Cat Food

About

Everything we stock as cat food sits here — dry and wet, from kitten mousses to indoor, hairball, urinary and digestive-care formulas. Cats are obligate carnivores, so the questions are narrow: how much moisture the diet carries, where the protein comes from, and whether your cat will eat it. Wet, dry, or both Cats have a weak thirst drive and are poor at making it up by drinking, so wet food does real work: at roughly three-quarters moisture it carries much of the day’s water. Dry food is easier to leave down for a grazer and easier to measure, but it is calorie-dense: an indoor, desexed cat gains weight on a portion that looks small. Air-dried and freeze-dried foods from Ziwi and Feline Natural count as dry but are fed in smaller amounts. Texture preference is largely set in kittenhood, which is why Royal Canin sells the same diet as both a gravy and a jelly. Life stage and living situation Kittens need a growth formula for the first year, usually starting on a mousse or soft texture at weaning. Adult food covers about one to seven years; from seven, ranges such as Royal Canin Indoor 7+ suit a slower, less active cat. Indoor formulas cut calories and lift fibre so hair moves through rather than back up — the same idea behind the hairball ranges from Advance , Royal Canin and Hill’s Science Diet. Urinary and digestive-care lines are stocked too, but a diagnosed problem is a diet to choose with your vet. Reading the label and changing foods Ingredients are listed by weight before cooking, so a fresh meat at the top of a dry food shrinks once cooked down. The Guaranteed Analysis panel gives protein, fat, fibre and moisture, but a wet food’s protein figure cannot be read against a dry one — the wet food is mostly water. Check that taurine appears; it is an essential amino acid for cats. Cats are far more neophobic than dogs, so change food over ten days or longer, a quarter at a time and mixed through. If a cat refuses food for more than a day, go back to the old diet