Basically wet food is best. Less fattening as it doesn't contain as many carbs. Dry is fine and more convenient but wet food exclusively is best. If you want to go mixed that is great too.
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Dry food or wet food
- Thread starter krazycatlover
- Start Date
This kind of information was very confusing to me at first. I had people tell me to read the can or bag which tells how much to feed. It turns out, I had to let my cat tell me.
I switched him over to wet off of dry about 6-8 weeks ago due to obesity. He weighed about 18 pounds at the time. In one discussion group, I mentioned I was feeding him 1 tablespoon of wet every 4 hours. These people jumped all over my case, saying I was underfeeding him, putting his health at risk, etc, since it would lead to too rapid of a weight loss. However, that is all he eats at one sitting since being switched to canned foods. If I give him more than one tablespoon of wet, he simply won't eat it.
So, he is now eating 4 tablespooons of canned food a day, which comes to about 2 ounces of canned food per day. At night, I leave out 3 level tablespoons of Innova Evo. Oftentimes, he doesn't eat all of that either.
Catitude, you were given correct information, you can't reduce a cats intake by less than 15% without risking liver probs. I would advise getting him checked over - cats are very weird when it comes to food, once they get into a routine of not eating a lot, it is hard to break and is incredibly risky to their health. I would also try experimenting with foods to find one he will eat more of.
Except I didn't reduce the amount of food he ate. I switched him from freely fed dry to canned food. Part of the switch was learning how much would he or did he eat. When he was free fed dry for the past 5 years, I had no clue at all how much he was eating.
He eats everything I have put out, including dry Evo, canned Nutro (couple of different flavors), Chicken Soup, Blue Spa Select, etc. No matter what type of canned food I give him, he eats one tablespoon per meal & no more. If I put out 2 tablespoons of canned, he will only eat one and leave 1 tablespoon in the bowl. I certainly won't tie him down and force feed him.
Except he does eat regularly. He eats one tablespoon of canned food every 4 hours and dry Evo overnight. (I had to put the Evo dry out because he really does get hungry overnight.) He has no problems coming up to me and letting me know he is hungry and it is time for him to eat. He is quite vocal about it actually.
I have yet to find a canned food he won't eat. He did turn his nose up to canned food at first. I switched him over ten days by mixing 1/4 canned into 3/4 dry for 4 days, then half and half for 4 days, then 3/4 canned and 1/4 dry for four days. Since then, he eats canned only during the day and Evo dry at nights.
Since switching to wet, he is much more active. I trained him to expect play after every meal. So he gets exercise from that, as well as being in a house new to him, which has two flights of steps. There has been change in his behavior at all since the switch.
