Two of my cats seem to hate wet food. One take a few bites and walks away. One just sucks the juice out of it. LOL   Anyway to coax them to eat more wet and less dry?

malla said:

Two of my cats seem to hate wet food. One take a few bites and walks away. One just sucks the juice out of it. LOL 

 Anyway to coax them to eat more wet and less dry?

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Are you leaving dry food out? If so, pick it up and go to scheduled meal times with a measured (small) amount of kibble. Leave wet food out instead. And check out these links:

How to Win the Healthy Food Battle with Your Fussy Feline…

How to Win the Healthy Food Battle with Your Fussy Feline – Part 2

Transitioning Feline Dry Food Addicts to Canned Food

Good luck! Try a few different brands, textures, flavours, and most importantly, have lots of patience and persistence. It can take some cats many months to make the switch, but for sure it can be done.

 

Tried that. My youngest actually protested by running around the house meowing loudly until I gave her her dry food. lol

I'll try again though, much slower. 

How many different types of wet foods have you tried? Did you try both pate and chunks? (Some cats have a preference.) Did you try different meats?

EmilyMayWilcha said:

How many different types of wet foods have you tried? Did you try both pate and chunks? (Some cats have a preference.) Did you try different meats?

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I've tried Fancy Feast, Friskies, et tal. I tried chicken, turkey, fish. Youngest really hated the chunks, she literally bolted away. LOL Best the two did was with was chicken.

Can I substitute tuna/ canned chicken for wet food? All my cats eat the hell out of it. They get it once or twice a week. 

malla said:

Can I substitute tuna/ canned chicken for wet food? All my cats eat the hell out of it. They get it once or twice a week. 

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if the chicken is for humans, it doesn't have taurine and few other things cats need, so you'd end up with a deficient cat if you tried to feed it as cat food.  deficiencies don't manifest in cats the same way they do in humans (although some are probably milder) you can have heavy CNS damage, blindness, death--that sort of thing so you probably don't want to gamble.

people tuna isn't good for cats on a lot of different levels.  read through a few threads and you'll see.  the cat tuna, if from a higher-priced facility, uses smaller varieties with shorter life spans so the risk of mercury is diminished.  unlike mammals, where you can get free-range, organic, marine life lives in a very polluted environment and you'll never be able to get around that unless you raise your own fish in distilled water at home  (i'm just being ridiculous, i don't even think most fish could live in distilled.  certainly not salt-water or brackish).

you can sprinkle a little on top of the wet food though.  by a little, i mean a tsp. or so.  just enough to get them to start licking it.  you can also buy bonito flakes to sprinkle on top, or if that seems too pricey, i'd get dehydrated fish flakes from a pet store that's made to feed other fish (little cannibals lol).  just make sure there's nothing in it that will hurt your cat. i've never used it.

you can also use meat baby food (can't have onions--gerbers is safe), sardines, chicken broth, anything to get the smell to entice them. (i left out parmesan cheese, or there's a probiotic i can't remember the name of that smells and tastes the same.  kraft is probably cheaper.  and you can use bits of the human chicken too.)

i have a howler monkey too--he runs around and yells at the top of his lungs (even from the top of the fridge) if he doesn't get the food he wants.  i just ignore him and pretend like there's no other food.  he hardly does it now.  cats are like kids.  if you give in to manipulative behavior, you'll never have the upper hand.  you might have better luck with pate but i don't know your cats.  with any cat food (science diet, fancy feast, weruva) my cats all have a tendency to lick the gravy off and leave meat chunks or shreds.  the only difference is that if i leave weruva out, they go back and eat that part later, but the others they never would.  i always suspected it was the quality of the "meat" lol and that it probably doesn't taste very good. weruva is different but i guess they just automatically lick it and find out if it's good or not later.

i'd throw out all the dry food and then you can honestly say, "sorry.  we don't have any more." you can also leave most canned food out for awhile.  you can tighten up the feeding schedule later, but i found that even with food they didn't dive right into, even the pickiest one comes back and eats in shame later ("don't look at me don't look at me").  some cats can wait a long time though, so don't let any of your cats go more than 24 hours without eating.  mine can't last more than 10 or 12, and that won't hurt them.  i think a lot of people get nervous and think, "omg my cat hasn't eaten in six hours," but i think they're trying to see what else they can get.

malla said:

I've tried Fancy Feast, Friskies, et tal. I tried chicken, turkey, fish. Youngest really hated the chunks, she literally bolted away. LOL Best the two did was with was chicken.

Can I substitute tuna/canned chicken for wet food? All my cats eat the hell out of it. They get it once or twice a week.

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Not tuna. A whole can of that is too much for a cat.

The problem with feeding your own chicken is it does not have the right amounts of the right nutrients for a cat. You need to add supplements (taurine, vitamin A, and omega-3) to the chicken.

