My three babies died last year Tobin- my Bengal died of Lymphoma at 15, Maxwell - my tabby rescue died at 18 of heart failure, and Lana - my torty, who drew blood from me every week of her life but I loved her dearly. She turned into a marshmallow with my husband…well, she went paralyzed from the waist down at 19, so she was put to sleep.I missed them so much, I decided to look for a rescue kitty. Lots of Bengals find themselves in awful situations because they are purchased for their exotic looks….but people expect they can make them into lap cats. NOT A CHANCE. They end up unwanted….. Not a lot of people really get how much effort goes into Bengals. They are extremely vocal…which I love. After a while you can recognize specific vocalizations... like words. They are more active, they don't sleep as much as a cat, and they are faster than a greyhound on crack. They have different back ends than a cat, and they have buns of steel, that allow them to jump from the floor, to the two inch top of a door. It's a fun thing for a month…but people find a breaking point and ….I adopted a 8 year old female Bengal who was morbidly obese and could barely move. She lived in a closet for 7 1/2 years. I don't mean she slept in one…she lived there. Bed, food, litter….she never left it. They had 3 dobermans who terrorized her. They had an older cat who was elsewhere in the home, but she had kidney disease and had to eat hard kibble for kidney disease. They didn't want to buy other food for the Bengal, so this girl ate nothing but dry kibble FOR HER WHOLE LIFE, and couldn't move around. The people moved and surrendered the pets. I drove three states away to get this girl. My background is in marathon swimming and athletic training so I thought I could help her. She wasn't overeating, she still only eats kibble. I have switched it from kidney food that is really high in protein….since her muscles weren't being used, she just stores it as fat. A cat who needs weight might benefit from it, but this girl just became huge. My vet said to try anything to get her to eat wet food or human soft food. As cats age. Their digestive system benefits from wet food. Additionally, from what has been told to me about my girl, she is not able to absorb the nutrients as easily.

I have been having a nightmare, trying to entice her to eat anything other than the dry kibble. She won't eat fish…I mean my broiled haddock…the same as what went on my plate. She won't touch rotisserie chicken. I have to do something to get some moist or soft food into her….

The goods news is that she does love water, like most Bengals. I've had her swimming in the bathtub and she is getting stronger. Shes lost 6 lbs. She's also getting much stronger, and can now jump onto the bed. (The other Bengal can jump from the floor to the two inch wide top of the door.) A human who is up to their neck in water, only weighs one tenth of their body weight. So, a knee or hip replacement patient who weighs 200 lbs can do the exercise to gain range of motion and strength while in the water, and only be pushing around 20 lbs. That's s big deal. I used that to help this precious girl. But, at least she loves loves loves playing in the water !!!!

I can't believe how people can treat the pets they say claim to love.

Anyway, give your precious girl the wet food she loves. Hey. I like Raisin Bran, but I'd hate to be stuck with just that forever.

Many cats eat dry food their entire lives, live long and die peacefully of old age.

I have a cat that will not touch wet food, not even a taste. I've literally offered him at least five different varieties and countless flavors, he will not touch it. He will happily munch many types of dry food. He's 14 this year, he came to me at eight with his eating habits established. He's in the best shape of any of my cats, very active and muscular, not fat.

I feed the best I can afford. That means Wysong in one bowl, Blue Buffalo senior diet in another, American Journey in a third. Rightly or not, I have a theory that I'm more likely to hit their nutritional requirements if they have a variety to choose from.

Cats are weird. They're finicky and I really do think they get bored with flavors. I switched my wet food eaters to Wellness and the first few weeks they gobbled it up, didn't leave a morsel in the bowls.

They walk away from it anymore if I offer them the same flavor two days in a row. I have to offer a different flavor day to day. Fancy Feast is cheaper so I have that, too.

I'm of the opinion that cats are “hardwired" (for lack of a better word) to crave variety in their diet because the ancestors who didn't deplete the local food supply had a better chance at survival. Right up there with how they don't trust food or water that has anything in it.

The biggest problem with dry food is cats aren't big drinkers. Normally they get a significant amount of moisture from their kills. I have multiple water bowls (one for every food dish) plus a fountain. I still have one that developed kidney disease.

The next biggest problem with dry food is it's not good for their teeth. If you can get them used to teeth brushing, god bless you. Mine will happily shred me. Ideally you'll get the cat's teeth cleaned by the vet regularly, which heads off most problems.

