What do you guys buy for your cats? I am looking for healthy canned wet cat food. There are tons of opinions out there, but since most labels in Taiwan are either in Chinese or Japanese, it is difficult to figure out the ingredients in the cat food. Any suggestions, please?
I was thinking of posting the exact same question. Depends on your budget I guess. The individual serving cans cost from about NT$20 to NT$40. The “Royal” brand is really good (tuna and chicken that looks/smells good enough for human consumption) but that’s at the upper end of the price range. Down at NT$20 you have the “spam” type foods made from god knows what. The Whiskers sachets are also spam (albeit a kind of jelly) and made my cat vomit profusely. Dealing with cat vomit gets old pretty quickly.
I buy Chicken Soup for the Cat lover’s soul. It’s expensive so I use just enough so their Lordships will take the dried kibble -they refuse raw food.
I stay away from Seeds -not good stuff. I am buying a Japansese tuna as occassional treat, but I don’t know the name, only the color.
Stray Dog maintains, quite correctly, that pets should be fed raw meat, as that is what their bodies are designed for. My cat won’t touch the stuff, though. And she will not eat any wet food. I’ve tried every brand. The only thing that she will deign to eat is Dr Hill’s Hairball Solution dry food. It’s pretty bloody infuriating.
Have you tried adding cheesy bits? Dried sardines? Halibut floss? I tried all this with raw, no luck. Not even home cooked chicken, though when they were sick, they did go for liver/kidney/chicken mash.
Oh, and for giving cats medicines, either sardine juice or condensed milk. The latter works marvels as they can’t get the stuff off their whiskers. 
Yeah my Maine Coons the same . HE grew up eating only dried kibble and will eat absolutely nothing else. Not wet cat food, not freshly cooked pieces of chicken or tuna from a can or fresh cooked fish or anything. HE recognizes only kibble as food.
Thats what happens when you get a second hand cat 
U cant train him like you wanted to.
but hes a big boy
Long, long time ago my then-girlfriend gave me her cat to look after while she went away for the summer, with the instruction that it would only eat certain varieties of Whiskas.
I liked my girlfried, and I quite liked her cat, but there was absolutely no way I was buying it Whiskas for 3 months.
It got Cheapo Yellow Can Co-op Cat Spam. When the Whiskas was gone, it learned to like it.
I supplemented it by leaving a lamp burning in an open window, so it could catch and eat moths.
It didn’t seem to need to learn to like that.
You people spoil your cats.
Cats, just like dogs, WILL get gum disease and tartar build-up if not fed bones, as nature intended. Feeding soft food such as canned or meat alone will eventually lead to gum disease. Kibble, despite the claims made by those trying to trick you into buying it, has been proven NOT to clean teeth (other than the very tip). And while gum disease sounds like little to worry about, it sends toxins around the body wreaking havoc with the organs, leading to all manner of serious illness and early death for your poor animal companion—and all because you fell for the advertising and insisted on feeding processed convenience pellets or jelly. Bear in mind that cats have the potential to live to around 35 years of age and dogs around 29.
Feed raw meaty bones. My cat could get through an entire chicken wing or leg except for about an inch of the thickest part of the bone. If you insist on listening to clever marketing and stick with feeding commercial pellets or jelly (where all the money you pay goes to advertising geniuses or to basically bribing vets and animal orgs to perpetuate the myth that processed food is good for your animals), then you will need to find some way to clean your cat’s teeth daily along with a good gum massage. All a bit silly when you consider you could spend far less money and spend far less time feeding your cat real food that takes of keeping teeth and gums naturally.
Makes sense.
I’d say freeze-thaw them to -20C to avoid parasites, though.
Nature intended (and intends, as we all find out eventually) all sorts of nasty shit.
Thanks for the pointers: so if I just buy a couple of chicken legs, I should give a whole one to my two cats? No worries about bones splintering off, or salmonella or anything? How often should I be doing this? And a silly question: how long does it take them to finish off the chicken leg, so I can do this and clear away the mess before my vegetarian wife comes home and objects to a chicken bone on the floor?
