Dry food – A vet’s opinion
Posted by cheryl on Feb 6, 2012 in Nutrition | 0 comments
This has been a hot topic among pet owners for some time. Here’s what the good people at the Cat Hospital of Burlington have to say about feeding your pets a dry food diet.
Despite what internet photos might suggest, fat cats aren’t funny.
And really, who are we to talk? If you’ve ever visited the hospital during non-appointment hours and seen our resident posse waddling around, you know we’re struggling with this issue just as much as many of our clients.
So what are we, and most of everyone else, doing wrong?
Feeding dry food.
Yep. Dry food is the worst thing that ever happened to cats. Super convenient for humans, super-fattening for cats.
The only carbohydrates that cats were designed to ingest was whatever seeds/grains/vegetation was left in their prey’s stomach. Which, considering the size of your average mouse, isn’t very much.
And so cruising up to the all-you-can-eat dry food buffet at all hours has perpetuated an epidemic of obesity in our feline friends.
The not-always-so-simple solution is to feed a primarily canned diet.
We know it’s not-always-so-simple because we have a hard time implementing that for our own clinic cats. Some of them aren’t big fans of canned food because they weren’t exposed to it as younger cats.
Interesting (and slightly gross) factoid: Do you know what makes dry food so attractive to cats? ( I mean, really, it’s not like cats in the wild voluntarily gnaw on twigs or wood chips). It’s because the kibbles are coated with something called “animal digest” which is basically just a flavour-dust. And in your lesser-quality dry foods, the ingredients of the source-broth are rather dubious.
So yeah, we get it. We understand how hard it is to ease our feline chums off the kitty-crack that is dry food. And in reality, a little bit of high quality dry food isn’t the end of the known universe for your cat. The trick is to not implement the bottomless bowl approach and to not offer dry food before you offer the canned food.
The lure of that mouth-watering flavour-dust is just too much….
Feel free to drop us a line if you have any questions regarding how best to transition your kitty to canned food.