Food, Food and More Food

by-products are less biologically available than actuall flesh so if your going to pay high prices for cat food ,in my opinion, your better off looking for foods without byproducts and without chemical preservatives. the higher quality foods have more usable nutrients(contributing to less waste) and thats why your cat will actually eat less of a higher quality brand than a lower quality brand. for example one 18lb bag of cat chow used to cost me around $12 and last for about a month for my 3cats and then i switched them to solid gold and i only went through 8lbs in a month. they definatly poop less than they did also. in my opinion, solid gold, innova, wellness, felidae are super high quality brands.

Nern,

What do you think of Nutro. That is what I have my cat on.

Thanks.

Nutro was accually the first high quality food i tried to switch mine to. I think it is good food but my cats wouldnt eat it. They went through a 20lb bag of it so i bought another 20lb bag of it and they hardly touched it for a whole week. i could see they were loosing weight so i had to put them back on the cat chow until i could find another good brand to try. my dog is currently on nutro max and does well on it but i am starting today switching her to innova because i think it is better. just my opinion but i do think nutro is one of the great foods.

My cat is doing well on Nutro dry and wet. I have had her only two weeks from a shelter, and already her coat feels better.

But I am thinking down the road to switch to another brand for a while just for variety and to rotate. I don't have any Innova or Felide (sp?) in any stores near me. But I do have wellness, and a lot of people seem to like that, so I may try it in a few months.

Thanks

i agree with feeding them a variety of dry from time to time. many people think it upsets their stomaches to change brands but instead of changes over a 4-7day period(my cats got massive diahrea when i changed this quickly though others have done fine)i now change foods over a month's time and in doing so how could they possibly get an upset stomach. i also feed mine a variety of the canned. they havent gotten sick or anything so i quess its ok. i usually give them nutro,wellness canned. they love it.

Call me weird ("You're WEIRD!") but I like to be consistent with the dry food and vary the canned.

nothing weird about it. many people keep the dry consistant. i only decided to do this after reading the API's guidelines for feeding your animal companion. you can check out the link if you want.

http://www.api4animals.org/doc.asp?ID=689

I just figured, if it was me, I would not want to eat the same dry food the rest of my life. Blech, how boring!!!!

Nern, I read that reference too.

Vjoy:

The one treat that I have found to be the most popular with my cats is freeze-dried chicken. I'm afraid I don't have any in the house right now, so I can't tell you the brand name, but I get it from the homeopathic vet. Hope this helps.

I also feed Kirkland (with some canned food for the new shelter kitty, she still prefers canned)...it comes from Costco and it's really reasonably priced. The ingrediants were the same as Iams and I can't get my 2 older cats to eat canned, they prefer the Kirkland. The PAWS shelter had all their cats on Kirkland, too. It must have a good taste or something secret to get the cats addicted to it (grin) I used to be paranoid about all meat, I read this book called "spoiled" or something like that about all the bad meat processing and additives in food and for a year I didn't eat much meat at all. (Especially fast food burgers!!!) The corelation between hormones added to chicken to get bigger breasts and the statistics on women's breast size....or the scrapies disease in sheep and the mad cow disease corelations, and finding out the stuff they feed cows and chickens like processed excrement and chicken feathers, argh! I finally had to stop thinking about it all the time. I guess nothing is really "safe" unless you grow it and kill it yourself. I now buy my beef from a friend who has a few cattle that are free of hormones. Then there's the vegetables treated with pesticides, the berries that had e coli on them, it's enough to make you stop eating all together!

I don't fret over it too much, thats why we have bacteria in our bodies to get rid of this stuff (well some of it anyways) and immune systems McDonalds here I come

Yea, I had to quit worrying about it, it was becoming an obsession and made everything less enjoyable. Now if all my food fears could just make it easier to lose weight......I'd be in business
Cindi

I did the same thing. You would not beleive what you can find if you look. I found things I never knew about in things like gum,potatoe chips and mixed drinks. Life is too short to worry about some of these chemicals.

I noticed VJoy's comment about kitty getting "bored" with the food. We have a 14 yr. old that 2 years ago quit eating his hard chicken food (it was Purina Special Diet). He hated it and just threw it up. We finally found out that part of it was that his teeth were bad (too bad our vet kept telling us his teeth were fine) and we had to remove 3 or 4. We then switched him to the PetSmart special diet soft food. Our KITTY still refuses to eat chicken: soft food or treats. He just hates it!!! By the way- all of our cats eat this SpecialDiet soft food. It helps with Urinary Tract and they love it! Hope this helps!

Offer them some cat grass to settle their stomachs while you search for the right food. I feed Kirkland after trying every brand on the market. My cats all like it, the nuggets are small enough they don't cause problems and it lasts a long time. I do mix Purina One with it during the wintertime to help add bulk to their bodies as they are inside/outside kitties and it gets cold here at night.

It is up to the pet owner to figure out what formula they need to use for their cats and the individual cats needs. Talking to vets will help, doing research, but don't believe everything you read about pet food, if you are in doubt about the food you are feeding, then write to the company and ask them directly. Generally they will bend over backwards to help you out and even send you cat care kits and coupons if you make the effort to write to them. That is how I found out about Purina One willing to pay some of my vet bill if I turn in weight circles from the bags. So many circles, nets $25.00 to my vet. The check is written out to the vet, not to me. It has been a great help this year, and I hope they continue this program next year.

I gave my cats Nutro once and it made them VERY flatulent. It was disgusting!