Show us your kitty cats

OK, gonna post a few pointers on food - cat nutrition is my job and cats are my life ;)

Cat nutrition is actually REALLY simple. Cats are obligate carnivores. Grains and veg are no use to them. Unlike dogs, their digestive system simply can't process plant protein - it just passes out the other end. With that in mind...

Most dry cat food is complete garbage. Remember "obligate carnivore" and then look at the ingredients - with Iams, Science Diet, Whiskers, etc you'll see rice, corn gluten, barley, etc. These are pure filler - they make the food easy to manufacture (corn gluten is basically glue...) and very cheap to produce. You'll also see meat "by-products" - this is basically ground up beaks, feet, egg shell, etc.....no meat at all. If you're lucky, there might be some meat meal in there - highly processed meat scraps with most of the nutrients nuked out. Then, to make up for the fact there's little-to-no actual meat in the food, they add in a bunch of minerals, vitamins and other essential things and finally spray the food with a tasty "digestive" to make the cats enjoy it (and act as a preservative.) The better the dry food, the lower down the grains will be on the ingredients - the better foods have meat meals higher up and no by-products. The best dry foods are grain free altogether, and are obviously more expensive.

As for the argument "well, my cat ate Iams all his life and lived till he was 25!"......well, humans could probably eat cardboard laced with essential vitamins and a few food scraps and live until they were 85. Would you WANT to do that, though? Would you WANT your kids to survive like that?

"Oral Care" dry food is a total marketing scam. How about WE don't brush our teeth and instead eat cookies because they're crunchy and the shape will scrape the plaque off? :rolleyes: Don't even get me started on "prescription" cat food.......

Canned food / pouches are much better. Grains tend to be less of an issue and there's usually some real meat in there. Also, the liquid content is important as cats typically don't drink enough - they're supposed to get all their water from their prey. That's where dry food also fails - cats who live on dry kibble are a lot more prone to urinary problems and, ultimately, kidney issues.

The very best food? pre-prepared raw meat diet. Contains around 95% meat, bone, organs, etc. Replicates a cat natural diet perfectly. Unfortunately, very expensive and hard to find. Can you make your own? Not easily - you have to make sure there's organ meat in there (contains Taurine - without which a cat will go blind and eventually die) and ideally ground bone. This option simply isn't practical for most people due to the effort/cost involved.

Good quality canned food / pouches are the best solution. Also feeding them twice a day - not free-feeding. Worst solution - just leaving a bowl of dry kibble out for them to free-feed on. Not natural and not good for them. At least feed them some wet food a couple of times a week.

Just try and imagine how a domesticated cat is supposed to live. Up at dawn, eat a mouse/rabbit/bird or two....sleep in the barn all day....back out at dusk for another mouse or two. You want to try and reproduce that lifestyle as closely as possible. Grain-based kibble in a bowl is not the answer.

Whoa - lecture over :eek::o
 
Heres the reamining cat in my house hold (Had brother and sister put to sleep in Dec 09 and 2 weeks ago :()

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Cat currently has no name (We rescued her). Any (serious) suggestions?

Shes about 6 - 7 weeks pregnant as well so expecting some kittens soon :)
 
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As a treat I buy those packets of chicken slices just for the cats use, and chuck em a slice now and then. Trouble is one of the cats has become severely addicted to this and whenever I go near the fridge I am followed and chirrped at constantly. I'm basically a slice pusher.
 
Just a quick question about the food, animal organs are fairly cheap from the butcher because we dont like to eat them despite them being full of goodness. Is there any reason you can't buy hearts/kidneys/brains/whatever for cats?

We get our kittens in about a week (i've got 6 days off work lined up at the same, hurrah!) and its been quite a struggle to find any kitten food in Tesco's with more than 4% meat. we did find some dry stuff that was 40% i think but i'd have to double check.

I think i'll have to look at a couple of the sites mentioned for more meaty dinners!
 
Todge said:
... its been quite a struggle to find any kitten food in Tesco's with more than 4% meat. we did find some dry stuff that was 40% i think but i'd have to double check.
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If you want a higher percentage, you will need to buy a premium brand. I fed my kittens on Nature's Menu Kitten (pink packet): 70% meat content.

You'll find that a meat content of 4% is typical (and laughable) for supermarket cat food. Tesco Luxury is good stuff though.

If you want dry food, try them out on Orijen (70% protein) and Applaws (80% protein). Unfortunately, my Bengal gets stomach problems when fed those 2 foods, so I am now using Hills Science, which has a much lower protein content.
 
Curio said:
That's where dry food also fails - cats who live on dry kibble are a lot more prone to urinary problems and, ultimately, kidney issues.
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Great, so I've been slowly killing my cat by feeding him James Wellbeloved :mad:. Thought I was doing him a favor since it is so expensive
 
Souness said:
Thought I was doing him a favor since it is so expensive
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Cost isn't necessary a guarantee of quality.

When looking for cat foods, look for those with the highest protein content. These foods tend to be more expensive to produce.

Applaws (wet and dry) rules in this area. The wet food is prohibitively expensive, but is probably the one wet food a human could also eat.

I believe James Well Beloved tends to have around 30-35% protein, where Orijen has 70%, and Applaws dry has 80%. From this you can see that James Wellbeloved is hopelessly outclassed and is similar in price to Applaws dry and Orijen.

With regards to the Dry vs Wet food debate...I'm not sure. People have been feeding their pets dry food for decades without any outcry from breeders/vets, that this is a bad thing. I feed my cats both wet and dry food.
 
sunama said:
If you want a higher percentage, you will need to buy a premium brand. I fed my kittens on Nature's Menu Kitten (pink packet): 70% meat content.

You'll find that a meat content of 4% is typical (and laughable) for supermarket cat food. Tesco Luxury is good stuff though.

