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Do you Know a Quality Kitten -> Cat Food & Why?
I have a kitten and would like to know the opinions out there on which food I should use & why?
-The kitten is a male & will be outdoors;
-Loves fresh food & really fussy (I don't encourage it!);
-Lots of energy & eats well when;
-Eats some kibble, not so keen on pouches/tins (Whiskas)
-Looking to mantain high energy & good joints
I love using ARDEN GRANGE for my dogs, keeps them fit & healthy and not too sore on the pocket & I see they do a cat food range but don't really know if it's as good?
I reckon I'd be looking at spending £15-20 month for around 2Kg.
What would you recommend?
-FRESH / RAW / WET & DRY combo suggestions welcome...
THANKS!
A truly high quality cat food is perfectly appropriate for a kitten, providing the nutrients a growing body needs - just as a decently balanced diet of ordinary foods will provide a child with the nutrients s/he needs to grow. I do strongly recommend wet food, particularly for male cats. As a species that developed originally for desert survival, cats are meant to derive most of their water requirement from the bodies of prey animals. So their thirst instinct is not as well-developed as it could be. A cat fed on dry food will be chronically dehydrated because it simply will not ingest enough water to make up for the lack of liquid in the food. The strongly concentrated urine of a chronically dehydrated cat will be all the more likely to develop uroliths, such as struvite crystals, in the urinary tract. Due to the way the urethra of narrows through the penis, this leaves male cats vulnerable to blockages, which can be painful, expensive to treat, and even deadly.
Since I'm in the US, I can't really speak to price comparisons. The best guidance I can give you is to learn how to read ingredients labels, so you can choose the best of what is available in your area. The short version is this. The better foods have specific muscle meats (rather than by-products or meat meals) in the first couple of ingredients. Any grains or other starches are much further down the list - the lower, the better. Avoid by-products altogether. Many cats do not tolerate soy, corn or wheat, so you may wish to avoid those as well. It is unlikely that you will find the better cat foods at Walmart, or at your local grocery store. And yes, you may find yourself standing around in a pet store, reading labels for a long time - I do it myself, whenever I consider a new brand.
If you get concerned that these better brands are costlier, here is something to think about. The cheaper brands are cheaper because they have so much in the way of cheap filler - i.e. grain. Because cats are obligate carnivores, they are not designed to digest grains very well, and do not derive much nutrition from them. In order to get the nutrients that they need from the cheaper foods, cats will eat more. Because the better foods are more nutritionally dense, cats are more satisfied eating less. I know that I can feed my cats portions of foods such as Natural Balance, Eagle Pack, Merrick, Nature's Variety, Wellness, Blue Buffalo, and several others, that are half the size of the portions I fed them of Iams or Hill's products. This offsets the difference in price. Also, I have learned by hard experience that the less I spend on cat food, the more I spend at the veterinarian's office. Of all the times that I have taken my cats to the veterinarian for over the last eleven years that had nothing to do with the quality of the food they eat - there was one birth defect (umbilical hernia), the usual maintenance (shots, spay, neuter, annual exams, dental cleanings), and one infection that were unrelated to what the cats were eating. Every other health issue my cats had, including several episodes of bloody stool, scratching ears bloody from reactions to food allergies, struvite crystals - hundreds of dollars in veterinary costs, were all from diet. So don't forget to factor those costs into your pet food budget, eh? Oh, and one incalculable benefit of feeding the higher quality foods - because they eat less and digest more of it, their poo tends to be smaller and less... um... fragrant.
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