibly) as a snack/mini-meal when everyone is about a year old. Joni is the youngest so when she's a year, that will put the boys at about a year and 2 months, but with three kittens close in age, nobody does anything that everyone else doesn't do - so I couldn't keep feeding Joni dry without feeding the boys too. I'll just wing it when the time comes - I'm hoping that my finances will have improved because I would love to try a raw diet before they get too old & picky. If not, I'll just cut the dry down to the snack size.

Sorry for rambling... I'm bad at being concise

I free feed dry biscuits (RC Growth) for my 15 week old kitten and measure out his wet. When he is an adult I'm hoping to continue this practice - he seems to be good at eating only when hungry at the moment so hopefully he carries this out into his adulthood.

I like being able to free feed as there isn't set meal times in case I'm out for the day, etc.