Looking for guidance on wet food

lisahe

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I was also thinking this and just tonight I got our first can -- can let you know those are EQUALLY slimy! Re: carbier: I started to create a table of flavors because, while adorable, the names are confusing. There are 5 (I think) Chicken pates. One of the chicken pates CHANGES NAMES when it is in a can or in a pouch. GOOD gracious! But having started to read labels, the newer ones appear to omit the potato starch & sunflower oil, it seems. They might keep the older ones because it may be a bunch of cats are attached to that older formulation (?) The only one we can't get the boy (who is a trashcan) to eat is the lamb & mackerel. I don't eat shrimp, so the shrimp one made me gag -- be he chucked it down his chuck hole.
Some of the Cats in the Kitchen cans are slimy. Or maybe "gelatinous" is the best word!

And yes, some of their foods seem similar in can and pouch but aren't, which is tricky if (like us!) you have a cat who can't eat potato. Some of their expensive foods that are otherwise really good have potato.

Apparently some cats don't like lamb. Ours don't seem to mind eat... and even like it in some foods, including some Weruva BFF foods, like a chicken/lamb pouch in the OMG series, the ones with more tapioca (because gravy) that our picky cat (of course!) loves but only gets occasionally these days.

Good luck!
 

MindyStClairesMom

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Some of their expensive foods that are otherwise really good have potato.
I started to make a table (for my own sanity) and I just picked up on the potato starch yesterday.
Weruva Table.PNG

The red means it's a bit higher in carbs than I would like and the green means it is especially high in protein and also low in carbs. My judgement is non-scientific & I am not that kind of a doctor (and the table goes all the way through all of the proteins with the left column as the first-named protein and the top row as the second-named ingredient).

It isn't completed & I'm doing it more to try to keep track of what they don't like rather than ingredients, per se, because they are recently plucked from stray life and we are in early days of our nutritional plan.
Apparently some cats don't like lamb.
My non-picky boy wouldn't touch the Lamb + Mackerel and the medium-picky girl will peck at it, but rather reluctantly. Before I realized they were in the PLAY (pate lovers') club, they turned up their cute little noses at the Lamb minced.

Mindy St. Claire won't touch wet food to save her life and I was just listening to Jackson Galaxy's audiobook when I realized some cats NEVER will. I haven't refused the dry food in order to make her REAL hungry yet . . . may give that a go.
 

lisahe

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It can take serious time to, hm, convince cats to knock it off with the dry food! We spent a month or two on that with our two cats, who came to us underfed and scrawny. (Not ferals or strays but in a too-many-cats situation.) They'd eat just about anything but preferred dry food, which we initially left out for them all the time. We reduced the amount gradually, first reducing the amount in the freefeeding dish, then feeding it only once a day (at night, I think?), then only as a layer of their bedtime meal, then only a few pieces on that last meal of the day. And then we all forgot about it.

We did bring back very limited amounts of dry food a year or two ago: Dr. Elsey's Clean Protein chicken, which has no grains or potato or legumes or other carby stuff. I initially got it as a treat but we also started crushing a few pieces and sprinkling it on our pickier cat's meals. She'll eat just about anything that way! We also feed a little bit of it as a nighttime snack. The ingredients are good, we don't feed much of it, and I add extra water to many of the cats' meals so it works out well for all considered! Dr. Elsey's, by the way, will send sample packets.

One of these days I should make a food chart, too, though I think I'm too story-oriented! The vignette approach does work well for our incident log, though. :) (On a personal note, I clicked through and saw not only your photos but that you wanted to be a vet... I wanted to be a lab scientist but chemistry and calculus ended that! Like you, I got good advice, albeit from my academic advisor, who told me to do myself a favor and just drop my second painful semester of calculus, which I absolutely hated. The next semester I started studying Russian, and the rest almost happened linearly!)
 