I’m always puzzled by the claim that feeding a cat dry food is good for their teeth. I believe the opposite is true. Some points below have already been stated in other answers.

• Cats, being obligate carnivores, have pointed teeth and opposing canines designed to tear chunks of meat. They don’t really chew their food much - and dry food will leave some residue just as when a human eats crackers, cookies, or potato chips. Most cats aren’t big fans of toothbrushes.
• Our domestic felines descended from wild desert cats who lived in the Middle East. A cat’s natural prey, eaten whole, would provide all they need - protein, some fat, water, and a small amount of vegetable matter from the stomach. A cat’s digestive system is set up to process protein, not carbohydrates. They would get most of their water from their prey, and so don’t have a well developed thirst alarm - hence, if eating dry, they may not drink more to compensate.
• Cats, being domesticated much more recently than dogs, are closer to their instinctive ancestors and hide any infirmities very, very well so their humans may not notice until they become quite ill.

That being said, of course, millions of cats have lived and died eating just dry food. They may not have been as healthy or felt as good as they could have eating mostly canned, but they survived.

After 30+ years of rescue and cat behavior study and counselling, I always advise my clients to feed mostly canned with a small amount of dry left for grazing in between twice daily canned portions. Feed 1-2 ounces twice a day - they’ll eat what they want, and leaving the rest for 8 hours is fine (even the best ingredient foods have preservatives). Canned food is sold in 3, 5.5, and 12 oz. cans and easily refrigerated, so portion control is easy regardless of number of cats. Once cats are used to this routine, they will usually leave little in the dish so there’s not much waste. Buy the best you can afford - cheap canned is better than all dry. I prefer to buy and rotate a variety of brands and flavors - helps avoid allergies and if one is discontinued, it’s not a problem.

I also supplement our cats’ canned food with a few crumbled nuggets of Stella & Chewy’s freeze dried raw food. Cats adapt slowly to change - thus a cat used to eating dry may not readily eat canned - but the freeze dried additive can help entice them. Sometimes the change requires a little tough love - a cat won’t starve itself to death. When it’s really hungry, anything will taste good.

Many of my cases who have followed this recommendation have seen good results: reductions in weight, dull coats becoming shiny and healthier, correction of some behavior issues, increased play and activity, and generally healthier cats (extra cost of food might be recovered in fewer vet bills). Aggression and litter box problems are sometimes due to cats not feeling well - nutrition is a factor here, just as it is for any other species.

For your consideration.

No! That can be the worst thing you can do for your cat. You’ll end up spending more at the vet so you might as well just pay a little more and buy the wet food. Dry food has too many carbs and no moisture. Cats don’t eat carbs. They’re carnivores. It’s bad enough that pet food on the market is so poor quality as it is. It’s hard to find food that doesn’t have all kinds of carbs in it.

If you go to catinfo.org it tells you all about your cats diet. It’s a really helpful website as far as Lisa Pierson DVM goes. I do cheat a little bit and give my cats each a tablespoon of high-quality dry food. I add a couple of little treats and a vitamin every day. I also make my cats food which is a lot cheaper than high-quality wet food. It’s pretty much 95% animal proteins. Plant proteins is not the same for cats.

There are some recipes on that website. =^*^=

There has been a change in thinking on this in recent years. A kibble diet was being promoted as ideal for helping reduce tartar on cats' teeth. The problem is, most cats are not great water-drinkers, and an all-kibble diet doesn't provide enough fluid. This, along with ash content in pet foods, contributes to kidney disease, a leading cause of illness and death in domestic cats.

Current thinking advocates a diet that is primarily or entirely made up of soft food. If you do feed some kibble, consider adding extra water to Kitty's wet food. The goal is a diet that is 70 percent water (consistent with the liquid percentage in a wild cat’s usual prey).

Dr Lisa Pierson is an American veterinarian who has done a lot of work to research various pet food brands to rank them—and the more expensive ones are not always better. Pierson advocates no kibble at all, but some veterinary nutritionists like a mix of soft and dry food, as cats often enjoy that, and the mixed diet ( with the right ingredients) can be protective of both teeth and kidneys, provided the 70 percent water goal is met.

So don't take your little lady's soft food away from her!

We have the opposite problem. We have a tubby old kitty who really loves dry food.

