Remember the advice your veternarian gave you on feeding a cat or dog? It went something like this, "find one food and stick with it, do not change foods around on your pets."
Of course, this makes sense when you realize that most GI veterinary calls are food change related. Suddenly changing a pet's food can lead to a messy problem, and sometimes it may take a week or longer to get everything back on track again. Couple that with the fact that some foods simply will never work for a pet, and a 'stick with what works' philosophy makes sense.
Cat's GI sytems are far less hardy than a dog's. Look at what nature intended them to eat: Cats: rodents and birds, dogs: anything at all. Dogs are the billy goats of the pet world, designed by nature to eat most anything that didn't eat them first.
So why would your veterinarian recommend trying new and different flavors on your kitten? The answer is actually quite simple, a cat exposed to new flavors may cope better if your cat food is recalled, you travel and your food isn' readily available (very common in Tucson with both the high seasonal community and the military families), or, and this is very important, if your cat, as it ages develops a disease that requires a different food.
Cats, unlike dogs, cannot just cease to eat, especially ones that are overweight. You cannot just wait for the cat to start eating the new food. Heavy and obese cats, if they stop eating, are in danger of developing a possibly fatal condition called fatty liver disease (Which will be discussed here tomorrow).
So when your cat is still a kitten and flexible, feed it canned and dry, and try different flavors of canned, some dry foods may also have different flavors, flavor changes should not trigger the same GI issues that say changing from Iams to Purina would have. A slow transition over at least a week from one food to a similar food can also be done. You can also introduce different treats.
The goal is to end up with a cat that will eat both dry and canned, and chicken as well as seafood, this will hopefully ease any transitions that have to occur later in life.
Again, never wait out a cat that is refusing a new food. If your veterinarian recommended a new food, but your cat will not eat it, you must have the situation addressed immediately to prevent a possible fatal condition.
Cats are notoriously finicky, when an article here recommended changing cats over from a free fed dry food to a multi can a day wet food, several people commented that their cats will not eat canned food, even cats younger than a year were already determined not to eat it. Would changing up the cat's diet when it was younger have changed that response? no one knows for certain, but it couldn't hurt to try.
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