My cats will only eat ONE KIND of cat food, which is dry. One is skinny and the other is a round little pumpkin.
You live next to a river in the wilderness. Goddamn cats should be feeding you.
Crom (who is off next weekend to find love, in order to produce pupsplosion circa June) eats dry food plus a bit of offal such as liver or heart. She had wet food when herself a puppy, but doesn't now, which makes life easier for us and is also good for her teeth.
She has not so far become round, but obviously will be soon, though for different reasons.
The problem with meals and portions is that it quickly becomes having to feed your pets separately, if one has a tendency to scarf down the food of all of them.
3: Indoor cats! I get sad when cats get run over or fight with raccoons or possums or whatever, and lose.
When I was a kid, we thought our dog was fat. One day, my dad's friend, a veterinarian, was over and asked how long our dog had been pregnant. My dad just kind of put off getting her neutered.
I'm currently in the later phase of a rather complicated cat feeding situation - we adopted 3 cats from the shelter who had been malnourished, so they would immediately eat any food placed in front of them to the point of vomiting. This meant we had to split their food into 3 meals a day. We had been giving them only dry food, until one of them developed an unspecified protein allergy, and required a prescription diet to avoid scratching all of his fur off. Then one of the other cats got over his food issues and started leaving food in his bowl for later, which we had to keep away from the other cats. We wound up getting one of those feeders that only open for the RFID chip in a given cat, and that worked really well (once we put the whole thing in an open cardboard box so the other cats couldn't sneak a paw in the back while it was open.) Then the second cat developed health problems that required a different set of prescription food, which he wouldn't eat the dry variety, only the wet. So we wound up transitioning the others to a 1 wet / 2 dry meal schedule.
In response to your actual question, in the middle of this some the cats did start getting rotund, and our vet did recommend we do something about it. For us, just giving them slightly smaller portions per meal was enough, there was no retribution and only marginally more begging around meal times.
In conclusion, cats are a land of contrasts.
6: One cat got eaten by an eagle here.
Probably more than one, but that one was on the eagle camera.
We wound up getting one of those feeders that only open for the RFID chip in a given cat, and that worked really well
Now this is interesting. That could potentially solve a lot of the hassle of feeding a cat when we're out at work, if they're also on a timer or whatever. Do your cats have to wear a collar to make it work?
If you can get them to wear a garter, that would work.
I like the idea of having a cat, but I heard they poop depression.
Not that other animals poop euphoria.
People have gotten intensely moralistic about little specifics of pet treatment in a way that seems parallel to the rise of "fur baby" as a phrase, but as far as I'm concerned, humans have one duty to animals and that is to refrain from putting out food for whitetail deer.
11. No, it works off the chip they presumably already have from the vet. They don't have a timer, though, at least ours doesn't.
Fur baby! That's tied with "mouth-feel" for my least favorite phrases.
Not that other animals poop euphoria.
Peuphoria?
Yeah. The cat people on the local Nextdoor are something else about outdoor cats.
5 sure sounds like heebie is formally describing how she gobbles all her pets' food herself.
Semi-topically, I have been visited by the animes with a vast and presumptively forever unrequitable love for Great Pyreaneans.
We put my cat down last month. (Anyone remember me saying in a check-in thread that the cat was sick? Oh, by the way... It was surprisingly sudden. In November last year I would have said he was totally fine for a roughly-10-year-old mostly outside cat and could easily have had five years left in him. In December he had a bladder stone which was expensive and by the way he seemed to have some kind of a nose problem. By February the nose problem had progressed to a tumor obstructing his breathing and when someone found him wheezing outside and called the humane society, they recommended euthanasia. I agreed and said a teary goodbye in their office.)
Sorry for the digression. We're OK these days, I'm just saying, my cat knowledge is not totally current. Anyways, he would only eat dry food, even when something else was medically indicated. Keeping his weight under control seemed easier than expected considering that we'd usually just leave a bowl in the living room and never let it get empty. I gather that it's easier for inside-outside cats like that.
They are always trying to catch and neuter the feral cats. But if cats can't keep reproducing, they can't replace the ones the freeze to death and they'll be overrun by raccoons and possums and foxes.
People are also trying to treat the mange in the foxes.
Sorry for your loss, Cyrus. The outdoor cat who prowls our yard is taking a bath in the sun and looks hale and hearty. I've grown pretty attached to him.
People are also trying to keep the raccoons and skunks from getting rabies by throwing vaccine-filled fish pellets around from helicopters. I guess it works, but the little informed consent notices often become separated.
Both of the cats I've adopted at different times over the years, I specifically avoided ones where it said they needed wet food. I stick to dry, and module the amount if I'm told they're overweight.
Your cats came with instructions? Or they can talk?
We have two rabbits, because kids who want you to buy them a pet are very convincing liars. The rabbits eat their own poops, but only the special poops, I guess so they don't violate the laws of thermodynamics? Also they die if they get constipated so the quantity of poop in the litter box must be verified to go up every day.