The veterinarian suggested that she be put on a diet of high quality canned food, because she thinks the cereal fillers may be contributing to Miss Naughty’s weight problem. Unfortunately, Miss Naughty doesn’t much care for canned food (and our other cat does), so the all-canned-food diet isn’t working very well. ;)

Here is Miss Naughty in her younger, more svelte days. Now, she’s quite a bit more portly.

As a former owner of two diabetic kitties (one died from it), I cannot stress enough how horribly bad carbohydrates are for cats.

Cats are obligate carnivores, which means they thrive on a diet of meat, meat, and more meat. If they do not get certain amino acids that are only found in animal flesh, they die.

A cat's body is not built to have any need for corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, or any other form of starch. Once in awhile a cat will nibble on grass which is mostly fiber.

Every single version of cat kibble has some form of starch. It is a necessary binder to give it its texture. Dry cat food is just about the worst food to give a pet cat. They may as well be eating cereal.

After losing my girl kitty to diabetes, her twin was diagnosed. I treated him with insulin for about a month and switched him to all canned (Fancy Feast was the cheapest that I found that agreed with him). He was 11. After a month, he was off the insulin and would remain in remission from diabetes for the rest of his life which turned out to be five more years.

Catkins diet!

This is a very concise answer, and I'm sure someone will follow up with a more thorough one, but here goes:

Cats in general obtained the majority of their hydration via their prey, and so have little impulse to drink water, especially water that is adjacent to their food (a valuable instinct, because often water contaminated by one or more carcasses isn't fit to drink. Similarly, many cats prefer their wet food to be warm, presumably because cats typically only consume fresh kills, rather than scavenging from an old one). Working at a Humane Society, I (anecdotally) heard tale after tale from the owners of recently deceased cats of long-term battles with acute urinary tract infections, ultimately succumbing to kidney related issues; these cats had spent the majority of their lives in a state of dehydration, and likely could have been remedied in large by augmenting their diet with some wet food.

“There are a lot of people who believe that cats only need to eat canned food and will be unhealthy if they eat dry food,” says Larsen, noting that most cats can do fine on either.

Growing up (in the 80s), our cats only had dry food and water; there really was no such thing as the wet food market that there is today.

For this question, I will exclude the barn cats because they did a lot of hunting. But my cat, Frisky, was my house cat, who lived on kibble and water—and it sure wasn't the expensive, high-quality kibble, just a basic brand (ironically, he wouldn't eat the “Friskies” brand, but it was a similar bottom shelf kind)—and he lived to be about 20 years old, give or take a year.

(Photo of an old photo)

The only time his diet included something else was when he caught a mouse in the basement, in which he would eat just the head and leave the decapitated body to freak out my mom (haha, that little psychopath!), but that was not a common occurrence.

Frisky was the one cat I had throughout my whole childhood, into early adulthood. He never had any health issues until the last year or so of his life, when he developed some kind of respiratory issue that he couldn't shake.

The cats I have now receive a mix of kibble and canned catfood, but I really dislike the recent attitude of shaming that seems to surround the wet food market. I am not arguing that providing wet food is optimal— it does help give your cats added moisture in their diet and is closer to what their natural diet would be. However, that option is just not practical for everyone, and if someone cannot afford to provide wet food, or if their cat doesn't want it, this does not make the owner negligent, nor does it mean they love their cat any less.

Little Ruthie at six months.

I fed my cats dry food for years. As a result, they ended up with life threatening health conditions such as cystitis, diabetes, periodontal disease resulting in severe gum and bone infections with tooth loss, obesity and kidney failure. I do not feed dry food anymore. The only time they do get any type of dry food is a few pieces as a treat or reward.

My cats only get wet food now, whether it is canned food or home cooked. All health issues have resolved themselves with the help of antibiotics and operations. I can only attribute it to a change in diet three years ago. I am also spending way less in veterinary bills now. My cats only go in for their annual checkups and any shots that are due. They do not have any hairballs or digestive issues either. I make sure they get their heartworm and parasite medications on time. Worming is not needed since they do not go outside.

I buy my cat food by the case in the variety pack. I try to limit the amount of fish based food to twice a week with an emphasis on poultry based food as the primary source of protein.

I presently feed Friskies Pate in mostly poultry flavors. (This is not a paid promotion!) They generally get a half 5.5 ounce can per meal per cat. Sometimes I will cook up some fresh chicken or liver to give as a treat. At present, all of my cats are at their ideal weight although Ginger and Ruthie get a little more food since they are going through a growth spurt as adolescent cats.

