advice please?

Question

I have 2 kitties, jess who's 12yrs old and woody who's 3yrs old.
We adopted woody in may from cats protection, he's only got 3 legs sadly and i'm worried 'cos he's getting fat(!)
Anyone got any suggestions on what i could feed them so that woody loses afew pounds but without affecting jess as his weight is fine?
(It's difficult with feeding separately as they're indoor cats with full run of the house, and I tried to separate them for a day while I was at work but they clawed at the carpet under the door trying to get to each other........)
HELP!!!!

Answer 1

You just need to feed Woody less than you feed Jess. Many cats will eat anything they can get their stinky paws on. I have one, a five year old called Biz-Biz who will eat and eat and eat and then complain that she is hungry. She is quite cuddly and every year at her vaccination check up, the vet says she could do with losing a little weight. I explained that she is eating Hills Science Diet and asked if I should feed her the light version. He said I could if I wanted but try feeding her half the amount at each meal time that she was currently eating. I told him she was only getting one small scoop, he said half of that was fine. It didn't seem like a lot to me, but as he pointed out, cats in the wild may sometimes have to starve for a day or so if they are hunting for prey, and can actually manage quite well not eating for up to a week, as long as they have access to fresh water. So you really only need to give him a tiny amount of food. They lose weight quite quickly, just as they put it on quite quickly. Also, cats are used to burning up a lot of energy from hunting, but with house cats who don't need to hunt and have somewhere warm to sleep, they get a little lazy and don't excercise much. As long as its not putting a strain on Woody with his three legs, play some games with him and get him some little toy balls to chase so he gets a bit more excercise and he should be fine. If he doesn't lose weight with all this, take him to the vet in case there is anything not quite right with him. Well done for rescuing a cat, we recently adopted a beautiful dog from a shelter, the cat tries to eat her food too. Good luck, I'm sure he will be fine.

Answer 2

I'm presuming the cats are fed dry and it's left down for them! There would otherwise be no need to seperate them when you weren't there. The answer is feed them only when you are there. That way you can monitor how much each cat is getting. If you feel Woody still needs less then feed in seperate rooms, they'll be too busy eating to care where the other cat is. Exclusively feeding dry food is not a good idea for cats, it causes health problems, as it doesn't supply an adequate amount of liquid, and is nutritionally unbalanced. I feed a natural diet and don't use 'commercial' foods but if you do, feed the best and look for ones that contain meat (not just meat derivatives) and rice rather than cereals. Change to tins or pouches and only give dry as treats.

Answer 3

First, have the vet check Woody out to make sure that he (the Vet) thinks there is weight that needs to come off.

I would suggest feeding them a high quality cat food like Royal Canin... ask your vet which version... and then perhaps giving Jess some extra treats or a bit more food when Woody is not around.

Answer 4

The problem is you are feeding dry foods which are loaded with carbs. If you switch to wet, you will find a huge difference

Nutrition since there are so many bad things out there is very important to your cat’s health
Contrary to what you may have heard, dry foods are not a great thing to feed a cat.
Dry foods are the number 1 cause of diabetes in cats as well as being a huge contributing factor to kidney disease, obesity, crystals, u.t.i’s and a host of other problems. The problems with it are that they are loaded with carbohydrates which many cats (carnivores) cannot process. Most of the moisture a cat needs is gotten
out of the food and 95% of it is zapped out of dry foods in the processing. Also, most use horrible ingredients and don't use a muscle meat as the primary ingredient and use vegetable based protein versus animal. Not good for an animal that has to eat meat to survive.
You want to pick a canned food w/o gravy (gravy=carbs) that uses a muscle meat as the first ingredient and doesn't have corn at least in the first 3 ingredients if at all. Fancy feast is a middle grade food with 9lives, friskies whiskas lower grade canned and wellness and merrick upper grade human quality foods.Also, dry food is not proven to be better for teeth. Please read about cat nutrition.

http://www.newdestiny.us/nutritionbasics.html

Answer 5

Pro pac premium dry food for a balanced diet also good for hairballs, Hills feline for indoor cats its low calorie,or phone your vet they will be abe to give you somethink

Answer 6

I've had the same difficulty and had great success with Iam's multicat formula.