Need help feeding my cats...

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BooBoo Kitty

BooBoo Kitty

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Since switching to an all wet food diet for all my cats, I have had much confusion. They used to eat dry food all day from a feeder. I am unsure of how much a day, i.e. how many cans per cat. Also how often? Every 4 hours, every 5 hours, or how long between meals? Please someone help as I am going a little nuts over here with these bottomless pits! Plus my diabetic threw up (clear liquid) this morning because I think she was just sooo hungry but I was trying to wait til around her AM shot to feed her (now on Lantus). Any help is greatly appreciated!!! :?
 
BooBoo Kitty said:
I am unsure of how much a day, i.e. how many cans per cat. Also how often? Every 4 hours, every 5 hours, or how long between meals? Please someone help as I am going a little nuts over here with these bottomless pits!
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It varies. Small frequent meals seems to best for most cats. It may take some time to find out feeding schedule works best for your cats. How many cats do you have? Try meals every 4 hours and adjust from there.

How much to feed depends on your cats. Generally you want to feed enough food to maintain a good healthy body weight. I think the formula is 25 calories per pound of ideal body weight.

Feeding a multi-cat household is challenging since some cats may eat more than their fair share. Setting multiple bowls or timed feeders around the house may help. My civies eat breakfast, a lunchtime snack via the two timed feeders, dinner, and before bedtime. One civie eats a 3 oz can of food per day.
 
I've read 1 oz. of wet food per day per pound of cat and that seems to play out well in my household. But kittens need as much as they can cram down their furry little faces. I feed about four times a day: 8 a.m., 1 p.m., 5 p.m., and 10 p.m.

I have a hog 9 month old in the house who's not quite a kitten anymore but is still growing and needs extra calories. He also likes to throw his weight around and dominate my other two cats at the food dish, so I've developed a complicated system of schlepping cats around at mealtime. Osky has to go in the basement to eat so Leo and Sam can enjoy their food undisturbed. Sam is a dainty girl about half the size and weight of the boys, so if she's in a timid mood, I set her up in my bedroom with her own litterbox, food and water, and a ringside view of the bird feeder out the bedroom window.

I don't feed anybody side by side--I have trays placed strategically around the house to catch the spillage and I put food down on those at mealtimes so nobody feels overcrowded. My boyfriend has a pair of littermates who are more bonded than my kitties and they'll eat from the same dish without competing. It really depends on the relationships among your cats.

Whoever said cats are low maintenance wasn't paying attention. ;-)
 
I have three cats and they are all grazers. i put out the following 2 times a day:

1 5.5 ounce can of friskies
1/2 5.5 ounce can of nature's logic
1-2 big spoons of raw food

some days everything is eaten, some days not

if i don't have natures logic I put out 2 cans of friskies

when Maui was on insulin and not regulated, she could eat an entire can of food all by herself several times a day.

how often and when to feed really depends on whether your cats eat meals or graze.

if you have grazers, you can leave the wet food add - just mix with water to ensure moistness all day and see how quickly and how much gets eaten, then you can start to gauge how much to serve....

hope this helps
 
Multi cat households can be a challenge. For the 10 here it is 4 meals a day with a total of 14 (5.5 oz.) cans being served through out the day. Timed roughly at 7am, 1pm, 5pm and 10pm. With a variety of snacks for the civie kittens through out the day. This also entails 5 bowls in 3 locations. There are 3 bowls under my kitchen table for the 6 cats that are bonded and will eat together, 1 bowl under my desk for 3 semi-ferals girls, and 1 in our bedroom for Max who prefers not to share his meals with the other kitties.

Now the above is for daily normal cat food now when it comes to the serving of TUNA which they get about once a month as a special treat. its 10 small bowls spread out around the kitchen and I have to hurry to get out of the way once it is down before the furry horde descends on it like lions on a water buffalo....lol

Mel, Max & The Fur Gang
 
Is this the second time BooBoo has thrown up the am before the shot? It would be nice to stop that trend - if she hasn't eaten since the night before, it may help to get her eating in the night. Is there a way you could manage to get her some food overnight - say 2 or 3 am? I know it is hard with the other cats. If she sleeps somewhere they don't, maybe a small automatic feeder for just her or frozen food that would thaw out about that time......
 
My cats routinely 'throw up' pretty much just water in the mornings. They do it when they're trying to get rid of a hairball, so some weeks it's every morning, and other times it just randomly throughout the month. And I'm always thankful it is before breakfast and not after, because I get really irritated when they throw up all their food.

As for feeding times...I'm the oddball around here and only feed twice a day. We fed dry food twice a day, so that's where we started with the wet food. Both cats adjusted just fine to it, tho sometimes we catch Truman trying to clean up the leftovers from the dog's dish because he's hungry. And Max went into remission on this feeding plan, but I know that many struggle with this. If we had had problems with his sugar control, I would have bought an auto-feeder and given more smaller meals throughout the day.