I find spending a little more on a nutritious food pays great dividends in a much healthier happier cat in the end.

Edit: When I say they don't get wormed; I should have clarified my statement. They do get tested annually for worms, however they have been negative for worms for years.

Dry food is full of carbs and calories, has less nutritional value, no moisture, and more additives. It’s worse for males because cats, in general, don’t drink enough water. Crystals can form in the urethra and block the urine stream. Cats that can’t urinate go downhill very quickly. This can happen with females also. They quickly get lethargic and jaundice. Basically destroying the kidney. It happened to 2 of my boys. One was within a day. My Siamese boy got blocked on thanksgiving. We found an emergency vet that unblocked him twice and sent us home. Within 2 days he got that look again and we took him to his vet in a hurry. They unblocked him and he spent a few days for observation. They offered a surgical procedure that basically changes his anatomy so this has less chance of happening again if we saw the “signs”. He was discharged and was fine for almost a year when he started to show “changes again . Ct scan and biopsy showed relativity normal microscopic and macroscopic structure but is renal values, blood work, and urinalysis were off the chart. 5 days of IV fluids at the vet and 7 days subcutaneous fluids at home and a new ct scan revealed acute renal failure. We had to euthanize my 8yr old lilac Siamese.

The first cat, a gray tabby, basically popped at the vet when he was being examined. A horrible site and situation.

in short, no. I’d never feed dry food again. Even the prescription renal dry food and we have 5 water bowls all around the house.

Absolutely; since they descend from the African Wildcat, a desert animal found in Egypt, cats are terrible at drinking sufficient water as in the wild they get all the liquid that they need from their prey. Dry kibble just doesn't have the moisture which cats require and due to how prone kibble-fed cats can be to urinary tract issues like crystals, it is highly recommended that you feed them wet food.

Trust me - you don't want to deal with crystals! So far I have spent a whopping $6,000 on my cat Casper due to his bouts with urinary crystals (better known as uroliths) and he has been through two major surgeries. You don't want that and urinary crystal blockages are not only extremely painful, they are extremely life threatening! If you ever see your cats straining to pee or peeing outside the litterbox, even crying in pain, you need to call your vet straight away because it IS an emergency - yet feeding wet food can help prevent all of this stress!

Note that due to their long urethras male cats are more prone to crystals than females who are more prone to urinary tract infections. Both problems, again, can be much less of a risk with proper hydration.

So please, DO feed your kittens wet food; they'll love it!

Casper says "Look at my beautiful soft tummy which was shaved a month ago because I had to have a cystotomy to remove bladder crystals and note how I don't have ANY junk because I had to have a perineal urethostomy to save my life when I was three years old! The doctor had to cut off my penis to shorten/widen my urethra and make me a new opening to pee out of. Orange kitties like me are especially prone to uroliths for some reason!"

Both.

The main concern with free feeding is that cats will overeat. Being overweight isn't any healthier for cats than people, and many owners don't bother to check on their carbs weight.

So, does a cat with food available all day overeat?

Some do. Some don't.

How do you find out which kind of cat you’ve got? Put down the food for a while, and see if it starts putting on weight. If it does, you can’ t free feed. That simple. Many cats are self regulating and nibble just the right amount during the day. I have free-fed my cats for 35 years, and not one has ever been overweight.

I respect Galaxy greatly—God knows we quote him all over quora—but in this I think he goes overboard. There is nothing inherently bad about free feeding, if you have a self-regulating cat.

The plusses?

Cat can eat whenever it wants. It's not dependent on you for food. That means if you sleep late, get held up at work, or want to stay at a friend’s house later than expected, the cat's not hungry and unhappy. You can go do something for the whole day and not worry about it. Got to go away overnight? They can eat like normal without you. .

When given the option, all my cats have preferred to nibble throughout the day, just a few pieces of kibble now and then. This indicates to me that this is the way cats naturally prefer to eat.

Now, on to dry food….

Dry food is not evil. It can be wholesome and nutritious, if you buy the right brand. It lacks moisture, so you do have to make sure your cat drinks sufficient water. But if it does, Therev’s nothing about quality dry food that will hurt your cat.

Everyone I have ever known who free feeds, also feeds their cat some canned food. For my cats, it’s their evening meal, right before bedtime. Some people even feed their cats regular wet meals, but leave out a bowl of dry food in case it feels peckish between meals.

