Confused by cat food, help!

giantmutantbroccoli

Probably the dumbest thing I've ever been confused by, I'll admit it!

Backstory:
I have an 8-month old kitten, name of Teddy, who needs to gain a bit of weight. The vet has seen her (two weeks ago, when she was skinnier than she is now!) and she's been wormed etc so it's now just a case of feeding her up a bit. She gets bored of food extremely quickly, and there's some flavours that she just will not touch for some reason - anything 'game' flavoured, rabbit or beef offends her so much she won't even go near it! I've been feeding her a variety of different types of wet food, plus a standard (go-cat or p@h) dry kitten food that I can leave down during the day. She has had absolutely no problems whatsoever with her stomach, and is gaining weight slowly.

My tactic for buying cat food so far has simply been to grab whatever had the highest protein content, which is usually the most expensive. When she's stopped growing I'll switch to a more cost-effective diet, supplemented with the odd bit of raw meat/fish.

HOWEVER...
I recently bought a pack of applaws fish flavour tins, fish being the only flavour she will always definitely eat. When I opened one I was shocked - it was just fish! If you feed wet cat food you'll understand what I mean, because normally it looks and smells like something has already eaten it This stuff smells like I could eat it. The "ocean fish" one was just mackerel, and it smelled really good! I looked at the ingredients and it IS just fish with the odd bit of rice.

Which leads to my confusion, because I'd heard that tuna, or fish, is most definitely NOT a balanced diet for a cat. I looked into raw feeding before realising I don't have the time, and I know cats need a lot of nutrients which are commonly only found in incredibly fresh meat, such as taurine. Most cat food manufacturers get around this by adding a taurine supplement to the food, but the ingredients list on these tins is just: tuna, rice, cooking water. No taurine, no vitamins/minerals or extracts of anything. What gives? Are they just not putting all the ingredients on the list, or are they selling a nutritionally incomplete cat food? Or do they have special tuna?

Also I feel a bit weird feeding my cat perfectly good human-grade food. Could anyone recommend a good quality, high-protein cat or kitten food that is made out of meat/fish that would otherwise go to waste? Preferably something that's like a paste or a solid, meaty lump rather than chunks in gravy.

And wow, that was a long post about cat food :eek:

Rev

This is basically because standard commercial cat food, IE go cat, whiskas, felix, etc has very little actual cat food in it. It's mostly fillers and derivatives. Although, I'm pretty sure applaws wet food isn't a complete food, it's meant to be a complimentary food to their applaws dry.

Basially with cat food, the more meat in it the better. Check out these two threads over at the pet forum.

http://www.petforums.co.uk/cat-health-nutrition/116753-z-dry-food-cats.html

http://www.petforums.co.uk/cat-health-nutrition/112132-z-wet-food-cats.html

The ones you might not have heard of (Portia 21, Garu etc) are usually available to order at zooplus. But there are decent foods to be had at sipermarkets, feline faye, hilife, encore (applaws re badged).

Natures menu is a great food, about 70% meat and usually on some kind of offer at pets at home. It's a pate/paste type.

Hope that's of some help.

morg_monster

The "purely" range at Pets at home has a high fish/meat content and like you say, you can identify it as fish - to the extent that all is left in the bowl when our kitties finish is maybe a couple of eyeballs and a bit of spine if they weren't feeling up to crunching it... My husband says he might try some of the cat's food one evening when he's a bit drunk and hungry..


I think that Applaws wet isn't a "complete" food, so you can't only feed that (as you say). But Purely IS a complete food and so are lots of others like the ones Rev has mentioned. We have also tried Bozita which the cats love, is something like 98% meat (although it does look like whiskas, it doesn't look as "proper" as purely, but I do trust them I think!). It gave our cats the squits a bit but they LOVE it, so we feed half and half bozita and purely and this suits them well.

There are also some dry foods which have a better meat content which you could try, which would be better for Teddy than go-cat. Applaws do a dry food which is 80% meat (I can't remember if its complete or not, but if you are feeding a complete wet food as well, this shouldn't matter), and also there are a range of Purely dry foods which vary from 40%-70% meat.

