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I only can say what has worked for my two and that is no dry food...ever. One horked her food up within 15 minutes of eating, horker #2 had the decency to wait 10 minutes after I cleaned up after the first horker to toss her cookies. Yeesh! In addition to the dry they were also getting wet food. I did try the raw diet but the two turned their noses up and refused to eat. I had to be out the door by 7:30 am and couldn't let the raw on the floor all day till I got home. Then Big Tom got pancreatitis so we must feed them both a low fat food which is Royal Canin diabetes. This food in my opinion is not the best but the puking has been reduced significantly.
OK, I transitioned 15 cats (one died from pneumonia or a stroke, was an outside and new, to us, sick feral) to all raw ground (not whole ) in 2 weeks and it really would have been about 6 days had I not been unable to believe how much they took to it!
But the trick is to give them minced bits of raw to start. Tiny pieces, minced or ground up. That is the key. Put it on the plate next to the usual wet and just let them decide. I had most wanting only raw in 3 days. That was March 2014. At the end of 2 weeks none wanted wet, only raw. Different personalities, the whole thing, ALL loved the raw. But I used a raw ground recipe which they go bonkers over.
Well Martha Anne, my veterinarian prescribed this VERY POPULAR required food, or my cats could die. Are you going to come tell just about every practicing Veterinarian what you posted here?
Here is the medicine my cats MUST be fed, or ELSE!! This is why so many cats have to eat this brand and style of medicine food, to keep them healthy!!
I'm an informed consumer but this is different than just being a consumer anyway because the problem is, I'm not a doctor. This is what is PRESCRIBED and picked up right along with the other medicines. I think the healthy foods are VERY nice and more power to everyone who can feed nice fancy foods but when it comes to medical things, gotta go to doctors. Have been to a few vets and they are just normal vets like everywhere who all have the food, too, so how can it be bad if all the doctors are prescribing it and nobody is complaining? We'd hear about it on the news!!
The Doctor isn't always right and you don't have to feed what the vet wants you to.
I don't understand why it is so hard for you, Catsmom, and you know I don't mean that to sound critical in any way whatsoever. My God, if we had to feed only 3 cats I would be able to prepare a batch of ground in a couple of hours every 2 weeks! .
I didn't say it was "hard for me", I said it was hard work. Yes I have a routine now, but it is still hard work. I've never been a big fan of spending time in the kitchen.
Keep in mind that you are a "we". I am one. I work 40 hours a week. I have other obligations on many weekends. I have health issues.
I don't have room for a big freezer, I don't even have a full sized refrigerator in my tiny apartment. I have to keep most of my raw in a friend's freezer, who lives a few miles away. I know you aren't criticizing me, but everyone is different. I think you've forgotten how challenging you found it at first. I remember reading a post in this forum where you said you just couldn't do it, you weren't going to do it, it was too much.
It's misleading to make it seem all rainbows and butterflies. Raw done right is the best way to feed a cat, but it is NOT easy. Making it sound so, is setting people up for failure. You hit blocks, and kept on.
Some, if they are expecting easy, may give up too soon. Where as if they went into it expecting some hard work, they might be better prepared to stick with it until it becomes routine..
The downside to a canned-food-only diet is that teeth and jaws no longer have to work very hard which can contribute to mouth issues. It's a fallacy that dry food helps keep plaque and tartar away, but what dry and raw do is force the jaw muscles and teeth to do some work to stay stronger. So, although their main diet is canned, I have on occasion fed a bit of quality dry as a supplement. Unfortunately Silver, who's 17, cannot have an dry at all (causes urinary problems), and he's the one who could use it at his advancing age for dental health.
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Raw chunks of meat and bone does. Dry does not. It's an interesting theory and I can see how it might seem to make sense. But kibble isn't anything like bone or chunks of meat, and cats do not have the correct kind of jaws or teeth to get even that kind of benefit from kibble. Kibble is not exercising a cat's jaw in any beneficial way.
If you saw a cat eat meat and bone, you'd see what I mean. I'll hunt up a video of my girl enjoying a wing. It's nothing like eating kibble.
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I also have a stray we rescued this summer who cannot tolerate canned at all. I've been trying to transition her from dry, but canned of any kind (gluten/veggie/fiber free or loaded with glutens and veggies and fibers) gives her diarrhea. My next step is to try some raw food, but if that has the same results as canned, I will not feel guilty if her diet remains dry food since historically, except for Panther, all my cats did just fine on dry before 2010.
I would suggest adding a probiotic to the cat's diet. This will take care of the diarrhea while her body adjusts to getting decent nutrition again.
They aren't, really, fine on dry, ever. They seem fine, but low level chronic dehydration takes it's toll all the same. They feel so much better when properly hydrated and not walking around with an indigestible load of dough in their guts all the time. Remember that cats hide illness and certainly you wouldn't notice any minor discomfort. But it's there.
I didn't say it was "hard for me", I said it was hard work. Yes I have a routine now, but it is still hard work. I've never been a big fan of spending time in the kitchen.
Keep in mind that you are a "we". I am one. I work 40 hours a week. I have other obligations on many weekends. I have health issues.
I don't have room for a big freezer, I don't even have a full sized refrigerator in my tiny apartment. I have to keep most of my raw in a friend's freezer, who lives a few miles away. I know you aren't criticizing me, but everyone is different. I think you've forgotten how challenging you found it at first. I remember reading a post in this forum where you said you just couldn't do it, you weren't going to do it, it was too much.
It's misleading to make it seem all rainbows and butterflies. Raw done right is the best way to feed a cat, but it is NOT easy. Making it sound so, is setting people up for failure. You hit blocks, and kept on.