Such a combination of dry and wet food can provide a healthy diet for your cat, while making life easier and more convenient for both of you

UPDATE 10/21: Well, one of my cats started getting chubby, so now we don’t free feed any more. The other cat is really pissed. Xena has realized that she only gets food when I go in the kitchen to feed her, which has translated in her little cat brain to “every time Celia goes in the kitchen I should get fed.” The problem? The path to the bathroom goes through the kitchen. Every time I head in that direction she runs to her food dish and insists that she is starving.

We have four cats and leave out four bowls of dry food, each with a different brand/flavor so they can choose whichever they like. They all have eaten different flavors at different times.

In the mornings, I give them each a dish of wet food. It is all the same brand/type (narrowed down after a year of trying different ones to find what they like best), but I give them a different flavor every day.

I love pizza, but I wouldn’t want to eat it every day, so I give them the same consideration.

Quora suggested I add this cute AI illustration to get more views. I’m a bit concerned the cat on the far right has a sinus infection.

My cats are the same breed, sired by the same father and have been inseparable since birth, but they could not be more different in their preference for food. They are both perfectly healthy cats with 2 completely different diets.

Cats are obligate carnivores, and in a feral state, they would eat prey that's high in protein and low in fat and carbohydrates. A cat's typical prey contains enough moisture to facilitate normal digestion and organ function.

They don't need wet food to be healthy, as long as there is enough water in their diets. The quality and content of dry food varies between brands so it's important to make sure you feed them high quality dry food.

The male eats only wet food - only the seafood varieties. He would rather go without than eat anything other than what he's used to. He tries to "bury" the dry food. In the 5 years he’s been with me I’ve never observed him drinking water. Throwing it all over the floor, yes, but drinking it? No.

His sister, on the other hand, eats only dry food, specifically, Friskies™. It's not the best quality and it's certainly not the worst, but it's all she will eat. She drinks lots of water. She doesn't get enough moisture in her diet eating the dry food alone.

High quality dry food provides all the necessary nutrients and their veterinarian maintains it’s better for dental health than wet food.

The wet food only eater still has a good set of chompers after 5 years.

Cats who live on dry food don’t always get enough water. They can become chronically dehydrated which contributes to health problems like Chronic Renal Failure and urinary crystals. Low quality or cheap dry food is not going to provide enough nutrients for your cat. These are generally high in carbohydrates, used as fillers or binders, and they should absolutely not be a significant part of a cat's diet. Check the label and list of ingredients.

Remember to check the expiration date on dry food as the vitamins and animal fats used to coat many brands can degrade over time. If my cat doesn't eat the dry food within 2 days, I dump it and refill the bowl.

Canned wet cat food has a moisture content of at least 75 percent, making it a good dietary source of water. Both wet and dry food can differ greatly between brands so it’s important to check the label for nutrient information.

The ingredients are listed on the label in order of decreasing proportional weight. So, meat, seafood or meat by-products should be listed first (by-products can mean anything from organs to cartilage), with additional vitamins added to replace those that degrade during manufacturing. [1]

As far as “fresh food”: giving your cat raw meat, such as ground beef, is not a good idea. It can lead to toxoplasmosis, salmonella or parasites. Cats, being obligate carnivores, require muscle-based meat in their diets and even though plant or vegetable based diets may provide enough protein, they will not provide enough taurine and their health will suffer for it.

Small amounts of cooked fish or beef is okay, but not on a regular basis. Canned meat, such as tuna is not healthy for a cat. Don't feed your cat pork products, cooked or not.

High quality dry food is better for your cat than low quality canned food. As long as it's nutritionally complete and you keep clean water available there is no reason to have to add wet food to a cat's diet.

[1]Feed Your Cat

If I were feeding kibble- I would never add water or milk to it. This is not giving a cat the safest and proper hydration that cats need. Few cats actually drink sufficient amounts of water to stay hydrated. Dry food contains 10% fluid, whereas canned cat food can contain up to 85–86% fluids. Adding water or milk to kibble does not turn it into “wet cat food”. They are simply not the same- nor do they contain the very same ingredients in the identical amounts.

It’s no secret that I shoot from the hip about dry food. Kibble has been made for the convenience of the cat’s human companions but certainly not for the health of cats. Advertising makes it seem that kibble aka dry food is a high quality food to feed our cats. This simply isn’t true. In fact, “dry cat food cleans cat’s teeth”is a myth. Brushing their teeth helps keep teeth and gums healthier.

