BellaOnline Forums Home and Garden Cats What do you feed your cat

I'm currently feeding my cat Iams and she seems to like it but she has some problems digesting. I've been considering changing her food and I'm curious if anyone feeds their cats Taste of the Wild pet food? They have a formula specifically for felines and it is supposed to be perfect for kittens that have problems digesting their foods. Their website also lists the benefits of all the ingredients in it which I think is neat. Any reviews would be great!

I have never heard of it but my cats do very well on Nutro. It really improved their little litter box issues they were having. And no one is getting sick and coughing up hairballs now.

Ours has been eating Science Diet for the last 10 years. Currently she's on the senior fur ball formula.

Our current cat (see my avatar) is only two years old, and we've spent a lot of time experimenting with different foods, trying desperately to find a food that is healthy, appetizing, and helps her drop a pound or two. Evo (from the makers of Innova) is definitely the best cat food we've come across, and it's been her primary food for many months, but even with carefully rationed feedings, she still wasn't losing weight. So we recently tried a small bag of Purina One's indoor formula for weight and hairball control. She started losing weight, and had more energy...

But she was never satisfied, and for the first time EVER overstuffed herself until she was ill... three times in a week. I took that to mean there was some vital nutrient she wasn't getting enough of. And the food obviously wasn't very filling. Also, I was concerned she was dropping weight a little too fast. It didn't seem right that we could see an obvious difference in her shape in just under a week.

However, she loves the Purina, and I'm sure it could help her weight issues, so I've settled on a happy medium for now. She's eating a 50-50 mix of Evo and Purina in her usual, rationed meals. This stage of the experiment is young, but I hope that we've finally found the right food to give her all the nutrients she needs, flavor she likes, and get her weight under control while she's still young. Wish us luck!

Thanks for the suggestions! I think I will have to fiddle around with what she is eating to find out what works best. Myrabeth, it sounds like we have a similar situation. My cat, Matilda, is also two years old and needs to lose about 2 pounds. We feed her rationed meals but she eats it so fast that she will sometimes make herself sick. We have been using Iams Digestive Care to help with that but it still happens about once a week. That is a big reason why I was interested in Taste of the Wild. It is supposed to help with that and also has all the necessary nutrients she needs. I got a sample of it a few days ago and have been mixing it with her evening meals and so far so good!

We always feed our cats "pouch food" - they really need the moisture content in their diet. Cats in the wild eat moist foods, and they are built to handle water as part of the meat intake, not as a separate liquid. So we alternate between Iams and the pure-fish varieties, to try to stay away from preservatives.

We find their coats are *so* much healthier on the wet food than on any dry food we've tried. And fish oils are good for anybody

It really caused us trouble when Iams had that taint problem a few months ago but luckily they are over that!!

Our cat turns her nose up at any canned food. Most cats LOVE canned food. She also doesn't really like fish flavored hard food....very wierd cat! We finally found one she likes and that is Hill's Science Diet from Pets Mart.

I know cats can be VERY picky about what they eat and even a subtle change like another flavor from the same maker can make their tummies upset

I do not seem to have a picky cat.... she likes everything! We do not change her food very often but when we have she hasn't had a problem getting used to it. And with canned food I've noticed that she is happy with almost all the flavors. The last few evenings I've been giving her kibbles of the taste of the wild food instead of mixing it to see if she actually likes it or was just hungry for her food. She eats it right up!

Beastie is VERY picky about canned foods. The flavor, piece size, and overall texture have to be "just so" or she just licks up the gravy and leaves the rest. She's much more easy going with dry foods. Canned food is now an occasional treat for her. The only ones we're certain she likes are pretty weak in nutritional value, and kind of fattening, so we don't want them to be mainstays in her diet.

But sometimes she wants some moisture with her dry food (which she shows by trying to splash water into the food from the neighboring bowl or begging at the cat food cabinet when her food bowl is freshly filled). So we bought a bottle of "spray on" cat vitamins. It's mineral and fish oil based and loaded with nutrients she needs, so it's a very healthy way of adding liquid to dry food. The downside is that she wants more moisture than the recommended 2 sprays per meal allows, so we dilute it with water (distilled, like all the water she drinks --she isn't any more fond of our city's tap water than we are). The mixture is approximately 3 parts water to one part liquid vitamins, well shaken before each use. With the bottle marked "diluted," we can give her meals a few extra squirts safely and she gets damp dry food. Everybody's happy.

