General food questions

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Megan and Boots (GA)

Megan and Boots (GA)

Member Since 2015
So Boots has pretty successfully (not that we gave him a choice!) switched from being a lifelong kibble guy to a lover of the canned food (mmm, chicken pate...). We have 2 other cats though, Polly and Emily. Emily likes canned food, and we're working now on slowly transitioning her off dry to all canned (she has had some digestive issues, so we're taking it slow to get her system used to it). Polly on the other hand... well, she is definitely one of those cats who doesn't recognize anything other than her precious dry kibble as food. So frustrating :banghead: She has tried to cover canned food or more often just flees the scene, wanting nothing to do with it. She seems to think it's better to starve than attempt to actually eat the stuff.

So in dealing with Boots' diabetes, we certainly have learned our lesson about dry food, and want badly to get Polly onto a wet diet. I've read and tried all the tips from various sites including Dr Pierson's site to no avail (admittedly we've only been trying a few weeks so far). So I was wondering if anyone else has had a case similar to this, where it was either extremely difficult to switch a kitty over to canned, or you just never were able to and gave up. If that happens (not that I'm trying to be pessimistic), would a switch to something like Young Again's "Zero Carb" be at least a step up from regular "commercial" kibble for Polly? I have to imagine that would at least be far less damaging if Boots were to get into it once in a while? (so far, he hasn't to our knowledge - we are really careful at feeding times and he's behind a closed door to eat, away from the girls).

Just curious on other peoples' experiences and thoughts on food switching and kibble lovers.
 
Evo Cat and Kitten dry is about 8% calories from carbohydrate and is an option, too.
 
Thanks, good to know about the EVO. Is Young Again's Zero Carb (even if not actually zero) lower than Evo? Or Epigen 90? I guess I'm concerned if Polly really can't get onto canned food and we have to stick with lifelong kibble for her, will having Boots possibly get into an 8% once in a while be really bad for him?
 
Young Again 0 Carb is 5% calories (not weight) from carbohydrate, the way we calculate it.

If he gets into it, it isn't likely to be too bad of a hit unless he binges.
 
MeganN said:
So I was wondering if anyone else has had a case similar to this, where it was either extremely difficult to switch a kitty over to canned, or you just never were able to and gave up.
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I went through this with one of my non-diabetic kitties. It took 4 loooooooooooooong, miserable, and frustrating (for me) months of constant work to transition him from kibble to wet food. He preferred to starve than eat canned food. IMO, perseverance was the key to success, but I have to be honest... it was hard work. I think what turned the corner for him was when I offered a commercial raw food: Feline's Pride.

The best advice I can give you is to stick with it...
 
Rats, was hoping you'd have a magic wand, not "preseverence" advice ;) I know you're probably right. It's tough though, we work out of the home all day and they meal feed not free feed (about 8am, 5:30pm, 11pm with maybe a small snack here and there in between but dishes taken away after mealtime), so I know she's hungry when we get home from work and it's hard to withhold food from her. Yeah, I'm a softy, I admit it. I guess I'll just keep at it. We got some fortiflora and I feel like that may be helpful, or crushing her normal kibble and combining that with some canned food somehow. I guess we will just need to do as you say and keep at it and try to beat her at her own game.

@BJM , that's really disappointing. I mean, I figured it wasn't really 0 carbs, but was hoping it was still under 2-3%, comparable with some of the canned foods Boots eats.
 
MeganN said:
I guess we will just need to do as you say and keep at it and try to beat her at her own game.
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You made me laugh when you said "try to beat her at her own game." That's EXACTLY how I felt with him! I had to beat him at his own game. It was really hard, but we're now 9 years from all that and he's still eating canned food!
 
That gives me a glimmer of hope! Were there any techniques in transitioning him that worked particularly well? Mixing dry with canned in some way? We've tried fortiflora (just a couple times), tried making tiny kibble-sized canned food meat balls rolled in fortiflora, tried just keeping a plate of canned food NEAR her kibble bowl (she wouldn't even approach it)... no luck, but we didn't try any of those techniques more than a couple times, honestly. I guess we need to be more systematic about it. How long would you withhold all food before caving and giving dry?
 