Additionally, most cats are lactose intolerant. Milk can cause gastric disturbances and very uncomfortable bellies. When adding water or milk to kibble, if it isn’t consumed right away as it is in canned cat food, bacteria starts building up and can cause further digestive problems.

An easy and safer way to feed the cat would be feeding canned cat food for the main diet and leave a small amount of kibble out for the cat to munch on. Leaving a large amount of kibble for “free feeding” is one of causes of obesity in cats- a nasty, unnecessary disease for kitties.

Thanks for your question!

Sure. Canned cat food is cooked, though not always all meat. Raw meat is even better, it’s what the cat evolved to eat, naturally, and the cats I have fed with a raw prey model diet have been healthier than any cat I’ve had that ate only canned food, and a LOT healthier than any that ate dry food.

Dry food does not contain anywhere near enough water for a cat, and they will never make up the shortage, since they have a very low natural thirst drive. Meat or canned foods are roughly 75% water, dry food, roughly 10% water. No cat is able to make up that difference and there are very good reasons to think that dry food is behind the skyrocketing rate of chronic kidney disease and failure in cats today.

Wetting dry food is dangerous, it can release very toxic mould compounds.

However, if you choose to feed meat, cooked or raw, be very sure you feed the right balance, because meat alone is not a complete diet for a cat. Taurine is an amino acid cats must have plenty of, as they can’t make it and not all meat has enough of this amino acid.

They need the following balance.

5% liver. ( contains vital nutrients and some vitamins, like preformed Vit. A, that they can’t easily obtain elsewhere)

5% other organs like kidney, pancreas, spleen, thymus,, brains, etc.

5–7% edible bones, or a calcium supplement

The rest can be roughly 20% or so fat ( cats need fat too) and meat, including the ligaments, tendons and other connective tissues, which, for a cat, act like plant fibre does for us when we eat it.

The meat can be from the dark parts of turkey or chicken, any bird’s gizzard, meat from duck, quail or similar birds, which are all dark meat and the tough, cheaper cuts of game, beef, pork, lamb, goat, etc., never the tender stuff we prefer. The harder a muscle works, the more taurine it contains, so use the toughest muscles - leg, shank, shoulder, butt.

Breast meat from chicken or turkey is fine for us, and no good at all for cats, as it has no taurine to speak of and the same goes for farmed rabbit, which is also white meat. Wild rabbit is fine.

The heart works harder than any other muscle, so it’s ideal in terms of taurine, but too much heart can give some cats diarrhea, so it cannot be fed as the primary meat source, or in too large a quantity.

Too much liver is dangerous, too much organ meat is dangerous, but that 5% of each is critical. If you leave out the liver and organs, you will end up with a very sick cat.

If you can’t do edible bones ( they MUST be raw, never ever cooked, as they’ll splinter and cause damage if they are cooked!), you can substitute a calcium powder, even ground up clean eggshells work for that. Use a tiny pinch on each meal and that should do the trick nicely, but the raw bones are better. The wing tips or ribs from chickens or other small birds, or a smashed up vertebra or two from the neck of a bird, work well.

I got this from Catster -

Many cat owners leave dry food out all the time for their cats, which is called free feeding. Some supplement it with wet food, some don’t. Is it the equivalent of feeding your kids a steady diet of fast food for the sake of convenience?

If your cat only eats dry food, she is likely to be getting less nutrition than a cat eating wet food. Many low-quality dry foods contain a lot of fillers. In the wild, carbohydrates are only about five percent of a cat’s diet — what she gets from ingesting the stomach contents of her prey.

Some fillers are necessary for the extrusion process that shapes the dry food nuggets during manufacturing. But they’re also included as a cost-savings, since they’re a cheaper ingredient than meat.

Dehydration and dry cat food diets

Prey consumed by wild cats is about 70 percent water. Canned wet cat food averages 78 percent, and dry cat food averages 10 percent. Cats on dry food diets usually don’t get enough water. They can become chronically dehydrated, which contributes to health problems like Chronic Renal Failure (CRF) and urinary crystals.

According to Purina, if you feed your cat dry food, she should drink approximately one cup of water for every ten pounds of body weight in a 24-hour period. In warm weather, she’ll need even more. Cats on canned food diets only need to consume one-third to one-half that amount of water.