By the way, the Purina-Evo mixed food experiment is going very well. She's getting all the higher-energy benefits of the Purina without the super-fast weight loss, and she's not upchucking or completely insatiable. The Evo is very filling, meets her dietary needs wonderfully, and keeps her coat shiny. It balances out the Purina nicely. She seems happy, is more active, and is very slowly trimming down into a normal cat shape. I'm very excited about this. I suppose that's obvious. It's been a long struggle to find the perfect food for Beastie.

I hope this helps. The point of all this rambling is to realize that the perfect food (regarding nutritional value, weight loss, and satisfied cat) may not exist for your specific cat. You might have to get creative. With us, it looks like that's going to be a mixture of two very different dry foods, sometimes topped with generous squirts of watered down vitamins.

I was just rereading this before posting and realized how spoiled that cat sounds...and how much her pet humans cater to her. But she's worth it! Good luck with Matilda!

I give my kitten (yeesh, he's nearly a year old now! Need to stop calling him that soon) a bowl of dry food every morning, and for "supper" he gets part of a can of wet food. Dry food is Iams, the wet is Purina shredded style.
My kitten has made it quite clear that if he decides that the type of wet food we bought is one he wants, it MUST be served chilled. I suppose he's odd in that he doesn't like people food at ALL. At the most he'll come sniff what we're having. Oh, except once when I made pork tenderloin, he did try licking the plate for that. I even tried giving him some chicken as a treat and he wasn't interested! Guess I trained him too well.

See that's funny, I consider it *healthy* when cats lick up the gravy. They need moisture in their diet and they want that moisture. The gravy provides the moisture plus food. It's like us wanting soup - it fulfills both hunger and thirst at once. With the pouch food they will eat the "bits" too sometimes but sometimes they'll just lick up the gravy. We consider that fine in both cases.

It's much better for them than just drinking raw water - and considering how their tongues are shaped, the thicker liquid is much easier for them to ingest

When a cat eats dry food, the food actually acts as a sponge in their stomach, sucking the liquid out of them. So it dehydrates them, then eventually when it digests they get the liquid back again, but in the wild they don't really eat anything that's bone dry. So I definitely agree that even dry food should have a moisture sprayed on it

Oh I wasn't saying it's weird for him to like gravy, just THAT gravy when he won't touch any other kind if it's on people food.
Fortunately my cat does get enough water (not just from the wet food each night) but he LOVES his water fountain, I got a catit fountain, it has water that flows over a dome so he can lick it from the side.

Yes our cats love their fountains too! In fact Hamlet will run upstairs if we go into the bathroom, to make us turn on the bathtub faucet. Then he'll leap in and drink from it.

We've never tried Taste of the Wild (I hadn't heard of it), but I did visit their website and (based on the ingredients) it looks like it would be a good choice.

We feed a mixture of dry Solid Gold Katz-n-Flocken and Blue Buffalo Spa Select for their main food. And for a treat several times a week we feed canned - either Natural Balance or Spa Select.

One of our cats (Sophie - the orange and white Maine Coon Mix in my avatar) refuses to eat wet food of any kind. The first time we tried to give her some, she tried to cover it up!! Since then she turns her nose and walks away from it. She will only eat dry.

For more about my thoughts on cat food, please refer to my Choosing a Cat Food article.

Our cats love to get in the bathtub or the bathroom sink and drink! I do want to get them one of those fountains - I'm just trying to figure out where to put it. We're in a townhouse with limited space, but once I figure out the perfect place they will be getting their very own fountain.

Our cat is over 17 years old now. She always ate dry food until last year - hairball formula ever since it came out. Now she gets a can of Fancy Feast in the morning and a can at night.(Only chicken and liver!) She eats a little dry food now and then.

I've never heard or seen a catit fountain before so I just looked it up and it seems great! I think my kitty would love it. She's always trying to drink out of the bathroom sink when the water is on. Do they have them at Pet Smart?

Thanks for all the food suggestions. I will have to do some more research and then try something out. Possibly a mixture. But how exactly do you realize what is the best food for your cat?

I bought mine off of Amazon, no wait, it was on Amazon but there was a coupon for it on PetSmart.com so I bought it from there.
I think the way to figure out the best food is to read the ingredients. In all foods, for pets and humans, the ingredient that there's the most of is the first one to be listed. So if it says "Corn, chicken, ect" that means corn is the main ingredient, which really isn't good. There should also be a list of %, like amount protein. I decided to look it up, and found this interesting article:BellaOnline ALERT: Raw URLs are not allowed in these forums for security reasons. Please use UBB code. If you don't know how to do UBB code just post here for help - we will help out!

