Your thoughts on cat food

[SlitherinSisters]

Ok....I might get flamed for this but you PMed me personally We had a debate about this on the cat forums I belong to. There have been millions of cats who have lived to 18+ years on Wal-Mart brand cat food, they seem to live as long, sometime longer, than cats fed a premium cat food diet. Although, I would like to see some sort of research not done by the premium cat food brands.

As for me I was feeding the kitties Nutro cat food, it's roughly $25 for a large bag. One of our kitties didn't fair well on any of the premium foods we tried, his tummy just couldn't handle something about it. And when we reached four kitties the price of cat food was a bit much to handle. So we switched back to Wal-Mart cat food. I chose to feed them Purina Indoor Cat formula. I liked the ingredients for the most part, and especially compared to other brands WM sells.

The main thing is to look at the ingredients list. The first five ingredients are what makes up most of the cat food. You want fewer grains and more meat in those five ingredients (or at least compared to other cat foods). Also, you don't really want "byproducts" to be the main ingredient, but you can't really find that at WM. Trust me, I've spend HOURS at WM reading all the ingredients of all the cat foods. An easy, disgusting, explanation of chicken byproduct is: they take the whole chicken and throw it in a blender, feathers and all. But, if you have ever seen a cat catch a mouse they eat the entire thing, bones, fur, etc. So.....IMO there isn't a terribly big difference.

Its really up to you what you want to buy the kitties, but I just thought I throw in my support for some of the WM brands. I would stay away from the extra cheap brands though, we feed it to the farm cats and it always seems to be a different color and quality

The best diet for a cat is raw meat, and I've often heard wet is much better than dry.



And I'm glad you are getting a second kitten! I was going to throw in something about you maybe thinking about getting a second cat! Kittens are great in pairs because they need A LOT of attention and exercise and a second kitten will help you out with that! I've also noticed (not through research, just the cat site) that a single kitten often develops aggressive/bad behaviors. In my own experience Enzo was the only one in the beginning and he was very aggressive when playing and would come up and bite me for no reason!


***don't flame me, I'm not claiming to be a specialist, I'm just stating my opinion. And yes I've heard the hole lecture that if I want that many cats, then I should be able to afford them. Well, my response: go talk to all the people that don't spay and neuter their animals, I wouldn't have adopted so many cats otherwise! ***