If you feed your cat kibble, it’s essential to provide a clean, appealing source of fresh water. Pet water fountains work well in enticing cats to drink, and their filters ensure a fresh, clean water supply.

Dry cat food and cat obesity and and feline diabetes

Cats on dry food-only diets are slightly more prone to obesity and diabetes than cats who eat wet cat food. Part of this is due to the high carbohydrate levels in many kinds of kibble, and part is due to the free-choice feeding of dry cat food which gives cats 24-hour access to food.

If your cat is getting a little pudgy, ration the dry food rather than serving it all-you-can-eat style. To avoid feline diabetes, stick to a premium dry food or switch to a canned food diet.

The Wet Cat Food Debate

Is wet cat food better for cats? Photography by africa studio/shutterstock.

So, that means wet cat food is better, right? Well, not necessarily. A very cheaply produced wet food is not better for your cat than a premium quality dry food.

Check the ingredients. It should list an animal protein source as its number one ingredient, and ideally, it should not contain meat by-products.

Some argue that a canned food diet can lead to dental problems including gingivitis, but if you adhere to a schedule of regular dental checkups and cleanings, this really isn’t an issue.

The bottom line on the wet cat food vs. dry cat food debate? Choose a premium cat food!

Ultimately, whether choosing wet cat food vs. dry cat food, it should be a premium cat food with quality ingredients. The higher initial cost will be offset long-term by reduced veterinary costs.

Whiskas might not be best food you can give you cat - it’s a mass-market, middle-of-the-road product, so it will have some ingredients that don’t sound appealing. But it’s a complete and balanced diet for cats - better nutrition than MacDonald’s is for humans. While it’s not a boutique food with a health claim, you should down the answers below to Jeanie Jones’s - she has always fed ‘junk food’ to her healthy, abnormally long-lived cats.

That helps to put things in perspective. People enjoy being absolutist about nutrition and having their theories, but it’s never as simple as all that. For the most part you can’t identify which cats get the best food, according to what someone read on the net, and which get the junk food. You can’t say “Oh, that cat died at 14. Well, that figures - he ate Friskies all his life!” or “Oh look at that sickly cat - I bet he has Whiskas”.

People who have healthy cats and food theories take credit for their cats’ health and lustrous sheen but I see a lot more cats than you, and I talk to their owners about them and discuss what they’re being fed and I cannot see from looking at a cat or at their health histories, what they’re being fed. It’s not that it makes no difference, it’s that health isn’t as simple as diet. If someone has brought a big, strong handsome cat me and says that he is fed No Name from Costco, I don’t gasp and sneer and say “Junk food provides no nourishment for your cat!” It’s not credible to argue with health, or to imagine some sort of physiological juju that results in excellent health in the present being undermined from within by junk food that will kill you in the long run.

Consider the other side of this coin: the feral or barn cat. They eat the perfect diet according to the popular theories, and yet you will never find a barn cat as sleek as an indoor-outdoor cat who hunts a little for sport, but lives on human-made food. You can spot an owned cat in the outdoors because they look so good. So, you blame the roughness of the feral cat on having to constantly hunt, or parasites, or reproductive efforts, or withstanding the elements.

There are a lot of elements at play in health. Eating mice doesn’t seem as decisive as all that. We have some idea of what a ‘good diet’ is for humans, but many healthy people eat things that food purists make faces at, and many people who eat healthy food die before people who eat processed, sugary, salty, nitrite-laden fatty foods. Which is not to say that it doesn’t matter or that a healthy person wouldn’t be even healthier if they abandoned bacon pizza, only that diet isn’t the sole determinant of health, and a healthy cat might eat food that people who enjoy their own opinions about food would not approve of.

The cat could be trying to tell you something.

My cat is 10 years old. Six years ago she started getting gastro issue with very sore belly. She was constipated and the vets said it was from dry food.

There I am trying to get her to eat wet food. For six years I am doing this. She is getting worse. The vets are having a field day with me.

I took her to the vet to get her put to sleep because she was so sick all the time. The vet gave some pain meds which helped.

This past month I gave up and started giving her dry food because that’s what she wants. She is getting better.

Something in the wet food is inflaming her gut. bowel, and rectum. She will now eat wet food once or twice a week and only 1/4 can at a time. That is her request.

I now know when her belly is hurting and I treat her sooner to stay ahead of it.

She is drinking plenty of water and seems happier.

I feel like I tortured her for years.