What to feed your cats

I am always perplex at the choices of food available for our cats. When I first started my journey into the feline world, I thought it was easy, just go to the supermarket and buy Whiskas. Little did I know, there are other brands such as Royal Canin (seems to be Malaysia's favourite), Friskies, Fancy Feast, Avoderm, Evo etc etc. There's also different food for different age group, from babies (upto 4 months) to kitten (upto 1 year old) and adult (>1 year). And there's kibbles and canned food (wet food).

It was actually too much information for me to digest so I sought advise from a few of my feline lovers friends and yes, most of them use the Royal Canin kibbles. So we got the RC Kitten 36 for our babies as they were more than 5 months when we got them and have added RC Hair and Skin for our 3 maine coons. We have added the RC Maine Coon for Putra as he is already 11 months old. We also give them wet food on daily basis for breakfast and dinner and occasionally we will give them boiled chicken or minced meat instead of the canned food. We have tried various canned food but it seems that they prefer either Natural Balance or Avoderm in view that they came in several flavours.

However, based on internet search and advise from some friends, we found out that we may not have been giving the best for our cats after all. We are now looking more at the labels ie choose food that is more protein based than carbohydrate based especially the first five ingredients listed.

We are now mixing Evo Turkey and Chicken kibbles with our RC. The cats have not complained except when we tried to feed them RC Instinctive (wet food) - they don't seem to like it except for Citrus so we are not stocking up on it anymore.

Anyway, we are still learning. We will get the combination right one of these days. At the moment, we are giving the following kibble combination:

• Putra (maine coon, almost 1 years old) = 40% RC Maine Coon, 40% Evo Turkey and Chicken and 20% RC Hair and Skin.
• Citrus and Pearl (maine coons, 10 & 9 months old respectively) = 40% RC H&S, 40% Evo T&C; 20% RC Kitten 36
• Boboy and Dusky (HHP, 9 and 8 months old respectively) = 90% RC Kitten 36 and 10% Evo T&C

We are still varying the wet food and alternating between different flavours and brands. We need to increase Putra's weight in view (we were informed) that he is slightly underweight for his age. However we note that since the introduction of Evo, their poo is slightly more smelly than ever, probably due to the higher protein content. 

If you need more info, please go to :

• http://www.homevet.com/petcare/feedingyourcat.html
• http://www.catinfo.org/
• http://www.drsfostersmith.com/pic/article.cfm?aid=98
• http://catfoodreviews.com/cat-food-reviews/

Please note that I am NOT a spokesperson for any of the products that I use.