I think that's the opening scene of Catch 22.
Maybe crossed with Watership Down.
humans have one duty to animals and that is to refrain from putting out food for whitetail deer.
I don't know if people are actively feeding them here, but it's way out of hand. Some of the deer at least have learned to cross the street by the speed bumps. Politically, it would probably be a disaster, but I'd like to have professional archers do a cull.
Back when we had cats they mostly ate wet food, in part because they were male and had had problems with stones and urinary crystals. We also got a recirculating fountain for them to drink from, but only one of them ever used it.
I also had dry food in a dispenser that could be remotely triggered and timed, so I could hit the button for a "snack size" dispense when I wanted to get them off my case on a weekend morning, and I could schedule feedings of dry food if we were away for a couple of days. That worked pretty well.
Later when we were down to one cat, he became super-picky about food (seems like there was some pancreatitis/IBS going on), so the challenge was finding anything he *would* eat, whether wet, dry, or anything in between. Trying to keep him fed (and pilled) became a real chore for the last several years of his life, and that experience has contributed to not wanting to get more cats any time soon.
I have a possibly superstitious belief that both dry food and free-feeding are bad for cats, and I've never lived with a cat (in my childhood and now Newt's two jerk cats that I'm housing until he has a place he can move them into) who wasn't on solely wet food. So far, this method is 4 for 4 on producing glowingly healthy, fit and muscular cats, but of course that's not science.
How much does cat-fatness matter? I would guess not much if the cat doesn't seem to be fat enough to be incapable of doing cat things.
Could outdoor cats be trained to take down deer? By weight, you need like fifteen cats per deer.
Cats are noted for teamwork, right?
Or is this a "oh lawd, he comin'" type situation.
39: You definitely, definitely want them to be lean enough to be able to clean themselves. That was a problem for one of my family's cats growing up. Overactive (underactive?) thyroid.
I'm very much anti-outdoor cat, but it's out of feelings towards birds, not cats. Also Buns. A cat once killed a bun in our backyard in front of us. The lights from the car sacred the bun right into the murderous cat. I worry about it every time I pull into my driveway.
They're the greatest murderers God ever made, keep them inside!
The foxes will come for the bunnies if you get enough of them.
Then the foxes get mange, so the animal lovers set traps so they can treat the mange, which pisses off the assholes whose unleashed dogs get stuck in the trap.
Ugh. If I had a cat that became incapable of cleaning itself, I think I would treat that as an emergency, maybe not for the cat's sake but for mine. I never want to bathe a cat.
A wildcat can take a deer one on one, as long as it's willing to commit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dr-SXaboXM
You don't gotta bathe it LB, you just gotta wipe its ass.
49: Snep!
Can't cats wipe their asses by skidding across the rug like dogs?
We used to just leave food out for the dogs, but the vet said they were getting overweight so we switched to feeding them twice a day and they've slimmed down. The kids generally do the feeding.
45: I feel like my conscience is clear about this because our dearly departed cat gave us no choice in the matter. He chewed his way through three window screens. He would have been an inside/outside cat or an outside/outside cat.
I might share your concern about my in-laws' cats. Several inside/outside cats, at least some of them would probably be happy enough inside, and yes, they kill rabbits. But considering that my in-laws have a walnut orchard they actually work on - I'm not sure how much they need the money, but it's not just wilderness or an empty field - there's an argument that controlling vermin is useful in a pragmatic sense.
We used to feed our dog chocolate chip cookies as a daily treat. We weren't great at taking care of pets.
She would sit in the yard and kill birds.
My jerk cat's breath smells like jerk chicken.
She would also kill bunnies, but she was fenced in so after the ones with nests in her yard were killed, the others stayed out.
She would also say things about immigrants that made everyone uncomfortable.
I don't think there's actually anything wrong with killing rabits, I only object to killing *my* rabbits. Birds, on the other hand, are a real problem.
She also mugged my sister, just flattening her to steal a hot dog.
Kind of topically, since cats at least discourage rats, New York City's rat problem is discussed here.
The thing with this particular cat is that she's got a much smaller frame than the other two, and so her portliness looks kinda extra cartoonish. Her head and arms are still petite. Come to think about it, that's also my problem.
You're smaller than 2/3rds of your cats?
Jammies and Hawaii are actually gigantic cats. Do keep up.
Your bio specifically says Jammies isn't a cat.
Last fall one of our older cats developed a pricey to fix bladder stone and related bladder infection. We got the same advice- the dry food contributes to the forming the stones, so switch to wet (and preferably their special formulated food that he wouldn't eat). Many years ago we went to one of those continuous water fountains; it does get some use, and the filters last quite a while if you rinse them out instead of tossing them each month, but they didn't prevent his bladder stone.