What I did first when switching mine from dry to canned was to put them on scheduled feedings.  No more free feedings.  Then I began replacing the kibble with canned.  And, yes, it takes awhile with some cats for you to find a food they like. We tried literally hundreds of different brands, flavors, types (pates, slices, chunks, etc.  I also have one who will lick it to death until all that's left is a pile of dry "stuff", and I always wonder if she's actually getting any nutrients, since it seems the meat is still in her bowl!  (but since the whole conversion to canned was so we could convert to raw, I didn't worry about it too much) 

Oh, and one way to entice them is to crush up some of their beloved kibble and sprinkle it on top of the canned food.  At least they might come over to the bowl and take a lick or two, and with any luck, they'll like what's under it!

cinderflower

Thank you. That was very informative. I bought organic tuna from the pet store once they turned me to it. 

I have given them baby food meat before as a treat. They loved it. 

mrsgreenjeens said:

What I did first when switching mine from dry to canned was to put them on scheduled feedings.  No more free feedings.  Then I began replacing the kibble with canned.  And, yes, it takes awhile with some cats for you to find a food they like. We tried literally hundreds of different brands, flavors, types (pates, slices, chunks, etc.  I also have one who will lick it to death until all that's left is a pile of dry "stuff", and I always wonder if she's actually getting any nutrients, since it seems the meat is still in her bowl!  (but since the whole conversion to canned was so we could convert to raw, I didn't worry about it too much) 

Oh, and one way to entice them is to crush up some of their beloved kibble and sprinkle it on top of the canned food.  At least they might come over to the bowl and take a lick or two, and with any luck, they'll like what's under it!

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I am getting ready to make that switch just to get Patricia off kibbles. She does not care if it is shredded, sliced, chunks, or pate. However she does not always like the smell, so I have to figure out which canned food she likes.

EmilyMayWilcha said:

Not tuna. A whole can of that is too much for a cat.

The problem with feeding your own chicken is it does not have the right amounts of the right nutrients for a cat. You need to add supplements (taurine, vitamin A, and omega-3) to the chicken.

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I would split the can between three cats. Facey would eat two cans of tuna (or wet food) if I let her. 

I've given them chicken in a can for a treat  not as a meal. I thought of it as people food and I rarely let my cats have table scraps. Sometimes they get a small bite or a lick of something but thankfully they don't beg. It took some effort to teach the cats I kept from my roommate to stop begging. My cat never did. lol

This thread is so informative. Thank you all!

I'm gonna try some tricks tonight to get my two kitties off dry food.

My neighbor INSISTS wet food rots their teeth - any truth to this?

Dumb question:

As I said before Facey would eat two cans of wet if I let her - is she actually THAT hungry or is she just being a pig? She does not do that with dry food.

malla said:

This thread is so informative. Thank you all!

I'm gonna try some tricks tonight to get my two kitties off dry food.

My neighbor INSISTS wet food rots their teeth - any truth to this?

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Wet food does NOT rot their teeth!  There are many debates as to whether or not eating kibble cleans their teeth or not.  Most people say "no".  The only way to really clean their teeth is to brush them, and many people do just that .  I'm not quite brave enough, but I do smear they teeth (quickly) with a cat toothpaste which supposedly has enzymes in it that keeps the plaque down.  There are lots of threads under Care and Grooming about cleaning your cats teeth.  AND there are lots of threads about whether or not kibble keeps their teeth clean too

malla said:

This thread is so informative. Thank you all!

I'm gonna try some tricks tonight to get my two kitties off dry food.

My neighbor INSISTS wet food rots their teeth - any truth to this?

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The myth is dry food helps teeth when cats chew food. There is just one problem with this idea: cats don't chew their food. They just use teeth to break kibbles in half, not chew them, so there is no dental benefit.

malla said:

Dumb question:

As I said before Facey would eat two cans of wet if I let her - is she actually THAT hungry or is she just being a pig? She does not do that with dry food.

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Is she gaining weight?  What kind of canned food, how many ounces, etc.  Some canned is high calorie, some isn't.

mrsgreenjeens said:

Wet food does NOT rot their teeth!  

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I thought it was rather odd to say that, knowing wet food is better for their health. 

mrsgreenjeens said:

Is she gaining weight?  What kind of canned food, how many ounces, etc.  Some canned is high calorie, some isn't.

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Her weight stays the same. I fear if I let her eat til her heart's content, she'd get too fat. Or should I just let her eat that much? 

I switch up the canned food from Friskies to Fancy Feast to 9 Lives and others. She literally has NO prefernce. If it's wet, she'll gom it down. Same way with tuna and chicken.

5.5 oz is the usual can.

Well, I'd say if she is eating  two 5.5 oz cans a day and not gaining weight, then that's the right amount for her.  IF she is at her ideal weight currently.   Seems like a lot, but I think if you read the label,it probably says to feed that much (which is normally too much, but each cat metabolizes food differently).  She may be full of energy or a fairly large cat?  Whatever, as long as she stays at a good weight, I'd let her eat it.  However, if you ever switch to a grain free canned food, you could probably cut back on the amount considerably.

She would eat 5 cans a day if I let her, 2 and a half per sitting. LOL She is full of energy. She's a medium cat. I usually let her have two cans a day.