Some, if they are expecting easy, may give up too soon. Where as if they went into it expecting some hard work, they might be better prepared to stick with it until it becomes routine..
I see. I didn't know you don't have the ability to have a freezer. If you made, say, 15 lbs of raw, you'd need to freeze much of it to spread it out for 3 cats. So, that IS a problem.
Yes, I don't work now and I have my husband here but we are in our later 60's and early 70's and running a household of 11 cats and you don't know this, but we have had to do 10 mouth surgeries after a calici virus epidemic here, all 11 were sick, several full mouth dental extractions (we now have 4 cats with no teeth and we are going to be doing more dental surgeries) and we have stomatitis care, we are at the vet 4 days a week and also we manage a house with tons of work to do here. So, I was learning to do raw at the exact same time we had a calici epidemic. We were at the vet on a daily basis for a while there. But I did work full time and I know that there is very little time or energy at the end of the day. Well, if once a month, if a person did have a large enough freezer,they could make enough ground raw to feed it as part of the meal each day, I suppose. (not meaning you).
If you feed all dry or even half dry, I pity your cat.
While you may have a lot of really good knowledge and useful advice to share.... you will get very few people to listen to what you have to say if you insist on making statements like the above.
When you consider that many many domestic kitties live very long lives on what you consider to be (maybe even rightly so) junk, You are going to have to make a much better and more appealing case for why people need to consider a change. After all if it isn't broken why would you want to fix it right?
My cat is doing just fine on her high quality dry food diet thank you very much.
While you may have a lot of really good knowledge and useful advice to share.... you will get very few people to listen to what you have to say if you insist on making statements like the above.
When you consider that many many domestic kitties live very long lives on what you consider to be (maybe even rightly so) junk, You are going to have to make a much better and more appealing case for why people need to consider a change. After all if it isn't broken why would you want to fix it right?
My cat is doing just fine on her high quality dry food diet thank you very much.
She may appear to be "fine" but there is much more to life than "fine". Until you have experienced the difference you really can't know what people are talking about.
If you saw your cat on an all wet diet instead of dry, you'd be amazed at how much more than "fine" your cat can be.
Please, think about it. You really can't even imagine how much better your cat will feel and act, on a wet diet.
There are some good links in this thread. But you can always start here:
While you may have a lot of really good knowledge and useful advice to share.... you will get very few people to listen to what you have to say if you insist on making statements like the above.
When you consider that many many domestic kitties live very long lives on what you consider to be (maybe even rightly so) junk, You are going to have to make a much better and more appealing case for why people need to consider a change. After all if it isn't broken why would you want to fix it right?
My cat is doing just fine on her high quality dry food diet thank you very much.
You took a gamble on your cat by feeding her/him all dry. The research has been done. This is not my opinion. I am only the messenger.
There are so many sites now that go into this in depth as to why dry is not good.
The famous teaching and research hospital in New York, the Animal Medical Center, doesn't even have dry food for their cat and dog patients. I know this only because a 3rd year resident there who was about to take her boards told me that.
But scientific data aside, I long ago wanted to feed raw but just didn't know how to and was worried about contamination. Since then, I learned that cats get sick far more often from eating dry and canned food than from raw! I didn't know that! And the thing that I had decided, on my own, was that I wanted to mimic as best I could what Mother Nature had decided for cats in the wild: to eat whole, juicy rodents or all kinds, rabbits, birds and insects, not dry ones. By the way, the endocrinologist said that a cat cannot and does not make up for the loss of water in dry by drinking from a bowl of water. Cats do not, she said, drink water that much, as a rule, also. The majority of the water they get from their food. This is another thing that concerned me.
I am only a pet parent, not a scientist but I am personally convinced that feeding dry is not safe.
Ugggg....Hills Science diet is not a great choice at all.
It's almost unanimous here. Who are you guys' vets? Dr. in the holistic link? I read it, she's in California and obviously not everyone here is closeby. Where do you take your pets in person?
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"My jaw dropped a little at some of the stuff you have said, Umpire... I am not being hostile, but I know very, very few people anymore who are as trusting of social authority figures as you appear to be.
Social authority figures? Is that what they're calling vets these days on Facebook?
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"My vet said so, therefore I HAVE TO."
"If it was true it would be on the news."
^ Those kinds of ideas.
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Are you aware that many Americans now have no trust for big business or big media? You realize that many official sources of "information" (the news) are heavily sponsored by often highly intertwined big businesses?
Where are these Americans cause I don't know any who can diagnose and medicine their own pet or brave enough to try. I see Geico, Kay jewelers, allergy prescriptions, expensive car commercials while watching the news on local and cable. What's your point? Plenty of high preaching down to.
snip long preachy- Yeah I see at least half dozen lawyer commercials daily, what does that have to do with it cause I never saw one saying to call them about 20 years of toxic prescription food that every vet still prescribes with no fuss, have you? And Disney owns ABC (or vice-versa) so ABC is biased about bashing Carnival Cruises the way they did. No secret. Everyone's out to promote their interests when they can afford to. Tell me something I don't know, like how every vet I know hasn't been arrested for prescribing such toxic food for 20 years. And try getting an appointment when something comes up because they're always booked solid prescribing the toxic food with no fuss from anyone.
Guessed this title was about ol roy before I read it. Glad I did anyway. Thanks to the nice people for the holistic vet info cause it could help dog too and thanks to those not pitying my pets and flinging negligent poisoning akin to Doctors sugaring up Diabetics accusation because not everyone's a doctor and psychic and lives near new age vets.
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