Removing food between meals

Has anyone ever done this? I used to. I stopped when my cat's vet told me she had never heard about what I told her. It was interesting how after I stopped doing that, my cat developed his first UTI. This was one of the reasons I had started it in the first place....to prevent UTIs. I got my information from a book I have called The New Natural Cat: A Complete Guide for Finicky Owners by Anitra Frazier with Norma Eckroate. Anitra Frazier is a nationally known feline nutritionist, groomer, & behaviorist. If anyone out there is interested in reading more about this, send me a PM with your email address and I will scan the pertinent sections of the book and send them your way. I will have to scan this at work tomorrow and my personal computer is down at the moment getting some work done on it. I'm using my mother's computer.

Have read the same book-how the urine ph spikes after a meal. I did for a while remove food till he got a urinary infection and was placed on c/d which is meant to be down all the time. Now with hiow many I have I'd run into the cats fighting as they start to get hungry and then eating to fast-and puking back up. So I jusat keep bowls filled. Haven't noticed much of a difference one way or the other honestly...Cat has urinary issues going into the taking bowls up and still does but as long as he eats his c/d hes not needed further treatment. RJ

I used to free feed my cats, but then our male cat developed a UTI and has to be on special food. Since then I've switched over to meals so that i can try to get him only eating his Rx food and the others eating their food (the Rx is expensive!).
I'm surprised your vet has never heard of not free feeding cats. That seems a little strange to me. However, I also haven't heard of using set meal times to prevent UTIs. I will say that with set meal times, my boy has dropped about a pound of weight (that he needed to loose!) and it's been good for training them to go to their "room" when it's time to put them up (they always get a small amount of food when they're put up).

~Julia

Originally Posted by jlutgendorf

I'm surprised your vet has never heard of not free feeding cats. That seems a little strange to me. However, I also haven't heard of using set meal times to prevent UTIs. I will say that with set meal times, my boy has dropped about a pound of weight (that he needed to loose!) and it's been good for training them to go to their "room" when it's time to put them up (they always get a small amount of food when they're put up).

~Julia

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Julia..........you misunderstood my message....or I didn't clarify enough. It's not that the vet had never heard of not free feeding a cat. What she never heard of was that leaving food out all day long can lead to UTIs.

oh, ok. That doesn't seem so strange as I already said I haven't heard that before!
I don't think there's any harm in feeding them meals though vs free feeding.
Why would free feeding make them more prone to UTIs? I only switched mine to meals after the UTI because I didn't want our other two eating his food all the time, and he needed to loose some weight. He's also on c/d and the vet never mentioned that it should be free fed either. What's the thinking on that? I don't remember the packaging talking about that, i'll have to go double check!

~Julia

Anitra Frazier's The New Natural Cat is handsdown the very best book I've ever read on the subject and, with exception of the raw food diet, I feel it's the authority of cat behavior and health care books! One of the lessons learned from this book was to remove food between meals, and I have done so ever since. Sierra and Serenity have scheduled wet food meals following which, their dishes are removed and washed.

Prego and Polly are exclusively meal fed because they eat two different kinds of food. Before I got Polly, I would just put food down in Prego's bowl and leave it, except that he always wolfed it all down