Help!! What to feed the fur babies

We have recently adopted three kittens and we have 2 resident cats.  Now we've got 5! I know, we're crazy cat people.  So when we just had 2 it wasn't a big deal to feed them "fussie cat" brand wet food.  They've done so well on it.  I love how the human grade food cuts down on litter box oder.  However, the costs to continue to feed all 5 of our babies this food could amount to $300 per month.  That isn't in the budget.  It's important that we feed them good food.  I have thought about preparing chicken and or sardines for them, but then I wondered if those home cooked foods would have enough enzymes they need for good digestive health.  What do you suggest I feed the fur babies, while keeping it economical and healthy for them?

Your input is appreciated.  Thank you in advance.

I order from chewy and fancy feast is about 42 cents per 3 ounce can. My cat gets 2 cans per day which is about $25 or $26 a month. That would be about $130 per month for 5 cats. Hope this is helpful info.

I forgot to mention that I only feed ff classic. Tuffy has eaten this for 1 and a half years and is very healthy with a beautiful coat.

You'll spend significantly less on Wellness complete 12.5 oz cans for a comparable food to what you've been feeding. FF classic like PP suggested I'd argue is also comparable, despite marketing of "premium" foods that suggests otherwise (though the waste created by feeding 5 cats from all those tiny cans would be enough reason for me to avoid). I used to have a cat to whom I fed Honest Kitchen (only turkey because it had a much better protein/fat/carb ration than the chicken flavor). It's a human grade dehydrated food (it's a powder and you add water) that I found to be affordable for a commercial food of it's caliber, though like most contains some questionable plant-based ingredients. It would be better to rotate these different foods rather than feed just one brand (and feeding FF and Wellness for some meals and higher cost food for others is a good way to reduce the overall cost of a quality diet). I imagine there are some other dehydrated / freeze-dried / possibly frozen raw products that are more affordable than what you've been feeding, but I don't think there are better affordable options for canned.

Even with only 2 cats, I pretty much find all healthy commercial foods to come at a prohibitively high cost. To drastically reduce the cost of feeding 5 cats a healthy diet, I'd definitely look into homemade. Both economically, and quality-wise, nothing comes close to homemade raw, but it will be time consuming for 5 cats -- especially kittens! My cats were bottomless pits as kittens, and still kind of are. $300/month is equivalent to $2/day per cat -- it's not super easy to spend much less on a healthy diet for your cats, particularly a commercial diet. If you are going to prepare food for them, whether cooked or raw, you will need to research how to create a balanced diet. It is not safe for you to simply feed cooked chicken and sardines etc (enzymes and digestive health is not what is at issue here, and they wouldn't be worse off with homemade cooked food than canned when it comes to this). This would lead to nutritional deficits and serious health problems, especially for developing kittens. Also sardines are a healthy fish to feed cats, but can still only be fed minimally, as any fish cannot make up a major part of the diet. I suspect homemade cooked diets are similar to homemade raw in that they're much more economical for the quality than any commercial diets. 

EDITED to add: Your best bet may be something like a complete supplement that you can feed with boneless meats, either cooked or raw, as far as simplicity of homemade diets.

Thank you so much for your input. I truly appreciate it. I'll check into Wellness complete. Aside from the nutritional factors of Fussie Cat brand, I like how their wet food doesn't stink at all. It smells like human food. So cleaning the cat box isn't a smelly task.

If you want to feed raw or homecooked you need to add a supplement to make it a complete meal. Something like Ezcomplete or alnutrin, which are both made for boneless meat. 

hmmmm Wellness complete and FF classic are pate style, so they're not going to be the texture you're used to with Fussie (which I'm thinking is like TikiCat -- that style of food is $$$). However, the odor of cat poop correlates with how biologically accessible their food is, largely, and since FF classic doesn't have veg and starches for filler I'd expect low poop odor on that even though it's pate. Wellness has a few fruits and vegetables, and sweet potatoes as a starch, unfortunately, but so do some of the Fussie cat flavors (not sure which you feed obviously) so I wouldn't expect smellier poop.

I've heard people assert that cats have stinkier poop on canned food than dry because they find canned food stinky. In reality, cats fed grains have stinkier, softer, larger, more frequent poops, and dry foods are more likely to contain both a higher percentage and poorer quality of filler ingredients than canned (poop odor and such correlate more with how available the nutrients are to the body and thus how much becomes waste, and less with how the food smelled before it went in). The more appropriate the diet is, the less smelly the poop should be, and all the canned foods in question, including Fussie, have similar ingredients to one another (also note that Fussie and FF contain menadione, a potentially harmful supplement, while Wellness doesn't).

Nothing beats raw as far as low poop odor and low output. Homecooked should yield lower poop odor than what you're experiencing now too because it's not highly processed and won't contain any filler.

darra said:

 
We have recently adopted three kittens and we have 2 resident cats.  Now we've got 5! I know, we're crazy cat people.  So when we just had 2 it wasn't a big deal to feed them "fussie cat" brand wet food.  They've done so well on it.  I love how the human grade food cuts down on litter box oder.  However, the costs to continue to feed all 5 of our babies this food could amount to $300 per month.  That isn't in the budget.  It's important that we feed them good food.  I have thought about preparing chicken and or sardines for them, but then I wondered if those home cooked foods would have enough enzymes they need for good digestive health.  What do you suggest I feed the fur babies, while keeping it economical and healthy for them?

Your input is appreciated.  Thank you in advance.

Click to expand...

Assuming that your goal is reducing cost compared to a premium canned food while not sacrificing quality or venturing into feeding raw:   Yes you can do it, but only by going the homemade route.  Let me suggest that you start with the website catinfo.org.  The recipe there has been vet-tested (by a single vet but on all her cats over the years) for over a decade.  It utilizes partial baking to provide adequate food safety.  

Cooking boneless meat and adding a supplement like EZComplete is an easy way to start, but it will not be cheaper than canned.

Thank you. You're correct I don't want to sacrifice quality. It's important that they eat high quality food. Our resident cats have done so well on the feeding regimine I've had them on. A local independent pet food store carries high quality pet foods. It's where I typically buy the fussie cat brand. They have a sale once or twice a year. I'll have to keep an eye out for the sale and really stock up.

I feed my babies a Raw diet. cost me 50 bux for a 35 day supply for two cats!

Wow! What do you feed them?