Completely Unpicky Cat Suddenly Very Chosey

[ailish]

I'm just wondering if anybody else has had this experience. I've had Ailish for 2 years this summer. She will be 3 years in August. When I got her she was on supermarket dry food which we changed without problem to good quality wet for three of her four daily meals and good quality dry for the fourth simply because it had to go into an automatic dispenser. She was a little underweight when I got her and had just weaned a litter. The 8 lbs seems to be a good weight for her per the vet, she is small.

I have fed her a big variety of foods since I've had her and she pretty much eats (ate) anything. I've been very lucky in the feeding department. She's very food motivated. She loves the dry and the occasional dry treat. Recently her favorite wet food came off the market and I had to fill in with something so I upped the frequency of Weruva, which she has always had, not very often, and liked.

Suddenly, and I cannot think of one thing that has changed, she will mainly only eat Weruva. Any kind of Weruva. She will also eat freeze-dried raw (Primal). She never got this before, but I was desperate the other night so I tried a sample. Gobbled it right down, licked the plate clean. Now she will not touch the normal pates and even some of the shreds she used to like. She even turned up her nose at TikiCat chicken and tuna. What cat doesn't like Tiki? She loved it up until now!

She is a fairly active cat and remains that way. Poop and pee are normal, especially considering she's missing some meals, partially eating others, and is sometimes eating a whole new food type - the Primal, She's still crazy about treats and eats every molecule of her nighttime dry feeding. She also doesn't pester for food like clockwork like she used to, although when the Rubbermaid with the treats in it is opened she can hear it downstairs and on the other side of the house and comes running.

As anyone else had this rapid change in their cat? If so, did it lead to more pickiness, or did they go back to their former ease with food.

And I'd like to add...there is NO free food available and never has been.

 

[lisahe]

I'll answer the easy question first, about Tiki: Our cats loved Tiki but now they hate it! The recipes for many of Tiki's foods have changed, and our cats decided they don't like the food now. It used to be a big favorite.

If I'm understanding correctly, your cat is still eating, right? It sounds like she'll happily eat all forms of Weruva, still likes her dry food, and has taken a liking to Primal. I wonder about several things. The first is her age: our cats are about five and their appetites dropped off a bit at around your cat's age (what's your cat's name, by the way?), though I suspect they're still eating more than is typical for their weight. They've also gotten a little picker, enough that even our piglet of a cat will sometimes reject foods she's tired of. Sometimes the cats reject because of recipe changes (see above: Tiki; the same thing happened when Merrick changed their LID food recipes and they noticed the change before I did!) but at others, I think they simply get tired of certain brands or specific canned foods.

Every cat has individual quirks but for ours, the best thing has been to feed a combination of foods: each day they get 2 freeze-dried raw meals, 1 Rad Cat snack, a homecooked meal, and a canned meal. That sounds far more complicated than it is but it seems to help keep them interested. (For better or worse, we feed small meals because our unpicky cat has a tendency to scarf and barf.) FWIW, it's the canned foods that they get pickiest about, often liking the newest offerings best, though they'll often regain interest in older favorites if they're set aside for a while. Unfortunately, it can be very frustrating to figure out what's going to work best for a cat.

One other thing that I wonder about: our pickier cat occasionally shows signs of minor nausea, namely she licks her lips sometimes and will get more fussy about her food. The homecooked food (I use the EZ Complete supplement) seems to have eased that quite a bit: our vet thinks it's the pancreas ingredient that works for her! I say that mostly as a suggestion to watch for signs of nausea like lip-licking. I think Ireland is a cat with very definite food preferences, too, and she's not especially food-motivated: she'll eat Rad Cat and a few other things without toppers but I use egg yolk powder and Pure Bites on much of her other food. Considering that the cats have been eating the same raw foods for several years, albeit in combinations that vary a little at each meal, I don't think that's such a bad sign, particularly since it keeps her eating, which seems to keep her lip-licking to a minimum.

Anyway, good luck!

 

[duckpond]

My cats do this sometimes. They eat a food like its the best thing out there, for months, then they turn off it. Normally i have enough foods in my rotation that i just put that one back for a few weeks, then they are usually happy to have it again. Guess they get tired of the same thing all the time.

I feed a variety of textures and proteins, i usually keep 5 or 6 different ones in my pantry at any given time. They get Dr. Elseys chicken, dry. for wet i feed quite a bit of tiki after dark, weruva, against the grain chicken and cheese and tuna mango tango, fussie cat super premium chicken and beef, and chicken and liver. some of the almo nature complete foods, Earthborn catalina catch and monterey medley, American journey the minced poultry flavors and the chicken pate, nutro minced chicken, and nulo minced flavors only.

and my guys can hear a bag of pure bites opening from anywhere in the house, even when they are sound asleep, its a stampede