You might have already tried this, but the only way I could get my 2 kibble addicts to even think about eating canned food was to add enough water to turn it into "soup". For some reason, even though they'd turned their noses up at every flavor of pate I'd offered, they LOVE it prepared like that and switched to preferring their soup to kibble really quickly. I still turn the food into soup for them now - the extra water isn't going to do them any harm and I figure as long as they're eating the canned, why try and "fix" something that's already working!
 
  • I always offered wet food before dry. Mornings were usually more successful from not having eaten all night.
  • I used a food processor to grind a low carb kibble (Evo is a good one) into powder. Poured it into an old spice container with a shaker top to sprinkle on wet food.
  • I also finger fed "meatballs".
  • I warmed wet food to make it "stinkier".
  • I'd sprinkle grated parmesan cheese on the food.
  • Sometimes I had to leave food out and then leave the house so I wouldn't give in. :D
  • I wish I would have tried feeding raw food earlier in the process. He liked it!

MeganN said:
How long would you withhold all food before caving and giving dry?
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It's hard to remember. A lot depended on my schedule that particular day. However, I do remember caving when dinner time rolled around and I knew he only ate a little that day. I didn't want to take the chance on him getting sick.
 
Don't play a waiting game for converting to wet food. Food refusal can go on too long, which may result in excessive fat breakdown overloading the liver (hepatic lipidosis).
 
My ex kibble cat really likes primal freeze dried raw. Independent pet stores in my area have samples. She has IBD and it has had the added benefit that she hasn't thrown up since she started on their turkey formula. Double check carbs but cat info has them listed as low.
 
I haven't tried some of those, @Jill & Alex (GA) - thanks! I don't know if warming will help (she actually seems to HATE the smelliness of wet food as it is) but worth a shot. Haven't tried parm cheese yet either, though now that you mention it, I recall seeing that before. I'll give a look at the primal freeze dried too, though I don't hold a lot of hope in that either (we give freeze dried chicken as a treat to Boots all the time and Polly won't go near it). She's also one of those weird cats who hates all things fish, even treats, she won't touch fish-flavored treats. I know a lot of people use the attractiveness of "fishiness" to transition cats, but I'm out of luck there with her.

I think we've also (unintentionally) made it hard on ourselves by our meal time schedule. We generally feed them like minutes before we need to be out the door for work in the morning, again after work (no rush then, except for their hunger cries!), and then again right before we go to bed. So I think that hasn't been helping us as far as sticking to it with giving Polly enough of a chance to try the wet food. Maybe we need to make our morning and night meals a little earlier so we have more time to try to convince her to try the wet food before giving up and letting her have dry. May help that 4th of July weekend is coming up, and we are off work for 4 days, so we can spend some time planning out some techniques to try and really follow through on withholding dry for a few hours to try to get her to eat the wet.
 
Mine won't eat fish either.
There's no doubt transitioning some kitties to an all wet diet may require some creative thinking on your part. :)

Take a look at: Suggestions on How to Stimulate Kitty's Appetite. You might find some others tips/ideas that will work for you. Most of all, just hang in there. Some days will be easier than others. I know how frustrating this process can become. Don't let it get the best of you!
 
Thanks. We're working out our plan of attack, so to speak. Now that we're more enlightened about the perils of dry commercial kibble, we actually got some Zero Carb Young Again to try out for her as an "at-least-it's-better-than-regular-kibble" food to try while we're trying to get her onto canned, and she took one sniff of it in her bowl and tried to cover the bowl. Like a dozen times - every time we put it in front of her, she acted like she was horrified by it and frantically covered it. So we decided to just not even bother trying that intermediate step, and we're going to really focus on a full canned food transition. We'll try parm cheese, fortiflora, watering it down to soup, making meatballs with crushed kibble, and if we have to, syringing some into her mouth until she realizes it won't kill her.
As we move forward with this attempt, I'll no doubt be back here for moral support from people who have gone through the fire too! :)
 
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