Jasmine comes in for lovings when I’m pooping. Only when pooping. I’m peeing? She ignores me. I’m in the shower? She cries and begs me to come out of the giant glass box that’s spraying me with water until I get out.
On topic; She loves wet catfood, but I rarely give it to her. She only eats half a can at a time, and I’m lazy and don’t like wasting food.
My 2 kitties get dry free fed, and start their morning with 1/4 of a small can each, really, no more than a heaping tablespoon. They look forward to their breakfast every day and believe me, I hear about it until I give it to them!
I used to give my cat wet food and she wouldn’t eat it. It took me an embarrassing number of years to realise she simply doesn’t like to eat out of a curved bowl. She eats her kibble because she can knock it out of the bowl with her foot and eat it off the flat floor. Once I started serving wet food on a flat saucer, she ate it happily. I still reserve it as a sometimes-treat rather than a regular event.
I used to think this also, but it’s really not true, and any competent vet won’t tell anybody this. Cats teeth are really designed for rending, rather for chewing, so most of the dry food goes down whole. Toothless cats can eat just as easily as those with teeth. The benefit to teeth is negligible, and the grain by-products in most dry food are not natural food for a cat. What a vet will tell you is to feed your cat whatever it will willingly eat on a regular basis, whether wet or dry. If it prefers dry, try to get some wet into its diet. If you’re going to feed it dry food as a regular diet, then something like Royal Canin HP (hypo-allergenic) is a good choice for when they get older. If your cat doesn’t like wet cat food (and a lot of them don’t), try pureed baby food, such as ham with ham gravy. They love the stuff.
Any cites?
Little screamy cat has trained me to feed him wet food twice a day. Much easier to give in to him than to endure the Siamese yowl of starving protest. The other cat is pretty happy about the wet food thing, too. I mix hot water with it so it’s really sloppy and a little bit warm. Figure it’s a good way to get some fluids in them and makes the can last a bit longer.
Dry food is left out for them free choice, though I have yet to find a location that the cats can get to that the dogs can’t, so it’s really only available if the dogs are out with me or I’m there to keep an eye on things.
My last cat would turn his nose up at the wet food for most of his life, but started to eat it when he got older.
Lenny and Squiggy only ever got/get dry kibble. wet food was a treat for Christmas and stuff, and when Lenny was temporary on a special diet while he recovered form an illness. Squiggy loves it and the vet was very impressed with his health during his last visit.
Last time we ran out of his kibble and got wet food as emergency stuff, Squiggy barfed it up everywhere. Too rich for him. (Dog thought that was just great though.)
Only Walmart Special Kitty urinary tract protection dry for nearly eleven years now. Very happy, healthy kitty.
We’ve had a lot of interaction with our vets recently, as our cat was failing, so a lot of the information comes from them. Opinions abound on the internet, of course, but simply watching wildlife documentaries will tell you that cats eat meat and pretty much bolt their food. Usually, when cats start barfing it’s from allergies to the grains added to dry food, or from cow’s milk, or from hairballs. I’m not saying that dry food is a bad thing, as our sweet cat survived for 18 years on the stuff, but it did nothing for her teeth, which still had to be cleaned periodically. As for swallowing much of it whole, when your cat barfs a lot (as ours did with the thyroid problem), it’s easy to see that most of it goes down intact.
My cat eats pretty much only Hills Science Plan Furball Control Dry Food for Mature Cats. YUM!
If I give him wet food, he just licks off the jelly. And god forbid that you might make him eat a bit of real chicken or tuna, he will look at you like you’ve lost control of your senses.
My vet told me the same thing, that dry food being better for teeth was a myth. Of course, that’s just my one vet so I suppose she could be wrong. I think it makes sense though. I wouldn’t expect a bowl of cheerios to do much about my plaque build up, I’m not sure why dry cat food (which is pretty much just meat cereal) would be any different.
A few given by the vet tackling the subject here. It appears the bulk of the research in this area has been done on dogs rather than cats ( who have somewhat different dentition ) and her conclusions ( i.e. “At best, we can say that dry food tends to produce slightly less tartar than canned food. For cats, the benefits of feeding canned food far outweigh any possible dental problems that may result.” ) are just a little at odds with her opening statement that dry food has NO benefit for cats, but not vastly so. The first reference cited ( Logan ), which looks like a book article surveying research rather than a research paper per se, seems to be the one that backs her argument the most strongly.
Didn’t anybody read my post?
Here’s an article/client handout that can be printed from Veterinary Partner - sister website to the vet-only VIN.
This was originally written in 2001 and edited in 2009. Interesting that you can search around on that site and still find some writings that say kibble helps, but this one is most current.
My cat is not a fan. Considering his previous urinary problems, I wish he were. He’s good about “people food,” too; he eats some vegetables, almost any meat, and he loves eggs, but he’s not a big fan of canned cat food. Maybe we should just keep trying it.
I have one every time my Wonton gets hold of dry food. The vomit is still kibble shaped.
I meant a reference to a scientific paper. I never did find much on why wet food is better than dry for a cat. I must say I was turned off by a reference to to the Huffington Post. I think it is full of socialistic garbage having no place in a discussion of pet food.
To the extent that it is chewed, dry food will provide some teeth cleaning benefit. Inhaled whole, no.
So let’s see a link to a study showing cats are healthier eating wet food than dry.
Larger kibble would work better with a dog, perhaps, although both animals are carnivores at heart and tend to bolt their food. Milkbones seem to help with dog teeth.
We have three 12 year old cats and have only fed them wet food if we needed to mix in medicine. Otherwise they’ve been eating the same brand of dry food for their entire lives (although we do switch the flavors).
They seem few and far between for cats. Here is one review paper summarizing some research on dry diets and potential relations to diabetes and other conditions in regards to the consumption of dry foods and it concludes that for the most part:
Current published evidence thus does not support a direct role for diet in general, or carbohydrates in particular, on disease risk in domestic cats.
I wouldn’t consider that definitive given the apparent paucity of research, but it is certainly a starting point.
Well, there are several articles by DVMs on the web that discuss potential benefits which I’m sure you can search down yourself. However the ones I’ve found aren’t research papers so much as opinion pieces based on informed speculation and anecdotal evidence. I think they make interesting arguments, but as above I don’t think they have much solid research yet to back their arguments.
I wouldn’t toss them, but I think taking them with a grain of salt is reasonable.
I went to an all wet diet for specific reasons related to struvite crystal formation in one of my cats that is almost certainly primarily genetic in origin. In his case every little bit of hydration helps. Before that I happily fed dry food.
What references to the Huffington Post?
Well the counter to that ( that feline dentition is not designed for chewing and cats really don’t chew per se ) seems pretty reasonable to me. The only benefit to dry foods ( and they are not inconsiderable ) that I can see are convenience related - they smell less, are easier to clean and can be free-fed for cats that do okay with free-feeding ( not all do ).
I wouldn’t get too obsessive about it for the most part. My last cat lived 17 years on an almost entirely dry diet. However for some situations ( i.e. my above crystal formation issues ) wet food does seem to have its advantages.
my crews have dry food all day and night. cans on sundays and holidays. they abso. know which day is sunday.