what do you feed your cat?

[x-clo-x]

thought i would ask the general question, and get everyone's answers, rather than ask about specific foods.

so what do you feed your cats? wet, dry or both? do you have set meal times or free feed? and what treats do your cats get?

i have no set brand for mine, because they can be fussy, so i swap and change.. they like whiskas at the minute (i dont! hate the stuff :lol: )

and their favourite treats are the whiskas temptations, they will do anything for one of them :lol:

[dandysmom]

Wet as 98% or so, with a little sprinkling of dry on top. I avoid dry because of the increased chances of cystitis, as cats tend to not drink enough water, I also add a bit of warm water to the food to increase the liquid content; Leia likes it that way.

Set feeding times: breakfast, lunch. dinner, midnight snack, mid-afternoon snack. The brands won't mean much to you as they're US brands.

Leia doesn't particularly care for commercial treats, prefers a bit of people food (which she would never eat in her earlier years, oddly enough!): ham, cheese, a bit of prawn, etc.

[Velvet]

Kittens
Mix of Natures Menu & Felix kitten wet
Pro plan kitten sensitive dry

Adults
Felix Sensation range wet
Hills Sensitive dry

Ours are free fed, food always available.

We are lucky as the adults dont like the kitten food. The kittens however like the adult food :-D

Treat wise they like the cushioned pillow type biscuits - crunchy on outside with various soft fillings on inside.

Also love cooked ham, chicken, cheese etc, they would only get the latter if we have it ourselves for our meals and then they (and the dogs) would get share.

[Tanya]

My cats have breakfast, tea and supper.

For breakfast they have a Royal Canin Sensitivity Prescription pouch. I then fill a bowl with Royal Canin Sensitivity Prescription biscuits.

At tea time they have a small bowl of biscuits each and then for supper they have a bowl of milk and a few biscuits!

They love cheese and chicken. Alfie has been known to steel my cupcakes while cooling on the side too! ;)

[Pickalilly]

My kitten has

In the morning half a Whiskas gravy with meat pouch Or other kitten pouch( I know Whiskas isn't great but he'll be moved to a more 'scientific' diet when he's older)

Then as much dry Iams junior he'll eat (he doesn't need to watch the calories yet!)

Then the other half of the Whiskas pouch later in the evening

After this more dry food for night

Treatise

Adores Thrive shrimps and chicken ( they're 100 percent natural too)
Whiskas temptations and dreamies! cats love dreamies!

[x-clo-x]

well seems my two have expensive taste! :lol:

i bought lots of different biscuits, the small sample bags, to give them a bit of variety and see what they like best.

turns out things like whiskas and go cat are no longer an option :lol: :lol: :lol:

their favourite is royal canin "beauty" i think it is, they love this and go mad for it.

their second favourite is james wellbeloved... so looks like they have expensive taste :lol:

they are having the gourmet meats at the minute by purina.. which they seem to like alot better than whiskas meat, and they wont even touch felix.

[JMPARK]

I Was Told By My Vet To Make Sure It Had Mostly Meat In It And Not A Lot Of Derivitives Or Extracts. I Use " Hi Life " It Is A Little More Costly Than The Others, But It Does Have 60% Meat And My Two Kittens Love It. Because It Is A Little Expensive, I Give My Two It Once A Day And The Hard Meals ( Which I Use " More " ), Soaked In Water First, ( As My Two Don't Really Like It, But Will Eat It When Its Softer!! Fussy Beggars!! ), The Rest Of Their Feeds! That Way They Always Get Enough Water In Their Diets! I Think All Cats Develop Their Own Preferences Just As Humans Do!

[x-clo-x]

I Was Told By My Vet To Make Sure It Had Mostly Meat In It And Not A Lot Of Derivitives Or Extracts. I Use " Hi Life " It Is A Little More Costly Than The Others, But It Does Have 60% Meat And My Two Kittens Love It. Because It Is A Little Expensive, I Give My Two It Once A Day And The Hard Meals ( Which I Use " More " ), Soaked In Water First, ( As My Two Don't Really Like It, But Will Eat It When Its Softer!! Fussy Beggars!! ), The Rest Of Their Feeds! That Way They Always Get Enough Water In Their Diets! I Think All Cats Develop Their Own Preferences Just As Humans Do!

yes i look for actual meat content rather than derivatives. natures menu is another good one which my two like.

