Day 3 and Still a Happy Experiment

Chalk today up as another success. Beef seems to be the catnip flavor so far.

Meglet asked what's my feeding procedure, so here it is: (those of you who babysit the cats while I'm away will already be familiar with the basics)

Hobbes: he gets a shotglass full of dry food (3 varieties mixed together - Nutro Weight Maintenance, Adult chicken, and Senior) in a small bowl along with a dish of 1/3 of a can of whatever wet food I'm serving up.

Doodle: she gets basically the same as Hobbes but because she gains weight faster than him and Moomin, I tend to reduce her dry food if she's getting chunky.

Moomin: he gets a shotglass full of Science Diet c/d dry food (prescription food for cats prone to urinary tract infections, poor baby) and the biggest third of the can of wet cat food mixed together (took me long enough to figure that out, he was taking forever with eating each tiny dry piece one at a time). He's the most active kitto of the bunch and he really needs the water factor in the wet food. Not to mention he takes after his gigantic tomcat father.

Everyone gets a bedtime snack of a sprinkling of dry food to prevent hanging over me like a vulture too early in the morning.

Dr. H said dry food is higher in calories and carbs, along with all the grains/veggies filler (he said it is difficult to make an all-meat dry cat food), than wet food, so he recommends I feed them more wet then dry. Dr. W did an experiment with her own cat and found if she fed it 16 dry pieces of the food she was feeding it, her cat never gained weight - if she took some away it lost weight and if she added more to the 16 it gained weight. I like to keep dry food in the mix as we as humans are supposed to eat crunchy/harder foods to keep our teeth exercised and strong so I figure the same goes for cats. Not to mention if they were out hunting their food, they'd be crunching on small bones. Yuck but true.

Taking this all into consideration, I tend to keep the dry to the minimum I've worked out with my cats to maintain their weight which is a shotglass full and not the jumbo shotglass, just the regular straight alcohol shotglass size. The reason I'm not giving them more then a third each of a large can of catfood is that they barely finish that and I can't have food laying around all day because a) eeww and b) Doodle would be 500 lbs by now. The bedtime snack helps with the hungries.

Of course, Doodle is ALWAYS hungry so it doesn't matter how much I feed her. She literally has no shut-off switch. Plus she eats so damn fast sometimes that she yarfs her entire meal up and 10 minutes later she's all super-affectionate to me which means she wants more food because she's on empty.