Finally if you don't have the time for 100% raw feeding, you can try feeding them up to 3 meals a week of raw without having to worry about taurine etc. We buy beef heart from tesco, which our cats absolutely adore, cheap beef mince, gristly bits of cheap stewing meat, chicken wings (these are great for their teeth), as well as "human" tins of tuna, salmon, pilchards, sardines. the only thing we really avoid is pork as I've read differing opinions on that. They have even shared a Fillet steak once after a bbq... and will never turn down a scrap of cooked fish if we're having it!

cyberbob

Just a couple of warnings. Keeping changing cat food is not good for cats tummy and cause lots of upsets.

Putting my head above the Parapet and waiting to get shot down by the BARF diet mafia.

Feeding raw if you're going to do it make sure you do lots of research as there is a lot of evidence that Raw feeding if done wrong can cause problems due to the balance of nutrients and vitamins being wrong. Also as much as the RAW food advocates state that this is what cats eat in the wild. Cats are domestic animals and are descended over 1000s of years from wild ones so with this domestication their diet has changed and their digestion also. There is also a slightly higher risk of Salmonella in the raw diet. Not a huge risk but it's still there.

The main problem is getting a balanced diet. A lot of people feeding Raw encourage food supplements which in my book shows that the Cat is not getting a balanced diet.

I'm not saying don;t do I know some breeders or successfully feed a raw diet but they have the time and the amount of research to do it.

morg_monster wrote:

as well as "human" tins of tuna, salmon, pilchards, sardines

Tinned Human fish is generally not good for ctas die to high salt levels. Tuna is particully bad due to the strong smell that if fed to often the cat will become almost addicted and refuse to eat anything else. Tuna is high in pollyunsaturated fatty acids which require huge amounts of vitamin E to preserve the fat. Cats fed just mainly on Human Tina can develop yellow fat disease

http://www.cat-world.com.au/steatitis-yellow-fat-disease-in-cats

The odd treat of tuna is fine it's just long term use that can cause problems.

*Scarlett

Thanks for that link cyberbob.

I have 3 cats, 1 came to us as a stray and initially only ate Whiskas Temptations! We then discovered that he would eat "human" tuna so were feeding that to him. I had no idea it could be harmful to cats. He is a bit odd and literally would eat nothing else - he was so skinny, a proper skeletor!

Several months ago I discovered that he would eat the small (expensive) tubs of Sheba tuna flakes and the (even more expensive) Tesco finest tuna flakes. He has actually put on quite a lot of weight eating these but recently has beome fussy again so I had started giving him the "human" tuna again but will stop this.

The good news is that he will now eat IAMS dry food (discovered after receiving a free sample from a link on MSE).

I have read advice that fussy eaters are created by their owners and I am probably guilty of this but I am going to try to keep him on proper cat food from now on.

So is it ok to keep feeding him the Sheba or Tescos combined with the IAMS? Are these complete foods?

giantmutantbroccoli

Thanks to everybody who replied or PM'd me, your help is much appreciated!

I'm quite annoyed about that applaws food now! I would NOT have bought it if it had said "not a complete food" on it, when I want to give the cat a treat I just give her some meat or fish! Certainly won't be buying the stuff again. I have a pack of HiLife which fortunately she seems to like a lot, so I'm thinking I may stick with it.

I'm quite lucky in that Teddy seems to have a cast-iron stomach. She was originally a semi-feral outdoor cat/kitten on a farm so I suspect that she has the gut flora to handle pretty much anything that comes her way. Certainly she's never had an upset stomach from my changing the food. She's indoors only while I'm waiting to get her shots, so I would definitely know about it if she did! If she developed a bad stomach I would stop mucking about with her diet, but at the moment at least she is fine.

