Living With Cats – Page 2

If you are away from home all day and there is no one else at home, caring for a pet cat can be a challenge. One of the main challenges is how to make sure your kitty is properly fed. This blog post will offer some ideas to help you deal with this very important responsibility. The suggestions you will find here are applicable to a healthy adult cat. How Often Should I Feed My Adult Cat? In the wild, cats are opportunistic hunters. If they are successful hunters, they may feed several times a day. This is normally not practical for cats living in a household where a human is providing their meals. According to an article published by the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, adult cats, here defined as cats age one year or older, can be fed once or twice a day. This schedule assumes a cat that is in good health and has no special dietary requirements. I disagree that once a day is sufficient. I believe twice a day should be the minimum. Personally, I always fed our cats three times a day. I gave them breakfast, supper, and a bed-time snack. My theory about the bed-time snack was that it calmed them down, and perhaps filled them up enough to discourage them from waking me up at 4:00 AM wanting breakfast. How to Schedule Feeding Your Cat Canned Food If You Work We will assume for now that you are feeding your pet canned cat food, which is also commonly referred to as wet cat food. We will address dry cat food later in this post. Let's provide a template for how you might construct a feeding timetable for your adult cat based on your own work schedule. This could be a typical day for you: Rise in the morning and feed your cat some wet cat food. If you have more than one pet, you should monitor mealtime to make sure one assertive pet doesn't get most of the food, and if there is a dog, cats get cat food and dogs get dog food. Remember to also put out some water and leave that out for the day. Before leaving for work, but no longer than fifteen minutes after serving the food, take up and refrigerate or dispose of any leftover food, because canned food is subject to spoilage just as human food that is left out would be. Wash the bowl. Return home that evening and greet and play with a cat that is glad to see you. As you prepare your own supper, feed your cat some canned cat food. Monitor mealtime if there are multiple pets. Fifteen minutes after putting out the cat food, take up and refrigerate or dispose of any leftover food. Wash the bowl. optional - Provide a bed-time snack (NOTE: For the bed-time snack/treat, I served a product our cats seemed to love, WYSONG Optimal Vitality Natural Food for Cats.) For some insight as to why you may want to choose to serve your kitty canned cat food rather than dry, drop by my blog post Why Are Cats Picky Eaters? The challenges you may encounter in choosing canned food for your cat include finding a cat food: that has healthy ingredients that your cat likes that is reasonably priced We often fed our kitties food from WERUVA because we felt this pet food company's products met those three criteria. Here is one of their pate' cat foods: WERUVA was founded in 2007 named after the founders' rescue cats: WEbster, RUdi, and VAnessa Press Your Dinner! Chicken Breast Dinner with Deboned Chicken is featured in the photo the first two on the ingredient list are chicken and chicken broth here find the WERUVA information page for this product Feeding Your Cat Dry Food Using an Automatic Feeder Since dry cat food does not spoil as quickly as wet cat food, you might be thinking about just leaving some dry food out and letting your kitty decide when to eat. Leaving out dry cat food in volume greater than one serving while you are gone might lead to your cat eating all of it early in the day and getting hungry later in the day. If there are multiple cats, that is a problem because one cat may get most of the food. If there is a dog that is a problem because dogs get dog food and cats get cat food. Instead of just leaving dry cat food out, try this schedule: Rise in the morning and feed your cat some dry cat food. If you have more than one pet, you should monitor mealtime to make sure one assertive pet doesn't get most of the food, and if there is a dog, cats get cat food and dogs get dog food. Remember to also put out some water and leave that out for the day. If your cat has finished eating before you leave, wash the bowl. Return home that evening and greet and play with a cat that is glad to see you. As you prepare your own supper, feed your cat some dry cat food. Monitor mealtime if there are multiple pets. When your cat is through eating, wash the bowl. optional - Provide a bed-time snack (NOTE: For the bed-time snack/treat, I served a product our cats seemed to love, WYSONG Optimal Vitality Natural Food for Cats.) How Important Is Washing the Pet Bowls? Visit my blog post How to Choose the Best Cat Bowls for information on germ formation in cat bowls. We humans do not eat off dinnerware that is not clean, and neither should our pets. How Can I Feed My Cat If I Work Late? If you are unable to keep a regular schedule for feeding your cat, you may wish to consider an automatic feeder that can dispense dry cat food at selected times. Features that an automatic feeder should have include: low profile construction that is not easy to tip over a voice recorder so you can announce meal time to your cat a non-transparent container so food is not visible to the cat and therefore removes that particular temptation to try to open the feeder and get at the food (Note: they can probably still smell it) a user-friendly digital food dispenser timer portion amount selection easy to clean Here is an automatic feeder that has the features listed above: VOLUAS Automatic Cat Feeder For more information visit the VOLUAS company website Is Dry Cat Food As Good As Wet Cat Food? The community of cat care experts is divided on whether or not dry food is a good option for cats. One concern I often see is that some feel the relatively low moisture content of dry food versus canned food can create hydration problems for a cat. Other well-informed and well-intentioned folks do not think this is a problem and believe that it is okay to feed dry food. While having multiple bowls of water in your house is advisable no matter whether you are serving wet or dry food, this becomes even more crucial if you are feeding dry food. You might also consider a water fountain that could possibly encourage your pet to drink more. For some guidance on this, have a look at my blog post How to Choose a Cat Water Fountain. My blog post How Do Cats Chew Food? will also give you some additional information on this subject. If you give your cat dry food, try to find a brand with healthy ingredients. We fed our cats mostly canned wet food, but occasionally offered treats. For treats we used a dry cat food that had what we considered to be healthy ingredients, and that our cats liked so much they considered it to be a treat. The brand of dry cat food we used for treats was WYSONG: WYSONG was founded in 1979 the founder was veterinarian Dr Randy Wysong Optimal Vitality Natural Food for Cats is featured in the photo the first three on the ingredient list are chicken meal, organic chicken, and turkey meal here find the WYSONG information page for this product Can I Leave Food Out For My Cat and My Dog? Cat food is formulated for cats, and dog food is formulated for dogs. Cats should not be consuming the food formulated for dogs on a regular basis. The occasional occurrence should not be a problem for a healthy animal, but leaving food out where a continuous crossover of the diets takes place would most definitely not be a good thing. A WikipediA definition of hypercarnivore is "an animal which has a diet that is more than 70% meat". Cats are hypercarnivores. A WikipediA definition of omnivore is "an animal that has the ability to eat and survive on both plant and animal matter". Dogs are omnivores. Cat and dogs have different nutritional needs, and the amount of meat in the pet food is not the only difference one needs to consider. In fact, there are some dog foods that are predominantly meat, but that does not mean that particular dog food is okay for a cat. According to an article from the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, there are several food substances that are crucial to a cat's diet, including: a high protein to calorie ratio compared to dogs levels of Vitamin A that is optimal for cats the B Vitamin known as Niacin the amino acid Taurine which is absolutely essential to a cat's diet Regarding Taurine, I did my own survey of dog food formulations from ten different companies. Five had Taurine in the ingredients, five did not have Taurine. The bottom line is, cat food for cats and dog food for dogs, and it is up to us to monitor the situation. A Gentle Reminder Our discussion here has been about adult cats. We have considered the feeding of cats that are neither younger than one year, nor suffering from the effects of old age. We have focused on cats that are both healthy and well-adjusted to their current environment. For Even More Information About Cats Living With Your Cat is another of my blog posts that will help you with other aspects of cat parenting.