I feed both cats together, from the same bowl...sometimes Max is over-dominant and eats more than his share, but I haven't noticed Truman losing any weight, so all is good in the end. And they don't fight over their food, so this is just laziness on my part--they tolerate it, and I don't have to wash twice the dishes, so I haven't changed it.

We feed 1-5.5oz can plus 1/4 of a 5.5oz can of Friskies each morning and again each evening. This feeds my 14.5lb cat and a 12lb cat just fine. I think it basically works out to about HALF of the recommended dosing from the cat food company. Actually, I probably should feed separately and reduce Max's food because he is a bit overweight, but again...laziness on my part. ;-)
 
Thanx guys. Do you think feeding at 9am, 2pm, 7pm and 12am is good? And a little over 1 5.5 oz per cat per day? or is that too little? That way they only go like 9 hours with no food while I sleep!

She has only thrown up that 1 time I think yesterday morning...
 
Sounds good here and you can always adjust it as the kitties demand it. If BooBoo is like My Max, she may need a little more while you get her regulated and she gains back any weigh she has lost. I know when I first adopted Max he was eating me out of house and home. For the first month he was downing 3 (5.5 oz) cans by himself. Now that he is OTJ and back to his normal weight (15lbs) he eats about 1 to 1 1/2 cans (depending on flavor, more if it is a seafood flavor).

But 12 (5.5 oz) cans here a day feeds 10 cats (6 large males and 4 smaller females)

By weigh and name it feeds

Patches 19lbs
Bert 17lbs
Max 15lbs
Casper 16lbs
Amon Ra 13lbs
Myrrdin (10 month kitten) 6lbs
Duvessa (10 month kitten) 5 1/2 lbs
Tre'Vona 10lbs
Sophia 10 lbs
Angel 12 lbs
---------------------

Total: 123.5 lbs of kitty eating 66 ozs of cat food per day
or
about 1/2 oz of cat food per pound of cat.

And no one is starving here as evident by Patches ample tummy
TheKitties018.jpg


Hope that helps

Mel, Max & The Fur Gang
 
You could also do the cat food hocky puck trick during the night...

We used that a lot for Yittle before he was regulated - because the poor dear was eating 12x a day (approximately 1/4 of a can of Friskies or 1/2 of a can of Fancy Feast each time) and he still lost over 1/3 of his body weight. Once he got regulated and even more so once he went into diet-controlled remission and didn't need insulin he ate between 6-8x a day.

We'd take a small disposable plastic tupperware like container. The ones that they sell certain brands of lunchmeat in do really well (Hormel I think, and Butterball?) but you could use the ziploc ones etc. We'd line the inside with some plastic wrap and then mix up the food. Typically I'd mix up 2 cans at a time, you can use the same flavor but we did different flavors because Yittle didn't mind eating the same flavor of food multiple times a day - but NOT back to back meals (so picky). For each can you can either prepare it in the can if you're careful, or just use a small bowl.. but chop up the pate portion of the food with a spoon and mix all of the juices/sauce thats in the can in. Then add a couple of teaspoons of water and give it a good stir until its about the consistency of thick chili or soft serve. Portion out the can into 2 dollops - one on either side of the rectangular tub. If you're using a circle - might want to try it in thirds or quarters. Its ok if the edges of the dollops touch, they'll stick together but you can break them easily. Then gather up the plastic wrap a little and fold it over the top, put down a second piece of plastic wrap and repeat. Freeze and you're ready to go. When you go to bed you take it out of the freezer and break off however many pieces you want to serve ... with 7 cats here we would put down a whole can usually (2 dollops). It defrosts in about 2 hours and stays fresh (due to the added water) for about 2-3 hours after that. It was the only way I could get 4 hours of continous sleep with Yittle.

Some people do this by putting down either nonstick foil or plastic wrap on a cookie sheet or in mini/regular muffin tins and freezing a huge quantity at a time. I found 2 cans got me through 1 absence per day and 1 night so thats about all I did unless we were going away and I needed to prep for caretakers. If you use the plastic wrap you don't even have to clean the container between uses. You can also store the plastic wrapped lumps in a ziplock in the freezer instead of in the tub.
 
Thanx!!! I'll have to try that one!!! So far she seems to just sleep the whole time I sleep. When I test her at 3am I usually give a little snack then go right back to bed, so she only goes 6 hours without eating. Luckily I CAN go back to sleep easily...

Also BooBoo lost SOOO much weight before she was diagnosed that she is starting to gain weight even with just eating about a can and a quarter a day!
 
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