I always thought freezing food just freezes parasites, rather than killing them - and then they thaw like everything else.
(We’ve got two cats, both around 5-6 years of age - normally they eat moderately high-end dried food. Canned or Whiskas as very occasional special treat.)
Thanks for the pointers: so if I just buy a couple of chicken legs, I should give a whole one to my two cats? No worries about bones splintering off, or salmonella or anything? How often should I be doing this? And a silly question: how long does it take them to finish off the chicken leg, so I can do this and clear away the mess before my vegetarian wife comes home and objects to a chicken bone on the floor?
I always thought freezing food just freezes parasites, rather than killing them - and then they thaw like everything else.
(We’ve got two cats, both around 5-6 years of age - normally they eat moderately high-end dried food. Canned or Whiskas as very occasional special treat.)[/quote]
After nine years of feeding raw and a total of zero cases of problems with parasites, I’d have to say that freezing simply isn’t necessary (especially when feeding human-grade meaty bones). Bear in mind that a healthy animal can deal with parasites (many of us have seen the sickest pup of the litter covered in fleas when healthier ones aren’t).
To answer your questions:
Yes, cats need about 150 to 200 grams a day, more meat than bone, so a leg is perfect (dogs need about equal amounts of meat and bone). No need to worry about splintering with raw bones, and cats and dogs deal with salmonella themselves; just be sure to practice proper hygiene when handling the meat yourselves, as you should with that for your own consumption, as well as the cats’ faeces.
Feed once or twice a day, to a total of 150 to 200 grams a day (watch the waistline and feel for ribs then adjust accordingly, but only by 10 percent per week). My cat would eat a leg or wing in about 10 to 15 minutes. If you’re feeding twice a day, simply give them that as a max and remove anything uneaten in that time and refrigerate until next feeding time. When you feed real food like this, you’ll find that cats and dogs don’t take their time eating it (because it’s appetizing and nutritious, unlike convenience pellets).
There is no such thing as ‘high-end cat food’; grain-based highly processed convenience pellets tend to differ more greatly in how well the marketing fools the consumer.
Thanks for the suggestions, and for the laugh!
Mmm… convenience pellets… :lick:
Um. So what if the cat refuses to eat raw food?
It’ll be one extremely stubborn dead cat…
Or it won’t.
Unlike dogs, cats can’t go too long without eating as it can very quickly lead to liver damage as their bodies start to use up body fat. So you can’t do the ‘starvation’ method with cats when switching fussy eaters to a new diet.
You have a couple of choices: 1. add real food slowly to their old, unhealthy diet, slowly increasing the proportion over a week or so until the cat is now eating the raw food alone; 2. Warm the meaty bones, preferably by boiling for just 20 to 30 seconds, as this makes some of the fats more palatable to a cat used to eating junk food; 3. Try both methods together.
Remember that what you’re doing is like weaning a kid off nuggets and french fries and onto salad and vegetables; while it might be difficult and you’ll face a lot of resistance, it will all become worthwhile once your cat’s tastes improve into enjoying the healthier options. We got them hooked on the junk in the first place; they need us to get them off it. 
And, yes, I use these terms on purpose, because they’re accurate; we have to stop propagating the lies of the commercial pellet manufacturers and take a step back and see this junk for what it really is.
I dunno. This sounds like an old wive’s tale. Is there any hard evidence for this?
Cats don’t have molars to grind bones and if they can’t chew, there isn’t going to be any chance for abrasion to clean off plaque. Gum disease is caused by plaque along the gumline, where any abrasion is least likely to take place. In fact I’d hazard a guess the chances of the cat breaking a tooth or getting cut internally by a bone shard outweigh any possible health advantages of eating bones.
Bones are soft when uncooked. Cooked bones are the ones that critalize and give grief. My older dog barely has teeth yet enjoys munching raw, meaty bones because they are soft. He can’t handle those novelty, plasticizer bones like the snacks they sell at pet stores and Costco -tried those even with the younger one, no go.