I feed my cats Gerber stage 2 meats (yes baby food), especially the turkey and lamb altho ham is their favorite. I use one jar for four cats--each gets a good spoonful then I swish some water in the empty jar and give them "gravy" on their kibble--which is exclusively GoodLife Formula since the big contamination scare last year. They eat the whole line of GoodLife formula--the treats too and so does the dog (kibble and 'cookies'). I also give them tuna and other canned fish or shellfish about once a week. And sometimes when I am feeling very ambitious I will grind up whole chicken thighs or breasts and feed them all a spoonfull or two as a treat. Chicken livers a couple times a month. They like their meat raw and cooked--I offer it raw and if it does not work I give it a quick stir in the pan with some olive oil. Incidentally I have found that I can get my dog to eat anything with olive oil and/or parmesan cheese on it! The cats like the cheese too.

(I mention te dog because she is an Akita and in Japan their main diet is rice and fish and for the first few years we fed her canned cat food to get the fish and nutrients--but I don't buy canned cat or dog food anymore after the tainted stuff last year and I read that they use euthanized sick animals and road kill in it too.)

Our cat loves lunch meat, especially roast beef and then turkey and ham. But it is the good stuff and not the cheap stuff since I bought the small bags and he walked away so I gave it to the other feral cats outside.

My son Nick gives him goldfish crackers and he has had a piece of cheeseburger from BK a few times. Otherwise it is dry food and a variety of it, like kitten chow, whiskas, kibbles n bitts, meow mix, etc.

I know someone who will only feed her cat cooked shrimp.

Mine get Eukanuba and the ocassional bit of cooked fish.

Sikpiksie

Denise - that's interesting? Wouldn't a cat get nutritional problems if all they ate was shrimp?

I would think so, I know that a diet of 100% fish is bad for cats, it doesn't give them some necessary nutrients and they end up with neurological problems.
I have trained my 2 from weaning to enjoy different kinds of cat food. I always have at least 3 different flavors/brands going so they don't get the same thing 2 days in a row. I learned to do this after seeing a friend's cat prefer to go hungry if the favorite food wasn't available. Cats can get SO picky if you let them! Of course, now if I give mine the same food as yesterday they look at me in disbelief, but they end up eating it.

Sorry, I guess I should have clarified about the shrimp cat.
Now I don't agree with this either- The feeding has evolved this way over time. She started with all types of canned food, cat got finicky. It also likes fresh beans as a treat, which is interesting. But I think the cat must also get dry food, I just don't remember seeing it. It is five years old and fine. Vet knows about it too.

The owner is an older person who also has strong opinions so one can recommend the "correct" advice until you are blue in the face and it gets you nowhere. Discussing cat food opinions are as varied as discussing politics sometimes.

I read that cats actually will not eat fish or seafood unless they have had it as kittens! Of course i also read a study done at Harvard says cats cannot taste sweet things--which I do NOT believe (why else would anti-freeze be such a danger?)My Myssi loves sweets and it is not because of the texture or flavors it is just because they are sweet! She licks the icing off cakes and knocks the lid off the sugar bowl--had to get the kind that screws on because I was afraid it would make her sick.

I don't think I'd have your Myssi around when I'm making a cake. She'd have to compete with my hubby. :-) I tried to share a popsicle with my girl cat last night, she didn't go for it. Afraid her tongue would get stuck or something.

I agree. They taste sweet. Also my cats were weaned on fish. I would cook tuna, cod, talapia, perch and salmon for them.

I cannot cook salmon without our Izzy and Azrael running and begging for some LOL

Of course Izzy also loves her chicken.. fried chicken, crack chicken (chinese chicken wings you never can get enough of) or her bbq'd chicken.

Jason - I want to come to your house to eat. Your cats get all the stuff I like. :-)

I feed my cats Royal Canin. Plus a couple of Temptation treats at night.

Romeo will only eat Friskies dry cat food any other kind and he wont eat it.

Believe it or not, I feed my cat Beneful Dog Food and have for several years. My dog kept eating the cat food and so the poor thing had no choice but to eat the dog food, which he actually seemed to like (it is a kind of soft food). When I talked to the vet about it he said that Beneful is actually fine for cats as it is very balanced nutritionally. So I could keep on that way, and he has always had glowing marks from the vet.