If you want dry food, try them out on Orijen (70% protein) and Applaws (80% protein). Unfortunately, my Bengal gets stomach problems when fed those 2 foods, so I am now using Hills Science, which has a much lower protein content.
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yeah was looking at Applaws last night and managed to find a 7.5kg bag of the kitten dry food for £32.59 with free delivery which was about a tenner less than elsewhere. At £4.34 a kilo its not much more expensive than some of the smaller bags available in the supermarket so i'll definately be ordering some.

All i need to do now is find a wet food.
 
sunama said:
Cost isn't necessary a guarantee of quality.

When looking for cat foods, look for those with the highest protein content. These foods tend to be more expensive to produce.

Applaws (wet and dry) rules in this area. The wet food is prohibitively expensive, but is probably the one wet food a human could also eat.

I believe James Well Beloved tends to have around 30-35% protein, where Orijen has 70%, and Applaws dry has 80%. From this you can see that James Wellbeloved is hopelessly outclassed and is similar in price to Applaws dry and Orijen.

With regards to the Dry vs Wet food debate...I'm not sure. People have been feeding their pets dry food for decades without any outcry from breeders/vets, that this is a bad thing. I feed my cats both wet and dry food.
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Natures menu is 70% MEAT, it is NOT 70% protein and really isn't any better than Felix/Whiskas/etc

Natures menu kitten pouches are 12% protein, not 70%, and Felix more expensive packs are, the same stuff, except 14% protein.

People pay a premium, for no reason. These companies are mostly just misadvertising and misleading. You're making it sound like the cheaper stuff isn't meat, it is, its just not specific meat, the meat content of those cheap ones isn't 4%, its just 4% specifically one meat, the rest basically the bits people don't want to eat, its still protein, its still fine. The more expensive brands don't mix whatevers cheapest, but neither does saying its 70% chicken for instance, mean its 70% good quality chicken, its just 70% of the crap people don't eat. The difference is Felix and co just, well, buy waste meat in bulk and they'll put in whatever they have that week, while maintaining a specific amount of a certain type of meat. It really makes smeg all difference, the quality of meat in all catfood is frankly, awful, lets be honest, but then, your cats, and my cats, are perfectly happy eating all that crap when they eat whole mice/birds/anything else they can catch anyway.

If you go into any normal supermarket a packet of 12 cat food pouches will be like £3, and thats the 7-8% protein stuff, or about £4.30-4.60 for the 14% protein version. I tend to wait for them to do a special offer, because they'll frequently do it for £3 a box for the better stuff, and Sainsburys online lets you order up to 30 a time I believe, with two cats I buy up a huge amount over a couple of weeks while the offer is on, make sure to get a load more on the last day the offer is available, and hope it lasts till the next time.

Tried natures menu and some of the other fancy ones, rip off, the cats went off I think it was Hilife after they changed the recipe because one day they'd eat it, new packaging, new version they wouldn't touch the stuff.

Likewise Applaws has 80% CHICKEN, not 80% protein, its 46% protein in some of them, no where near 80%, and the cheaper one is 31%, hardly a massive difference and not really a big deal. Dry food isn't particularly healthy for cats as I understand it anyway, and theres really no need for them to purely eat protein, if they eat a mouse/bird, it isn't 98% protein, their diet isn't supposed to be only protein.
 
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drunkenmaster said:
Natures menu is 70% MEAT, it is NOT 70% protein and really isn't any better than Felix/Whiskas/etc

Natures menu kitten pouches are 12% protein, not 70%, and Felix more expensive packs are, the same stuff, except 14% protein.
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Sorry. My mistake.

Natures Menu, 70% meat, while the cheaper brands are pegged at 4% meat.

It makes you wonder what the other 96% is.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Dry food isn't particularly healthy for cats as I understand it anyway, and theres really no need for them to purely eat protein, if they eat a mouse/bird, it isn't 98% protein, their diet isn't supposed to be only protein.
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my vet seemed to think dry food was the way forward. not that we really listened

anyway our cats what they are given. sometimes meat , sometimes dry , sometimes fresh fish/meat , various brands , we pay no attention to the content

the last two lived till past 20 years and our current cats get the same treatment and seem pretty damn healthy to me


all this x amount of protein x amount of meat stuff is nonsense to me and weve had 25 years of healthy cat ownership to prove it. its a marketing exercise. people realised how much money they could milk from that stuff and thats what they are doing. cats can live on scraps and animals if they need too. they dont need a gourmet meal every day
 
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Most vets will tell you dry food for the majority of the time.
Occasional meat and always use "in jelly" not "in gravy".
It's for their teeth.
Give you're cat meat in gravy all the time and they will lose teeth.
 
We've been picking up bits of food from Tescos every time we go shopping before we get the kittens and so far we've got Tesco Kitten Premium cuts in Jelly wet food (meat and animal derivatives, minimum 4% of the animal in the flavour, 8% protein), GoCat Complete Kitten dry food (min 4% chicken in the BROWN kibbles, 40% protein) and Tesco Enhanced Nutrition Kitten (Minimum 35% chicken, 35% protein) which just shows that high meat content doesn't mean high protein.

At the end of the day its obviously down to each owner. We'll not be feeding our cats crazy expensive food, but at the same time, we're hoping the'll be with us a long time. To that end we're going to try and find a balance between cost and apparent quality of the food. I just thought cat food was cat food until we'd already bought enough to last us about 4 weeks so for now they'll make do with what they are given an probably will be happy with it.

So much in this world is down to placebos though, its so difficult to know 100% that the reason X has happened is because of the Y that you changed.

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also something to consider is the serving size, the gocat dry i have says between 30 and 90g a day for upto a 3 month old cat, the tesco dry says just 25g a day. Both are "complete."
 
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