Here in Taiwan it is rare but back in the birthland my older cat -she’s 22 now- catches squirrels, which have a heavier bone structure than birds and such and munches through them happily. She’s lost a lot of teeth over the years but they do look helathie than my own cats here that have mostly pellets and canned food. Just as with people, salivating helps to keep th emouth “clean”.
My own dogs were trained going from cooked chicken to raw.
I dunno. This sounds like an old wive’s tale. Is there any hard evidence for this?
Cats don’t have molars to grind bones and if they can’t chew, there isn’t going to be any chance for abrasion to clean off plaque. Gum disease is caused by plaque along the gumline, where any abrasion is least likely to take place. In fact I’d hazard a guess the chances of the cat breaking a tooth or getting cut internally by a bone shard outweigh any possible health advantages of eating bones.[/quote]
From Hill’s own book (in an attempt to promote their ‘dental health’ convenience pellets, which were actually found to make very little difference):
[quote]
Logan, et al., Dental Disease, in: Hand et al., eds., Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, Fourth Edition. Topeka, KS: Mark Morris Institute, 2000, p. 487. “Although consumption of soft foods may promote plaque accumulation, the general belief that dry foods provide significant oral cleansing should be regarded with skepticism. A moist food may perform similarly to a typical dry food in affecting plaque, stain and calculus accumulation…Typical dry dog and cat foods contribute little dental cleansing. As a tooth penetrates a kibble or treat the initial contact causes the food to shatter and crumble with contact only at the coronal tip of the tooth surface…The kibble crumbles…providing little or no mechanical cleansing…”[/quote]
And this:
This FYI:
[quote]
The President of the Australian Veterinary Dental Society (AVDS), Dr Anthony Caiafa, commented “Pet owners don’t realise the damage that dental disease can bring. Infections are known as ‘the silent killer’ as bacteria from periodontal disease can spread through the bloodstream and damage internal tissues and organs. Dental disease has been linked to numerous health problems in dogs, including liver, kidney and heart disease.” [/quote]
And this too:
Our own dogs (and I include the hundreds I cared for at Animals Taiwan and the SPCA) have never had tooth or gum problems except for those with serious issues prior to being rescued and switched to a healthy diet. My own dogs all have almost completely white teeth; those who were fed kibble in early life still have a staining at the base of the tooth, though, but very little. You can find all over the Internet similar accounts of animals with terrible tartar or the suchlike cleaning up nicely simply from feeding raw, meaty bones.
Now you mention it, I think that’s what I did with the Whiskas > CatSpam weaning, since the cat came with a couple of cans and I tapered the Whiskas off, while reducing the overall ration. If it works for Whiskas (which I’m convinced has catnip or some similar feline heroin analogue in it) it should work for other stuff.
I dunno. This sounds like an old wive’s tale. Is there any hard evidence for this?
Cats don’t have molars to grind bones and if they can’t chew, there isn’t going to be any chance for abrasion to clean off plaque. Gum disease is caused by plaque along the gumline, where any abrasion is least likely to take place. In fact I’d hazard a guess the chances of the cat breaking a tooth or getting cut internally by a bone shard outweigh any possible health advantages of eating bones.[/quote]
From Hill’s own book (in an attempt to promote their ‘dental health’ convenience pellets, which were actually found to make very little difference):
[quote]
Logan, et al., Dental Disease, in: Hand et al., eds., Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, Fourth Edition. Topeka, KS: Mark Morris Institute, 2000, p. 487. “Although consumption of soft foods may promote plaque accumulation, the general belief that dry foods provide significant oral cleansing should be regarded with skepticism. A moist food may perform similarly to a typical dry food in affecting plaque, stain and calculus accumulation…Typical dry dog and cat foods contribute little dental cleansing. As a tooth penetrates a kibble or treat the initial contact causes the food to shatter and crumble with contact only at the coronal tip of the tooth surface…The kibble crumbles…providing little or no mechanical cleansing…”[/quote]
And this:
This FYI:
Not quite sure what you are trying to prove. None of those items even mentioned feeding bones to cats.