All Natural Cat

Bill was kind of chunky when we took him in, weighing in at about 16 pounds when his ideal weight is closer to 12 pounds. Because we didn’t know any better at the time, we’d been feeding Emily dry food (Iams brand), so we took the easy route and started Bill on weight control Iams, being very careful to feed him the prescribed amount every day and making sure that he didn’t get any of Emily’s food.

He gained four pounds in four months. The vet said that was the equivalent of a human being gaining 50 pounds in the same period of time. That was when we realized that slimming down Bill was going to be more difficult than we thought.

We tried a prescription dry food from Science Diet (I think it was M/D?). He did lose a little bit of weight, but we were underfeeding him and he was begging all the time and completely obsessed about food. His coat was also greasy and his teeth were bad (dry food does not actually clean teeth like many people—including veterinarians—seem to think it does). Eventually, he got a bladder infection that resulted in nearly $400 in emergency vet bills (could have been a lot worse—he could have died) and was put on a prescription wet food for urinary care, Science Diet W/D.

After that we started reading about urinary tract health in cats and diet. Like I mentioned yesterday, dry cat food is so dry and is so unlike anything that a cat would eat in the wild that it will suck moisture out of their body and leave them in a low grade state of dehydration, making them vulnerable to urinary tract problems. By doing what we thought was best for Bill, we could have killed him.

Any wet food would have been better than dry food, but we didn’t like the W/D because the first few ingredients were pork liver and pork by-products—cats shouldn’t have pork to begin with, and it’s really not conducive to weight loss. So since then we’ve been hopping around trying to find the perfect kitty food.

Tomorrow: adventures in wet food.

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