He's staaaaaaaarving.....

[ndo4000]

We are a week and a half in since rehoming Freddie and he's gorgeous! Only problem is he is starving. All. The. Time.

I am in the process of moving him over from Whiskers pouches morning and evening to Natures Menu and also moving him from Whiskers biscuits to Acana dry for during the day and he is taking to the new food well. But he is still very hungry! He hoover's his wet food in the morning and then inhales the dry food which he is meant to graze on in the day.

I don't want to over feed him! Especially while he is not even going outside to use up energy.

Any ideas?!?

(Photo for cat tax)

Our cat is a former stray who is food-obsessed. When she turned up in our garden she was very thin and subsisting, as far as we could tell, on mice and the odd bit of scavenged food. She is a healthy weight at 3.5kg now (she is naturally a small cat).

Now she eats 2 x 75g of high quality wet food a day, plus 20g of high quality kibble, plus a few treats. And the occasional mouse 🤢 We couldn’t let her have unlimited kibble as she would just scoff it all. She appears at every human mealtime, just to be sure she’s not missing out.

We find that feeding her multiple smalls meals helps. She usually has 6 across the day. That might be a bit of a faff for you, but worth trying to see if it helps.

4 pouches of wet food is actually pretty standard & what they tend to give inpatients at vets.

Although I've only had one or two cats that would that much!

Finlay has 3 pouches a day - he will only nibble a few biscuits in between
If he is pestering for more food than that he gets a mini pouch of soup or a stick or 1/2 a normal pouch

Mine was permanently bloody hungry. If he could've written the feeding guidelines on a box of wet food he'd have put one full box a day. However Felix was a fat porker so he was on a diet. He was allowed half a sachet in a morning and half on a night time with a small bowl of biscuits to nibble (hoover up) throughout the day. If he didn't have biscuits he could have an extra sachet. His sachets were spilt into portions due to him being a scarfer and barfer which helped massively. Treats were literally a Christmas present and anything he had, had to be grain free. He still of course managed to sneak food off my plate if I wasn't looking though. If I'd have fed him to the guidelines he would've been even more overweight to what he was. Although at the end I was literally trying to get anything inside him just so he would eat something.

But surely cats at the vets are (generally) unwell and in need of as much sustenance as possible?

If I was to feed my cats 4 pouches each of wet food per day it would cost me £4 - so £28 a week and over £100 a month. That's just extortionate and tbh, completely unaffordable, especially as it doesn't include any dry food or any treats etc.

As it is, I pay £32 a month for wet plus £35 every couple of months on dry, plus maybe £5 every month or two on treats. That's for three adult cats.

Thank you so much for all the replies! It seems like they all eat different amounts!

He's rehomed, but wasn't a stray. He's quite a small Persian (I think?) at 3.5kg.

Have tried spitting his dried food into 2 today so we shall see how that goes.

The quantities on the boxes seem way out!!!

I buy Acana kibble and mix it with Thrive dry biscuits.. they have this around 5pm and a wet tin/pouch of Thrive or Almo Nature in the morning plus a few Thrive treats (pure freeze dried chicken/tuna/white fish) at lunchtime.

I've found that whatever dry food you feed your cat, dropping just a few extra biscuits in the bowl overcomes your cat insisting there's nothing there at all (even when there is, of course!) It gives them a bit more to eat, but isn't excessive.
If the bowl is nigh on empty I put a decent layer in it.
(I also feed wet food as well - my ex-stray cat weighs over five kilos so is doing ok on this regime. )

Hills do some dry food called Appetite Control, and that worked with our fosters, who had previously only been fed once a day and were extremely food-driven. It calmed them down a lot.

I've never heard scarfer and barfer before, but it's bang on!

Big Lionel is definitely one of these.