Cat owners:
Do you feed your cat canned or dry food or both? Does it make any difference nutritionally?
Dry cat food is supposed to be better for a cat’s teeth. I have always feed mine dry food and only sometimes canned and they all seem to like the dry just fine. I’m not sure if it makes a difference nutritionally though.
We’ve always done dry food…mainly because the stench of canned food was too much.
I think most vets will tell you it doesn’t make much diff.
A blend of 2 brands of dry food in the morning because the crunchiness is good for their teeth, the fibre is good for digestion, and one of the brands is a chicken and rice anti-hairball formula. Then they get wet food for supper because it contains lots of moisture and fatty acids that keep their coats shiny. They are very healthy cats.
I figure that if a balanced diet is good for humans, then it’s good for cats as well.
Dry is fine. Cheap dry is garbage, however. Cats will eat less of the quality dry food (anecdotal observations). So the price difference is not that big a deal.
Many cats will not overeat, so just leave it out all day. Some cats, however, will wolf it down like …um…a wolf. So watch out.
I also give chunks of wet food now and then. It’s a great way to get him to leave me alone when I don’t have time to play fetch (yes, he does play fetch.) Domestic cats often don’t drink as much water as they should, so keep a second bowl of water away from the food, as cat instinct is not to eat and drink near each other. So I’m told. Seems true for my cat. He drinks lots more away from food bowl then near it…
In anycase, change water daily. In the wild, cats also prefer their water to be moving and not still (ie, not stagnant). Making sure you cat as sources of fresh daily water helps prevent urinary problems…which keeps them from having incontinence on your furniture (how’s that for motivation for you!).
I also give him a spoon or two of yogurt when I have some. Otherwise he’ll climb on my or silently scare the heck out of me by stalking my bowl of yogurt. Unlike milk, yogurt is good for all cats. Many can’t handle milk. Just adds some vareity and he goes nuts for it.
To what? 
Never kiss an animal that can lick its own butt.
If it’s to an oven, a pizza peel works nicely.
[sub]Damn you gato, I’ll feed you…[/sub]
I do only dry food, so as to keep their teeth healthy. I use Nutro Max Cat food, and ONLY that, because one of my kitties has a weak digestive system, and any variation in his diet gives him the runs for a week. Yuck.
In addition to the teeth issue, I find dry food is just generally more convenient, less messy, doesn’t go to waste as bad, and so on. It also seems cheaper.
drhess, not to be rude, but do you have any sort of cite, or at least reasoning, behind that yogurt thing? I’d always heard that dairy, in general, was bad for cats, because they were lactose intolerant. What’s different about yogurt?
Jeff
I don’t know about cats, but lactose-intolerant people can often eat yogurt because the live bacterial culture in it breaks down the lactose.
Our cat gets a small amount of milk or cream very occasionally doesn’t do her much harm.
She eats mostly wet food with some dry and her teeth are perfectly ok for a twelve year cat (infact we’ve never had to take her the vets except for routine stuff). One thing is though: our cat loves ham but it makes her sick. You shouldn’t feed cats ham they can’t digest it properly.
I’ve had good luck with the dry Iams. I recently acquired a new cat and he won’t touch the food he came with. Also from friends past expierience dry cheap food isn’t all too good for anybody, skinny kitty, crappy fur, STINKY cat box, damn little carnivores have a problem eating a food made of all corn and fillers.
I do the dry once in a while for a treat, they seem to like it OK but they won’t bother with it a second time in a week. However my folks have a cat that it took about 3 years just to get her to eat any dry, now she barely touches wet stuff. They had to wean her to soft/wet mix to soft to soft/dry mix to dry, all the while decreasing the amount of wet she got all the way down to half a teaspoon a day. When she started getting skinny they would back up a step. I’m sure expierences vary but I definately reccomend a quality food.
I used to do Iams, but then my vet informed me that Iams had been bought by someone else, and were switching their formula to go after the mass market - basically, they were going to put out the same crap as Meow-Mix and Co. I noticed that the price of Iams had just dropped, and it sounded like a plausible enough story, so I switched. The Nutro was the same cost as the Iams used to be, and the furballs were happy enough with it, so I’ve stuck with it.
Jeff
My three cats get dry, but I do give the two that will eat it canned (about 1/4 can Fancy Feast per cat) in the AM. That started when Hanna was a skinny sick baby, I don’t have the heart to cut out their morning treat. The third cat refuses canned.
As another treat, I give maybe 1/4 cup of Cat-Sip, a special milk for cats I got at PetSmart. Whiskas also makes a milk especially for cats.
Hi there. I don’t have a quote or cite, but Vets have told me so, and the good folks at cats.about.com agree. Now, if your cat can handle milk, no problem for now and then. Yogurt, afterall, is easy to digest. I can not handle milk, but yogurt has that bateria in it that helps. I love it. My cat vomits up milk, no such problem with yogurt.
I’ve always fed my cats quality dry food because I’d been told it was best for their teeth and for maintaining a healthy weight. However, I recently read a newspaper column by a local vet who claims that veterinarians have been mistaken in advocating dry food and that we should be feeding our cats canned kitten food:
An acquaintance of mine told me her vet confirmed this advice, but I haven’t been able to find any studies or other articles about it. I plan to ask my own vet what he thinks of this and to follow his recommendation.
eveanyn advises;
As a matter of fact, my old s.o. used to feed her kitties carefully selected “people food”, mostly from what we ate. They both got very old and stayed healthy.
She had a book that recommended what was good and what wasn’t. Lots of meat and fat, and some veggies IIRC. They’d growl at us (but never attack) if we messed with their dinner. 
Kinda cute.
Peace,
mangeorge
Well, I saw it a few weeks ago in the veterinary column of the local paper (and I’m pretty sure the column is syndicated), but this particular vet was saying that the new research was showing that a wet food diet is better for cats. If I remember correctly, the problem with dry cat food is that it’s loaded with carbs, which in domestic cats go straight into fat production. The new science apparently suggests that cats do better with a high-protein, low-carb diet, which is provided by wet food but not by dry.