What to feed the cat?

Sep 6 06:34 UTC 2002

For some years now I have been feeding our cat whatever is 
the cheapest bulk dried pet food at Sam's Club per oz. (dog or cat) 
with every now and then expired date code cans of tuna, chicken, 
or turkey from the disaster supplies.  

Other than an occasional tendancy to dry-hump my leg, bark, chase cars, 
yowl at the full moon (just kidding!)...

Cat (neutered, declawed, female tabby mutt of no known breeding) gets
regular vet visits and shots and only about once or twice a day escapes
outside but quickly returns. Generally a housecat.  And no comment
or complaint from the vet even though he is a hoity-toity high
roller type who has a reputation for prescribing custom diets and
drugs costing thousands a year - I figure he just recognizes a
sangre-de-petra problem in the first place (only reason I go there
is that I can walk the cat instead of drive).

About the only odd behaviour is that it will gnaw on the cold water
faucet in the bathroom sinks and turn on a trickle of water which
it will drink from - never the hot water.  And this seems to be only
when it is particularly hot weather or cold - steam heat means the
bathroom where it's water bowl is is warm too.  (No central air)  I
guess it just likes a cool drink of water from time to time.  And
since we don't have metered water...

The cat eats, drinks, shits and pisses in the same room generally.
We higher types only shit, piss, bath, and brush our teeth in the
same room.  Plus we pay for the food.  At least we use toilet
paper instead of our tongues.

So, the point is that just like geriatric retirees can live on
cans of dogfood when Social Security proves to be less than, your
cat or dog (or even your goldfish which is the next experiment)
can probably live and thrive on what is the cheapest form of 
food you can provide.  Your choice, four bucks for an 8-oz can
of purina gormet' cat chow (chow chow chow(R)(C))or the same
for a a generic 20-lb. bag of generic dry dog food.

response 2 of 45:

Sep 6 13:20 UTC 2002

I think sometimes cats just like to prove they don't absolutely *need* you
to set out water for them.  That's the only explanation I can figure out
that accounts for the way our cat would drink out of mud puddles when her
dish was twelve feet away, at any rate.

The main thing I've observed with cats is it doesn't matter so much which
cat food you feed them, as long as you don't feed them too much.  Every cat
my parents have ever had has gotten overweight when provided with a
limitless supply of food.  They always end up having to ration it.  The cat
will try to convince you it's starving when you do this, of course.

response 4 of 45:

Sep 6 13:36 UTC 2002

"Your choice, four bucks for an 8-oz can
 of purina gormet' cat chow (chow chow chow(R)(C))or the same
 for a a generic 20-lb. bag of generic dry dog food."

Geez, where are you shopping?  The expensive natural-food canned
cat food we get is about 80 cents per 5.5 oz can.

We do get some more expensive stuff, most particularly the 
freeze-dried meat which the kitties love, and the frozen raw
turkey which they don't much care for  :/  Our dry food 
is probably about 4 times as expensive as Brian's generic
food.

Over the long run, I'd worry about the ash content of the cheap or 
mass market food and its impact on kitty kidneys.  The mass market 
food may have gotten better in this respect since the early 
1980s, when we first ran into this problem.

response 6 of 45:

Sep 6 13:40 UTC 2002

        to

response 10 of 45:

Sep 7 04:28 UTC 2002

Purina Cat Chow isn't too expensive, and the kitties haven't gained weight
despite "open feeding".  I'd worry about giving them dog food, though.  Cat
food has extra vitamins that cats need for healthy organs and sight.

response 12 of 45:

Sep 7 18:11 UTC 2002

That's only because it's not been on tv.

Just you wait.

response 14 of 45:

Sep 8 04:37 UTC 2002

Define *excessively*? The cat named dog primarily lives indoors 
where it stalks mice (not so much since we took counter measures)
and moths and yowls like it has reproductive organs and knows what
to do with them.  Perhaps it remembers days long since past along 
with such notions as 'claws'.  I do sometimes think about a long
two hour or so road trip and dropping the 'dog' off but figure
the child unit is not so stupid after all.

response 16 of 45:

Sep 8 07:02 UTC 2002

I think cat weight is influenced quite a bit by the amount of exercise
they get.  I've seen "blimp" cats, that were primarily indoor beasts
including one particularly memorable example that, whenever it was tired
and wanted to rest, didn't bother lying down, it just retracted its
limbs and lay on its belly.  I saw that same cat, after a year or so of
living in an actual house and given the opportunity to go "exploring"
outdoors, turn into a beast that was, well, not exactly thin, but *much*
more cat shaped.

Cats in the wild are not exactly solitary hunters: they actually would
tend to live in small clusters, and might hunt either alone or in small
teams.  They are certainly capable of cooperative behavior, which is
probably an advantage in hunting, and is also why they get along so well
with humans.  Another example of a social cat is the lion, which is
actually not at all far from the domestic cat in terms of behavior.
There are other cat species that are much more solitary; the tiger is
one well-known example.  As a solitary creature, it can take advantage
of habitats with lower prey densities.

response 18 of 45:

Sep 8 17:33 UTC 2002

I just have one cat. I feed her IAMS. I leave it out for her because I 
would rather her be fat than wake me up in the mornings. I let her 
outside even though she is declawed because she pretty much stays in my 
fenced yard and I figure that the dogs will protect her from anothing 
she might need her claws for. She weighs 9 lbs. She lost a lot of 
weight when I first got the dogs. She likes to eat out of their dishes 
from time to time and I guess the dog food is less fattening than the 
cat food.  My vet said it is probably ok as long as she is still eating 
cat food too which she does so I am not worried. 

response 20 of 45:

Sep 8 20:06 UTC 2002

are you saying that cats are not sentient?

response 22 of 45:

Sep 9 00:19 UTC 2002

If starving people in to world would quit breeding like rabbits, there
wouldn't be so many starving people in the world and we could stop worrying
about them altogether.

response 24 of 45:

Sep 9 09:37 UTC 2002

this should probably be linked to pets, too.