[fancyabrew]

Marmaduke Royal Canin British Shorthair dry stuff

Chloe Royal Canin indoor cat as shes old.

They also get Gourmet Pate and Almo nature tins of wet.

Marmaduke prefers the dry food given the choice but he will eat anything at any time. We have two feeding stations and there is normally food always there.

Chloe does like fresh meat, chicken, beef, pheasent, but Marmaduke isn't all that about fresh food. Chloe also loves tins of tuna

[Kimble]

Whiskas sachets
Pet shops own dry food

[Hevvur]

Whiskas tins (am and pm)
Arden Grange kitten food (dry) - down all the time.

[Hreow]

Grau, Porta 21 pure chicken, Ziwi Peak, Whiskas, Smilla wet foods. (From most common to least)

Orijen, JWB, Acana, Ziwi Peak, Applaws dry.

He has two-three meals of wet per day. He self-doses on dry. Toffee loves playing with water so I'm not too worried about letting him choose how much dry he eats.

He gets bits of roasted turkey thigh, prawns and any bit of safe raw meat that we can find for his treats.
He also gets the lamb bone when we have leg-of-lamb, and spends a good hour gnawing the cartiledge off it. :)

[Hez]

Visa has Whiskas kitten dry food available 24/7 and Whiskas/Felix canned/wet twice a day.

I'm going to try her on Meowing Heads dry once the Whiskas dry runs out and I'm not sure what to go for on the wet front! :lol:

[Alfiekins]

Where the food has come from and how it has been tested is mega important to me as well as the quality of the food, so I give my two yarrah chicken chunks and arden grange light dry food. Both of my cats are on diets, one is quite chunky and the other an indoor cat so they only get about 150g of wet and 15ish grams of dry per day. I feed wet morning and evening and dry during the day. Not many treats either for my two!

[Moonbeam]

My 2 are fed Animonda Carney, Smilla, Grau and Bozita pate from Zooplus, all wet food, no dry apart from the odd Dreamy here and there :D They get breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. I was free feeding but as they're getting a little older and Purdy has been spayed I thought it best to cut down a little so they don't start getting podgy :lol:

[cattycat]

I feed my cat with the same food as I have. sometimes I pamper him with cat food, but not really often as I have read many negative reviews about cat food in the web.

[pamela81]

my 2 monsters get a pouch in the morning each and the same again at night aswell as treats during the day. No dry as Harris had cystitis and the vet advised against dry

[catspaw]

set times half 8 am & 6pm for wet - Iams (half a pack each cat, each time)
free feed dry all day - Iams (multi cat)

I am VERY lucky, my cats drink water throughout the day and after meals to wash it all down, I guess lol ..and they do love a dripping tap lol

treats - I try to stick to "dental" treats, Smilla Toothies. my cats are weird, they actually love 'em lol
Ohh, and almost any kind of "stick" They will sell their soul for a cat stick! Yarrah, usually but really any stick will be gnawed on happily

[Feliss]

Myszka has his dried food available all day. Siamese Royal Canin 38. He gets encore tins every now and again. For treats he has thrive fish things! He also loves to drink water, when he stayed at the vets with his broken foot they thought it might be an addiction!

[JMPARK]

Funny how things change. Since I wrote about feeding, my two are obviously older and I have had had to put them both on a bit of a diet.
I now feed them:-
42 gramms of Hills Science Plan Feline Adult Light with Chicken Dry a day each and
50 grammes of Hills Science Plan Feline Adult Poultry/Fish Selection Wet a day each.

