Thread: Kitten food to Grown Cat food?

My breeder is already introducing adult food. I'm not very read up about cat food but I have brought a bag of Royal Canin as suggested by my breeder - small bag of kitten and small bag of adult Maine Coon. I was surprised at the price though! I'm not sure what it is I'm paying for yet - if it's just a name thing so I'm going to look at alternatives. My dogs are fed on Skinners, a good food for gun dogs which is vat free suggested by their breeder - a 15kg bag cost as much as a 5kg bag of the Royal Canin cat food! I don't mind paying good money if its for a good reason but personally think Royal Canin might be taking the p**** If I can't find a good complete cat food at a sensible price I may go down the raw food route.

woahhhhhhhhhh my dogs food is dr jaynes complete sometimes he likes gravey on it but it jkeeps him healthy and not over weight as we cant walk him due to his aggression to other dogs, its 9.96 a bag and lasts 4 months and he is fed 3 times a day am i missing somethin lol,,,, he still eats the cat food and leftovers

We put Loki and Storvenn on adult wet food the day they arrived. Natures menu which I understand is a good brand.

Id read that it didnt matter so much, and with our two being on four different meals a day I dont believe it makes any difference to them at all.

Natures Menu is an extremely good brand. Sadly mine won't touch it for some reason. Picky missy. :D

I leave dry food out all day for the cat(s) to pick at & eat what they want. I do the same for my dog. None are obese & all eat what they need based on what they feel rather than based on what a manufacturer thinks that they might need based on their weight. I feed wet too as I don't like giving cats a solely dry diet.

I notice a lot on here are feeding Whiskas & Felix etc. - if your cat is doing well on them, then that is fine & we all do have budge limits. So you are aware, however, they are roughly 4% meat (most wet cat foods are) compared with say Hi Life which is about 60% meat. Obviously raw is best at 100% meat. ;)

I believe that in the past the kitten dry foods were higher protein and a bit higher fat than the adult foods. These days, if you read the labels, you see few differences between the kitten and adult in the better brands. We switched off of kitten dry (breeder was using Royal Canin Babycat) at about 4mos (Babycat seemed to give some of the older cats diarrhea when they got into it). Have given him some kitten wet but mainly adult.

In the US there are specific terms that are used in pet food for the meat that is used, and you can tell quality from that to some extent. E.g., chicken vs. chicken meal vs. chicken by-product meal vs. meat by-product, etc. Here are a couple of useful sites for definitions:
Cat Food Glossary - AAFCO Definitions of Cat Food Ingredients
AAFCO DEFINITIONS OF DOG FOOD INGREDIENTS

We have tried a large number of premium/boutique/natural foods over the last few years, but have not found many that the cats actually will eat consistently. Being a scientist, I am also highly skeptical about a lot of the claims being made by these companies, since I know that they are small and do not do any studies of their own. Think what you might about, say, Purina, but they actually carry out feeding trials and research. I have yet to find a single "premium" brand that does such things. Yes, they may have fancy "white papers" and healthy-sounding terminology, but little of what they do seems to have any sound scientific basis. Most also rely on the same AAFCO nutrition guidelines that all pet food manufacturers use here. We have also found inferior ingredients (e.g., meal vs. chicken) in some of the more expensive brands. Finally, the big Chinese melamine contamination scandal from a few years ago revealed that many of the premium brands do not actually do their own manufacturing (we came very close to feeding possibly contaminated Nutro pouches to our cats--actually manufactured by somebody else).

Currently, our cats eat primarily Pro Plan Selects dry and Fancy Feast wet, with various "premium" brands as we find they will eat them. Natural Balance is one of the few that they seem to like several flavors of consistently. Most they may eat one can of but then will never touch again. We have thrown away a lot of expensive cat food this way!

What "claims" are you referring to? I'm intrigued as to what the American pet market is marketing.

I usually despise PETA but they did publish a cruelty free pet food manufacturer list:
US Version
UK Version

Note that Purina & Mars are absent on both lists. I'm also guilty for buying Mars products as they bought out James Well Beloved a couple of years ago.

Originally Posted by messyhearts

What "claims" are you referring to? I'm intrigued as to what the American pet market is marketing.

Let me first say that I see no point in getting into a discussion about particular brands, as my experience is that people often have a lot invested emotionally in the particular brand they have chosen, because they want to feel they are doing the best for their pets. Probably everyone here is trying to do the best for their pets. My point is that there really isn't enough information to make well informed decisions most of the time. Furthermore, there are obvious trade-offs in most choices.

