PetCo carries Natural Balance.
We’re really not sure how old he is - the shelter’s best guess leads to six months. I checked the list when the recall was announced, and nothing I had in the house then was on it. I got this food after the recall when it had all been taken off the shelves - all except this, I guess! Iams says none of their stuff was added in the expanded recall, so PetSmart must have screwed up. I know I should have checked - I don’t know why I didn’t. 
He seems okay so far, anyway. Poor little Eddles - on a diet and now it’s a poisonous one!
It’s been a real pain to feed them seperately - they don’t like to be apart, and Dewey is having a really hard time adjusting to eating all at once. That’s why I gave up seperate feeding in the beginning. Edison has always been fat, but now he’s getting actually kind of heavy to pick up. What exactly is the benefit of kitten food, anyway (assuming both kitten and adult cat food are high quality brands)?
It’s super-high-octane fuel for growing bodies. A lot of people like to feed it to pregnant and nursing cats as well. Of course that means very high in calories - hence the sudden chunkiness when a free-feeding kitten suddenly hits a metabolic wall.
A few of those high-quality foods ( and I think Felidae is one of them, Innova Evo is another ) are actually formulated for both cats and kittens. Which means it is very calorie dense stuff that you free feed young kittens, then carefully restrict the amount for older cats based on size and activity level. A lot of people swear by that as it means a lot of calories in a nice small, nutritionally dense package. Supposedly a little less extraneous waste to clean out of the litter box ( and some claim slightly less stinky as well ), that sort of thing. Plus the stuff is supposed to more closely mimic wild high-protein diets, with none of the wheat and corn fillers so prevalent as carb bulking agents in other foods.
The flip side is that a cat used to eating more, cheaper, less calorie intense food may respond to going from, say, a cup and half of food a day to 2/3 a cup a day of the higher calorie stuff by being a total pain in the ass since they don’t think they are getting as “full” as they are used to.
Some cats ( like my previous cat ) are very good at self-regulating their weight and can be free-fed. Many ( like my current two ) aren’t - they have to have everything measured out. I just went to the vet last week for a check-up and at about one year of age, one is 10.6 pounds and about .5 pounds overweight, the other is 12.2 pounds and about .75 pounds overweight. So there are plenty of us dealing with overweight cat syndrome :).
- Tamerlane
Dry food has more calories than wet food. Look at the fat% on the package. Dry food will have >10%, canned food usually <5%. The reason is: dry food is made from plant matter, and no reasonable feline will eat it, unless it is made palateable by adding fat and aromas. Because of the high plant content and the way the feline body works, calories from dry food can make the cat put on weight faster.
Dry food is made for the convenience of the owners. Its recipe is the way it is, because otherwise it could not be manufactured. The reason why there is so much grain/plant matter in it, is because if there were more meat in it it could not be produced in extruders, would spoil faster, etc.
Cats are carnivores. Their diet should be 90% meat. Feeding them grain/vegetables is not healthy, because their digestive system is not made for it.
The best food for cats (apart from mice and day-old chickens) is raw meat and bones (B.A.R.F.), but not everybody is prepared to go that far. The really good brands of canned foods do not usually have different food for kittens and adult cats.
Eddles seems fine, by the way - it seems to be something they show signs of within 24 hours, according to the website, so that’s good. Whew!
If wet food is so nutritionally dense, why does Iams want me to feed so MUCH of it to him? I mean, good lord, he’s getting fat enough as it is - they wanted me to give him six pouches a day at one point! I mean, he’s active, but if I fed him like that I think his little legs wouldn’t reach the ground.
We used to do this for our cats sometimes as a treat, but stopped it due to the possibility of giving them toxoplasmosis . (I used to think my wife was making this up so she didn’t have to change the cat litter.)
These recipes do nothing to address my concern about toxoplasmois.
Owner of Many Cats here. Nothing but dry food. Everyone lives a long, slim, healthy life (with the exception of one fatty who came to us much fatter than he is). Dry food rocks.
sigh
Bumping this to note that the below comment is now officially outdated, as Natural Balance has made a limited recall:
http://www.naturalbalanceinc.com/faq.html
What a fucking disaster.