I feed them in the morning and night with 21 grammes of dry food each and the wet at dinner time

[Pickalilly]

Now Henry's 20 months, he has two small bowls of Hills Neutered Young Adult Male chicken dry food, one at breakfast and one at lunch. Then, at 6pm (4:30pm winter), I call Henry in from the garden, lock him in for the night, and give him his wet pouch or tin. This will always be a very good quality one such as Encore or Hilife, as any other is guaranteed to give him a prolonged bout of diarrhea! He's extremely sensitive and I suspect he has an ibs related syndrome. It's easy to control, though, as long as he only eats this diet and Thrive (100% fish/meat) treats.

I actually bought him a Dreamies cat advent calendar last Christmas, and whilst it was a lovely idea, poor Henry immediately got very ill!

[fecto's mum]

All my cats eat different things. Barnaby only has dried food. His fave is Royal Canin Kitten, even though he's 3! Fecto eats only wet food as he has no teeth, he's nearly 12.
Inky eats wet and dry, his fave is Felix As Good as it Looks Chicken. Swirl eats mostly dry food although recently he's been eating both wet and dry. The Big Foozy, 7 year old Ragdoll, has to have a sensitive digestion diet. I keep his on a cereal free diet and try to vary the food he gets, (he gets bored easily). He has Catessy wet food, Royal Canin Sensible and RC Prescription Sensitive Digestion dry food. I've also used Bozita both wet and dry and Grau and Catzfinefood. They also have chicken cooked for them and I buy cooked meat bits off the deli in Morrisons.

[dinky]

Hi Fecto's mum, your lovely cats seem very well catered for. All my five have Royal Canin kitten biscuits, Iams kitten pouches and Royal Canin pediatric pouches. They never seemed to drink much water until I started magnetizing it for them .It certainly improves the taste and they love it.So do I.

[catspaw]

They never seemed to drink much water until I started magnetizing it for them .It certainly improves the taste and they love it.So do I.

Hi dinky,
I was glancing over your reply when "magnetizing" caught my eye. I have no idea what that is, how it's done, why it's done. Please excuse my ignorance of this process. Would you mind explaining it to me, please?

Thank you in advance for your indulgence and patience. :)

[dinky]

Hi Catspaw,I drink magnetized water as do all my pets. My vet recommended it for my English Mastiff after an horrific dog attack. My Willow required surgery to repair a cruciate ligament and the magnetized water helped to reduce inflamation, according to the vet. I am no health freak, but this water definitely tastes sweeter and more pure than ordinary water and believe it or not, my cats love it, whereas they will not look at non-magnetized water.It is meant to provide more energy and a range of other things but I just love the taste. All I do is place a jug of tap water onto a special magnetizing disc for one hour. This magnetizes the water. The special disc would be available at health shops and is not expensive.It lasts forever. I bought mine online from America, but it should not be difficult to find one.Have a great evening.

[catspaw]

Thank you, dinky :)

[Kirsten]

Pete will eat anything except Tesco own brand biscuits. He gets a pouch of wet food morning and evening (half at a time, then the other half in another hour or so, or else he inhales the lot at once), and a few grammes of dry food put down before I go to work and before I go to bed. He's on a diet just now, so it's 10g of dry food each time and I might reduce that further after his next weigh-in. Once a week he gets a defrosted whole uncooked chicken wing with the bone in, instead of wet food. Watching him rip into it is like watching some sort of David Attenborough documentary!

I buy a variety of brands of wet food - Tesco, Kitekat, Felix, Whiskas etc, and I alternate them so he doesn't get the same brand two meals in a row, and I alternate meat/fish/poultry too. I also buy a couple of types of biscuits and mix them together in a tupperware so he's getting a mixture of those too -at the moment he has a mixture of hairball biscuits, diet biscuits and standard Go Cat. I don't want him to turn into one of those cats that will only eat a particular brand, so I don't give him the chance to get dependent. I think I'm worrying about nothing though - he eats so fast I doubt he can taste it. He hasn't even noticed he's had antibiotics pressed into his food since Friday! He also likes stilton, philadelphia, yogurt, cheddar, babybel and Heinz baked beans..