MindyStClairesMom

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Dr. Elsey's Clean Protein Chicken
Weirdly, this is what Mindy St. Claire came to me eating. I saw "weirdly" because the volunteers (affiliated with no formal organization that I can identify) who trap in GGP really just feed whatever gets donated from wherever. At $7 pound, it's a TAD PRICEY to have been the "whatever" someone had on hand! She REALLY likes it. I bought a 2# of the Rabbit (when I thought she had a chicken allergy, lol), and I mix a few of those kibbles in with the chicken with the idea, I suppose, that if we suddenly could not find it one day (and Amazon was out of it recently) we would have SOMETHING she would eat. But I think I will just order a bit ahead as it is the Chicken that she really seems to enjoy. Thanks for the ideas about crushing. We tried putting the kibble under the wet or mashing it into the wet. She was not amused.

The next semester I started studying Russian
LOL. Russian is one of my "research languages" (you have to do two for a PhD, and you have to be so barely proficient that it's really just a DAB of it). I can understand more than I can produce, but, like most people, I noped out when we got to verbal aspect :O And YAY for good academic advisors! I really love it as my profession, but my current scenario is super-strange and I don't love San Francisco enough to pay this kind of rent forever.
 

lisahe

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Weirdly, this is what Mindy St. Claire came to me eating. I saw "weirdly" because the volunteers (affiliated with no formal organization that I can identify) who trap in GGP really just feed whatever gets donated from wherever. At $7 pound, it's a TAD PRICEY to have been the "whatever" someone had on hand! She REALLY likes it. I bought a 2# of the Rabbit (when I thought she had a chicken allergy, lol), and I mix a few of those kibbles in with the chicken with the idea, I suppose, that if we suddenly could not find it one day (and Amazon was out of it recently) we would have SOMETHING she would eat. But I think I will just order a bit ahead as it is the Chicken that she really seems to enjoy. Thanks for the ideas about crushing. We tried putting the kibble under the wet or mashing it into the wet. She was not amused.


LOL. Russian is one of my "research languages" (you have to do two for a PhD, and you have to be so barely proficient that it's really just a DAB of it). I can understand more than I can produce, but, like most people, I noped out when we got to verbal aspect :O And YAY for good academic advisors! I really love it as my profession, but my current scenario is super-strange and I don't love San Francisco enough to pay this kind of rent forever.
Dr. E's food is, indeed, not cheap. I bet someone bought too much for a cat that ended up hating it. It's not easy to crush (I use a meat tenderizer) but the dustier the better. Unfortunately, I think only Dr. E's chicken doesn't have peas in it.

Verbal aspect in Russian is (for me anyway!) much easier than the ten zillion tenses in French! Then again, I think high school Latin trained me for Russian. And my Russian teachers really knew how to make aspect make sense. (They went on to write a textbook that I later taught with!) French was my (alleged) research language in grad school and our "test" (for the MA, which I received and then dropped out) was to translate a passage about literature. With a dictionary. So same thing here on dabs and "barely proficient." Though I can and do still occasionally use bits of French in my work.

Anyway, good luck on the food for Mindy St. Claire! Just try gradually decreasing that dry food...
 

Raul-7

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Two brands if money is no issue.

Weruva Truluxe and Tiki Cat.


High quality protein, no fillers, very low carbohydrates. Can never go wrong with either brand.
 

MindyStClairesMom

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No . . . I mean . . . I know. My cats only eat Weruva pates. But Truluxe is a LINE that the company (Weruva) makes -- like BFF is a line & Cats in the Kitchen is a line & Classic Weruva is a line.

1637982463264.png


The Truluxe line has no pates.
 

MindyStClairesMom

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Good suggestions! Will give it a try. I think Ziwi was pretty spendy when I checked and lots of lamb -- which mine don't care for. But I'll have a look at the others to see what we can get into. I have just been creating insane tables and charts to differentiate between the Weruva pates (as they have 5 different chicken-only pates, for example) and I think I finally have a handle on the ones with the fewest carbs (the BFF tuna pouches followed by the BFF tuna cans -- too bad mine don't love seafood, either. The Cats in the Kitchen pouches have carbs so high it's not something I would feed mine, and the Weruva classics are a mixed bag). They certainly get more thoughtful nutrition than I do!
 
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