If you free feed...

(I am assuming that you free feed dry) do you put the food in the bowl and fill it up when it gets empty or do you measure a certain amount and put it down for your cats to graze(and not refill the bowl when it is empty until the next day)?

And if I may ask, why did you choose to free feed as opposed to meal feed? Convenience? Your cats like to graze? Other reasons?

I'm just curious...not to judge or anything.

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.

Originally Posted by SweetPea24

(I am assuming that you free feed dry) do you put the food in the bowl and fill it up when it gets empty or do you measure a certain amount and put it down for your cats to graze(and not refill the bowl when it is empty until the next day)?

And if I may ask, why did you choose to free feed as opposed to meal feed? Convenience? Your cats like to graze? Other reasons?

I'm just curious...not to judge or anything.

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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)

Thank you all for your replies. Very interesting. So your cats don't eat it all at one sitting?

Originally Posted by SweetPea24

Thank you all for your replies. Very interesting. So your cats don't eat it all at one sitting?

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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.

It seems that free feeding works for a lot of cats. I think what I am finding very interesting is that all who responded feed some wet food too. At the hospital where I work, I would guess that around 80-90% of the cats that come in are free fed dry ONLY. And most of the time it's not measured. And of these 80-90%, all are overweight to obese.
Obviously, it is working for all your cats so I am wondering what our clients are doing...maybe feeding some wet would benefit them? Well, it would overall but I wonder if they added some canned, would these cats be less overweight?

Originally Posted by SweetPea24

It seems that free feeding works for a lot of cats. I think what I am finding very interesting is that all who responded feed some wet food too. At the hospital where I work, I would guess that around 80-90% of the cats that come in are free fed dry ONLY. And most of the time it's not measured. And of these 80-90%, all are overweight to obese.
Obviously, it is working for all your cats so I am wondering what our clients are doing...maybe feeding some wet would benefit them? Well, it would overall but I wonder if they added some canned, would these cats be less overweight?

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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 canâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]t digest it properly, there arenâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]t enough of certain nutrients, or some nutrients are not in a “bioavailable†form–that is, they canâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]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 catâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]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!

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AC