Regarding the RAW diet, I can't say as I like the look of it. The amount of research I'd feel I had to do to be sure it was safe is just too much. I'm doing an MPhil at the moment, I don't have time to do another one on cat nutrition! I would much rather rely on a decent pet food company to do all that work for me, especially as they can get their meat cheaper, and if they made a mistake they would get their !!!!!! sued and be in serious trouble. If I make a mistake on the other hand, I could kill my cat! So no, it's definitely not for me, there's just too many things that could go wrong.

She gets small scraps of whatever meat I'm cooking, when I'm cooking. Depending on what sort of meat it is I may give the scraps raw or cooked - beef I give raw, because if I can eat it very rare it ought to be okay for the cat! Pork, chicken or fish I cook. I gave her a boiled egg the other day and she went absolutely mad for it, too.

rita-rabbit

giantmutantbroccoli wrote: »

Thanks to everybody who replied or PM'd me, your help is much appreciated!

I'm quite annoyed about that applaws food now! I would NOT have bought it if it had said "not a complete food" on it, when I want to give the cat a treat I just give her some meat or fish! Certainly won't be buying the stuff again. I have a pack of HiLife which fortunately she seems to like a lot, so I'm thinking I may stick with it.

I'm quite lucky in that Teddy seems to have a cast-iron stomach. She was originally a semi-feral outdoor cat/kitten on a farm so I suspect that she has the gut flora to handle pretty much anything that comes her way. Certainly she's never had an upset stomach from my changing the food. She's indoors only while I'm waiting to get her shots, so I would definitely know about it if she did! If she developed a bad stomach I would stop mucking about with her diet, but at the moment at least she is fine.

Regarding the RAW diet, I can't say as I like the look of it. The amount of research I'd feel I had to do to be sure it was safe is just too much. I'm doing an MPhil at the moment, I don't have time to do another one on cat nutrition! I would much rather rely on a decent pet food company to do all that work for me, especially as they can get their meat cheaper, and if they made a mistake they would get their !!!!!! sued and be in serious trouble. If I make a mistake on the other hand, I could kill my cat! So no, it's definitely not for me, there's just too many things that could go wrong.

She gets small scraps of whatever meat I'm cooking, when I'm cooking. Depending on what sort of meat it is I may give the scraps raw or cooked - beef I give raw, because if I can eat it very rare it ought to be okay for the cat! Pork, chicken or fish I cook. I gave her a boiled egg the other day and she went absolutely mad for it, too.

Most people who feed raw do so as a treat. Cats can eat raw eggs too - but I found it a bit messy so stopped. Only humans need their meat cooked:D. I suggest offal - as it's v cheap & full of nutrition - for pets - obviously if you cook it some of nutrients are lost in the process.

Complimentary food is fine as long as you feed `whole' food to pets as well - say in the same day/week. I feed mine Burns dried food & either Aniconda Carni or Bozita wet (ocasionally they get tinned fish - pilchards or raw offal) I used to also feed Feline Fayre tuna until Asda stopped selling big tins cheaply. Lastly I find it MUch cheaper to source good quality pet food online than from pet stores or supermarkets.

giantmutantbroccoli

Raw eggs aren't a good idea as the egg whites contain avidin, stuff that binds up biotin (a B vitamin), as well as trypsin inhibitors that reduce your ability to digest protein. Cooking destroys these, but raw egg white will actually reduce the amount of nutrients you get from the egg.

The reason I cook her meat most of the time is because the stuff you get in the shops (especially if you buy from the reduced section!) is not all that fresh. When she lived on the farm she regularly caught and ate her own prey - rabbits, rats and mice for the most part, although her mother brought back a pheasant once! Obviously she ate all that raw without problems, but it's not like it sat around for blah days on a supermarket shelf first.

I do eat liver myself on occasion so I'd happily give her a bit when I'm having some, but again I'd want to cook it first. I draw the line at kidneys though, I wouldn't want to have anything in the house that smelled like that!

rita-rabbit

Do not feed the cat liver - kidneys, heart, chicken feet - wings, necks, gizzards etc raw are fine cheap sources of food. Animals digestive systems can cope very well with things humans can't.