Hi all!
I was looking for information online about how much a kitten really should be fed per day and came up with a bunch of nothing. Until, I stumbled upon this site. I instantly joined to start my quest for advice!
I rescued a stray about 2 weeks ago. His name is Opie and he is truly a bundle of love. When I first rescued him I took him to the vet for a check up, and he weighed in at 2lbs even. He was obviously grossly malnourished at the time, and the vet estimated he was about 10 weeks old. He had no problems eating dry kitten food that we had borrowed from a friend until we could get to the store to buy some for him. Since he was fine with the dry, we decided to keep him on it. I picked up a bag of Natural Balance Ultra Kitten formula (chicken, duck meal, and salmon meal) and have been giving him 1/3 of a cup per day as the feeding recommendations suggests.. Opie eats this up almost immediately. I've tried splitting the amount into multiple feeding times per day but he still eats it all immediately and begs for food constantly, and appears to be hungry. Now of course I feel bad, but I don't want to over feed him as I know cats that free-feed will often over eat.
Additionally, Opie was put on antibiotics for a URI, and no matter what I did I couldn't get him to keep the meds down. That is until I started giving him a small teaspoon of wet food, mixed with the antibiotics, twice per day. So now he's getting about 1/3 of a cup of dry food and about 3 oz of wet per day.
Currently he's approximately 12 weeks old, and up to 4.5lbs. My question is, is he eating enough? Optimally, how much should I be feeding him daily, and how many feeding times should it be split up between? Also, I would like to keep him on a combination of wet and dry, because he doesn't drink much water and I know the wet food helps with his water intake. Should he be getting equal amounts of wet and dry or more of one than the other?
As you can probably tell, I'm in over my head with these varying feeding guidelines and just want to make sure my little guy is getting what he needs!
Thank you in advance!
I was looking for information online about how much a kitten really should be fed per day and came up with a bunch of nothing. Until, I stumbled upon this site. I instantly joined to start my quest for advice!
I rescued a stray about 2 weeks ago. His name is Opie and he is truly a bundle of love. When I first rescued him I took him to the vet for a check up, and he weighed in at 2lbs even. He was obviously grossly malnourished at the time, and the vet estimated he was about 10 weeks old. He had no problems eating dry kitten food that we had borrowed from a friend until we could get to the store to buy some for him. Since he was fine with the dry, we decided to keep him on it. I picked up a bag of Natural Balance Ultra Kitten formula (chicken, duck meal, and salmon meal) and have been giving him 1/3 of a cup per day as the feeding recommendations suggests.. Opie eats this up almost immediately. I've tried splitting the amount into multiple feeding times per day but he still eats it all immediately and begs for food constantly, and appears to be hungry. Now of course I feel bad, but I don't want to over feed him as I know cats that free-feed will often over eat.
Additionally, Opie was put on antibiotics for a URI, and no matter what I did I couldn't get him to keep the meds down. That is until I started giving him a small teaspoon of wet food, mixed with the antibiotics, twice per day. So now he's getting about 1/3 of a cup of dry food and about 3 oz of wet per day.
Currently he's approximately 12 weeks old, and up to 4.5lbs. My question is, is he eating enough? Optimally, how much should I be feeding him daily, and how many feeding times should it be split up between? Also, I would like to keep him on a combination of wet and dry, because he doesn't drink much water and I know the wet food helps with his water intake. Should he be getting equal amounts of wet and dry or more of one than the other?
As you can probably tell, I'm in over my head with these varying feeding guidelines and just want to make sure my little guy is getting what he needs!
Thank you in advance!