As for claims, I doubt they are much different than in Europe. The basic claim is simply that their food is healthier or more "natural" for the pet or more "biologically correct" or similar. Unfortunately, there is rarely any hard science they point to to back these claims. Now I would rather feed my cats food made from say chicken rather than chicken meal, but is the first actually going to make them healthier? Is a certain exact ratio/percentage of protein or meat really "optimal" for cats? Many of the premium companies make claims like this but provide no scientifically valid evidence for the claims. I find this very frustrating personally, as I would feed my cats something if it truly were healthier than what they are getting. The current situation is such that I have a very limited basis for making that judgment. I recently scanned the "white paper" that one of the premium companies pushes on their website. Frankly, none of the key claims in the document have any citations at all for support, and most of the citations that are provided are so incomplete as to be difficult to verify. Having a "white paper" with lots of scientific sounding claims and a few incomplete citations may impress some people, but reading it as a scientist, it is really little more than marketing BS. Maybe the claims are true, but since they cannot cite actual research to validate them there is no way to know. The food looks like it is made with high quality ingredients and all, but if my cats won't eat it, is it worth trying to train them to eat it because it will improve their health? No way to know that. Of course this is not surprising, since it hard to see who exactly would fund the expensive and long term research needed to answer many of the key questions.

Originally Posted by Karena

My breeder is already introducing adult food. I'm not very read up about cat food but I have brought a bag of Royal Canin as suggested by my breeder - small bag of kitten and small bag of adult Maine Coon. I was surprised at the price though! I'm not sure what it is I'm paying for yet - if it's just a name thing so I'm going to look at alternatives. My dogs are fed on Skinners, a good food for gun dogs which is vat free suggested by their breeder - a 15kg bag cost as much as a 5kg bag of the Royal Canin cat food! I don't mind paying good money if its for a good reason but personally think Royal Canin might be taking the p**** If I can't find a good complete cat food at a sensible price I may go down the raw food route.

Royal Canin, in my opinion, is a scam. How can they genuinely say they have a cat for indoor cats or Persians or cats that need to look shiny? It is extremely expensive AND if you look at the ingredients... well, picking one at random, the "fit":

Dehydrated poultry meat, rice, maize, dehydrated pork protein, animal fats, maize gluten, hydrolysed animal proteins, wheat, wheat flour, vegetable fibres, beet pulp, yeasts, minerals, soya oil, sodium phosphate, fish oil, egg powder, DL-methionine, hydrolysed yeast (source of manno-oligo-saccharides), taurine, marigold extract (source of lutein), L-lysine.

RICE AND MAIZE? That's filler. Poultry meat is very vague. Maize gluten, wheat, wheat flour, vegetable fibres - more filler. A lot of it is not FOOD ingredients but chemical compounds. Doesn't even tell you the % of meat. Compare that to the ingredients for Applaws dry food:

dried chicken, dried potato, fresh chicken, poultry oil, poultry sauce, beet mash, dried whole egg, dried yeast, salmon oil, cranberry extract, yucca extract, citrus extract, rosemary oil extract

Sounds like real food. It specifies FRESH CHICKEN not just "poultry". Plus it is 80% meat. Royal Canin won't even tell you. Iams is 26% meat.

Originally Posted by messyhearts

Royal Canin, in my opinion, is a scam. How can they genuinely say they have a cat for indoor cats or Persians or cats that need to look shiny? It is extremely expensive AND if you look at the ingredients... well, picking one at random, the "fit":



RICE AND MAIZE? That's filler. Poultry meat is very vague. Maize gluten, wheat, wheat flour, vegetable fibres - more filler. A lot of it is not FOOD ingredients but chemical compounds. Doesn't even tell you the % of meat. Compare that to the ingredients for Applaws dry food:



Sounds like real food. It specifies FRESH CHICKEN not just "poultry". Plus it is 80% meat. Royal Canin won't even tell you. Iams is 26% meat.

cool learn something new everyday but what you curently feeding your cats on specify pls as im genuinely interested as you sem as you have researched alot and not that i hvaent im just new lol

One pouch of wet food an evening of a product that is at least 50% meat (Applaws, Encore, Tesco Finest, Hi Life or Simple) and leave dry food out all day (James Well Beloved, Burns or Applaws).

I would feed Orijen as a dry if I earnt more or raw if I could accept deliveries.