We have a feeding dilemma we would like advise on. Here's the background
information for those of you in rpchb.
5 adult cats, ranging from 3 to 6-7 years old. All in great health and
very fit and trim. The older cat had struvite crystals in the past, but
since we switched to two wet-food feedings per day he's done great.
We recently added 2 kittens (fosters we decided to keep), they are about 7
weeks old now. The kittens despise canned kitten food. It will actually
spoil before they'll touch it. They like the kibble allright (and our
oldest cat *loves* the kitten kibble), but we don't want to feed them
mostly dry food and it's just hard to separate them for meals.
We feed premium foods, currently in the mix are Nutro gourmet California
Chicken Supreme (the only food they will *always* eat), Nutro pouches, and
just started with the new Pro Plan cans (which look good!). None of our
cats will eat mushy food, it has to be cuts/chunks in sauce.
Now, the dilemma is, do we force the kittens to eat kitten food or will
they be ok eating a premium-quality adult food? The basic difference is
just the protein/fat content, right? Looking at IAMS for example, yields
the following numbers:
Protein Fat Moisture
Kitten 14.5% 10.5% 68%
Cat 10.0% 6.5% 78%

If we convert them all to dry-matter basis:
Kitten 45% 33%
Cat 45% 30%

Not much difference, right? What do y'all think?

Victor M. Martinez

http://www.che.utexas.edu/~martiv