The wet food push does feel like a somewhat sudden switch in advice. The bigger issue is that the cat who had the bladder issue (DC) now has some issues with litter boxes -- he's suddenly particular about the type of litter, and is prone to voiding over the edge of the box. I've got a sheet of painter's plastic under the litter area (and 3' up the wall), and my wife had already put a litter robot on order, so we're just waiting through the production backlog. Hopefully he'll be willing to use it, and the robot's twice daily cleaning will get me out of daily scooping. We'll see!
66: That was written like fifteen years ago. He wasn't.
Our current dog is the first I've ever had who was enthusiastic about kibble; with the first 3, we just kept food out and refilled if it started to get low. When this one was younger, he was kind of manic about kibble, so we had controlled feeding quantities/times, but now he's easing towards the previous norm.
Within reason, I see no problem with fat cats, but fat dogs make me very sad. Dogs are supposed to (want to) go on walks, and seeing a big chunkier barely able to move is just pathetic. Also, a lot of dogs over ~25 (lean) pounds have joint problems as it is, so it's 100% the case that joint health for overweight dogs is a legit concern, not just fat-shaming.
AB is super-allergic, so cats are a moot issue in this house regardless, but the wet food thing always put me off cats. So smelly, so expensive, so much packaging waste.
If God didn't want cats to eat kibble, he wouldn't have made it in the shapes of things cars naturally eat, like drumsticks.
I have one cat, she's not fat, mix of wet PM and dry AM, I only feed her Fromm's dry food. Also I use pine or newspaper pellet litter-- the ceramic kind apparently leaves dust on the cats, which they swallow some of when cleaning. She's 9 or so, so too soon to say whether this really helps.
68 is funny
Ours are indoor-outdoor cats, and they get mostly wet but some dry, except the grey one who gets mostly dry and some wet because she doesn't always eat the wet food. The first two were farm cats before they came to us, so there was never really any question that they would be indoor-outdoor. They set the tone for the third, who is probably not nearly as good a hunter.
There are foxes in the neighborhood, and wild boar sometimes come into the neighborhood from the forest on the other side of the lake, but the cats can probably fend off the first and successfully avoid the second.
One of our vets had some concerns about the tomcat's weight, but it's possible that she was projecting, as none of the other vets at the practice have said anything. He's not even chonky, he's just a whole lot of cat. (Had one like that, named after great-uncle Lester.)
We don't even have feral pigs, but I read that some are sneaking down from Canada.
Apparently, some Canadian farmers deliberately crossed wild boars with domestic pigs thinking that the Canadian winter would kill any escapees. History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
75: Probably would have happened one way or another, given how many people just introduced European wild boar for hunting purposes.
I don't want to make all Canada sound like a Wuhan Virus lab, but it's obviously an echo of that.
Our cat is dryfed and freefed but has learned that occasionally I have tuna and now any can opened in the house gets me headbutted in the shin by an annoying cat.
Because the cat is indoor/outdoor we have had on occasion a visiting outdoor/indoor cat and memorably once some raccoons in the kitchen.
I would be mildly anti-outdoor cat except ours became one prior to it being a thing, and our cat is such an asshole if he can't go outside. He's now too arthritic to catch the groundnesting quail in the front hedge. They have no fear of the cat or the children.
Maybe that's a different quail than the Bobwhite Quail then.
||
Ok, no cheating. Our scene is set in Crimea: in which year?
This morning, I have two thoughts,' she began. The first is for my son, who is in Germany: now I shall never see him again. The second is that there is no vodka in the shops, so I have no way to forget what is happening. You are from Britain? May we please export to you some of our big surplus of fascists?'|>
Back when we had a cat, the vet told us that an exclusive or majority diet of dry food would cause problems with her kidneys and bladder because she didn't know enough to drink more to compensate for the lack of water in her food. I don't know how true that was because the cat was run over in early middle age. But we gave her wet food anyway. She did pack on a bit of weight, but that was mostly due to Six Dinner Sid behaviour, which was beyond our control.
I'm surprised by the comment that wet food is overpackaged. Here it comes in tin cans that you could mistake for tuna until you smell it. We recycled them with all the other food cans.
Six Dinner Sid behaviour
I'm assuming this means going to other houses and pretending to be a stray.
And I bet he guessed wrong twice just to set that up!
The second guess wasn't that serious but the first was.
The trick is to ignore the "fascist" part because it's basically in constant use (if not constant meaning) and focus on when vodka was lacking.
75: Ohhhhh no, there goes To-ron-to, go go wild piggies!
84/99: Were there vodka shortages in any Tsarist times? Because then "fascist" helps you date it to post-1920.
93. Just so. Six dinner Sid is a well-known and brilliant children's book about a cat who has six households that think he's theirs. I'm sorry if it hasn't crossed the ditch yet.
If "The Flintstones" are to be believed, kicking your cat out of the house for the night used to be a standard activity.