Thread: USA MC Owners - what do you feed?

We feed both wet and dry to our four MCs. For wet we primarily use a rotating set of Fancy Feast flavors, so cannot help you with something different than Fancy Feast. We have tried virtually every canned cat food on the market in the US, and only Fancy Feast is consistently eaten. I could write you a review similar to Bubba's, but it would read: gourmet brand #1: hated it, wouldn't even go near it; gourmet brand #2: took one lick then would never go near it again, etc. We have wasted several hundred dollars trying various "better" brands. The only canned cat foods that our four will quite consistently eat (besides Fancy Feast) are a few of the Natural Balance flavors. Even with Fancy Feast, there are flavors that none of our cats like, and they all get tired of a flavor if fed too much. E.g., our 2+ year old male Remy last month was barely eating wet, and would have nothing to do with any of the Fancy Feast Tuscany or Primavera flavors. This month he is back to eating a significant amount of wet, and mainly wants Tuscany and Primavera flavors!!

As for feeding amounts, the Fancy Feast website says this for Shredded Fare:
Daily ration for an average adult cat is 1 can per 3 pounds of body weight. Feed up to twice this amount to kittens.

Some flavors say one can per 2 1/2 lbs. while the Classic (no gravy) says per 3 1/2lbs. You can look the ingredients, etc. up on the Fancy Feast website: Gourmet Cat Food, Wet Cat Food, Dry Cat Food, Kitten Food | Fancy Feast®

So a 14lb MC would be at the 4-6 cans per day range. We go through anywhere from 6 to 10 (and sometimes more) cans per day, bought mostly at Walmart, as Fancy Feast is significantly cheaper there than Kroger or Petco (though Walmart does not carry a couple of flavors). I frankly do not even want to know how much per year this adds up to.

As for this business about low carb flavors...well there are no Fancy Feast flavors that come even remotely close to 10% carbs from what I can see. The ones I looked at are 0% (given roundoff) to 2% carbs (carbs are not listed, so add up all other percentages and subtract from 100, duh). It is true that most of the flavors have gravy and so very small amounts of wheat gluten and/or corn starch. Obviously, if you believe that wheat gluten is a major health risk for cats or people, then avoid these. I know Purina stated that they would test all wheat gluten themselves after the Chinese gluten problems. I see absolutely none of the sort of symptoms of wheat gluten sensitivity in any of our current MCs, so I don't worry about it at all (of course, I can point you to plenty of Internet articles claiming that wheat gluten consumption is one of the major health risks for humans, blah, blah, blah).

There are lots of "high end" brands on the market in the US, and we have tried most of them. If you can find some YOUR cat will eat, great. As I said, we have wasted several hundred dollars looking, and failed. It gets pretty depressing when you buy some new brand, it smells great to us, but all four cats take one whiff and immediately walk off with disgusted looks on their faces.

All of our cats enjoy the dry as well as wet, so I would never want to feed only wet. We have multiple fountains and all cats seem to drink plenty, so I am not worried about lack of fluid intake due to the dry. The dry foods we use are all very high quality (high protein, low carb/grain), so there is no real difference with canned other than moisture. The three dry foods we use are: (1) Pro Plan Selects chicken; (2) Blue Wilderness chicken; and (3) Wellness Core. Note that all of these companies/brands have cheaper, lower protein lines as well (e.g., basic Wellness is not the same quality as Wellness Core).