feeding - Kittens are 9 months

[SoftKitty]

Hey! My two kittens are now 9 months old and have been on canned food since we got them at 10 weeks old with a side of dry as a fill in (maybe the nighttime snack). Our little gal is chubby while our little guy is a lean mean machine who runs a lot. Our vet believes in 1 can per cat per day and that's it. But these kittens are constantly hungry and scrounging the counters and every possible food source. If we were like many people.. we'd keep dry food out all the time but then Missy would be rolling and not walking. I hate feeding too little and I know they are still kittens but I can't have one cat way too overweight. Most days they end up with the equivalent of 1.5 cans (includes the little bit of dry food) The only times I've had them actually full... they would have had 2 cans each..and then they weren't always looking for food.

Suggestions? What is just right for cats this age on a canned food diet?

[littlesushi]

my cats are 11 months old and still eating more than 1 can of cat food a day. they are on an all wet diet, with a little bit of raw occasionally. right now i'm feeding them 3x a day, once in the morning before work, once in the evening when i get home from work, and one more time right before bed. i give them as much as they can eat in one sitting and then pick up the leftovers after about 20 minutes or so and put them away.

aster was getting a little chubby since over the holidays we were out of town and had dry food out at all times while relatives came to check on them.

it's good that you don't have dry food out all the time since cats are not meant to be grazers, and i feel like your instinct is right contrary to what your vet thinks. i have read that kittens should be able to eat as much food as they want until they are about a year.

i feel like we are in a similar situation! our girl aster has always been on the slightly chubby side, while our boy cody has been lean and active. i've found ways to make sure that both of them get enough exercise everyday with wand toys.

also, what kind of canned food are you feeding them? a grain-free low carb canned food would be ideal, high carbs can cause cats to gain weight (and like humans it seems so much harder to lose it than gain it!) catinfo.org says it's ideal to feed a food thats less than 10% carbs. catcentric.org has a handy dandy carb calculator to estimate the amount of carbs a food has. CatCentric.org - Canned - the link is at the bottom.

remember your kitties are still babies and growing, sometimes a little pudge is ok i've heard that sometimes kittens get a nice round belly before a growth spurt. but if she's getting too chubby, maybe you might want to consider cutting down what you normally feed by a smaller amount until she seems to be a little more slim, instead of cutting it down to one can a day strictly.

good luck and look forward to hearing about your progress!

[ladycat]

I have 3 kittens that are nine months and if I only gave them one can a day each, they would literally figure out a way to open the fridge and help themselves. They get fed 2-3x per day and am honestly feeding them an equivalent of about 5 (or even 6) 5.5oz cans a day. That is equal to (or slightly more than) the instructions on the can give for feeding kittens given their combined weight. I have tried tapering them down because I feel like they should be eating less by now, but they go crazy when I do that. I feel like what they are eating is WAY too much, but I only feed them wet food and they ALWAYS eat everything quickly. They are very muscular and active cats. The little one is skinny and the other two are "big enough". I'm hoping the bigger two will thin out a tad as they grow a little more, but you can still easily feel all their ribs and they have slight waist indentations so I'm not concerned they are "overweight".

I should mention that one is HUGE, so he requires more food than your avg. kitty. He's a solid 13.5 lbs at 9 months. When the kittens were small he was always 2x as big as the others! His sister is a tall and lean 7 pounds and the third kitty is in between the two. My vet was horrified that they ate that much, but she also said that kittens shouldn't eat any more than adult cats and they should be eating dry dental food I can only get at the vet, so yeah...whatever she says regarding nutrition goes in one ear and out the other.

For your situation with one skinny and one overweight, I would try feeding them separately if possible. Maybe Missy is eating a lot faster and getting more than her fair share? Also would recommend wand toys, especially "Da Bird" to get them moving!

[marie73]

I agree with feeding them separately. I have to do that with Charlee. Apparently, she feels she's in some sort of pie-eating contest at every meal. She doesn't even chew, she slams it down and then pushes Cali out of the way and eats her food.

Now I pop open a can and she runs into her bedroom and waits at her dish.

[MowMow]

1 can a day is NOT enough for a 9 month, imo. Shepherd Book is 9 months old and I'd be afraid to sleep at night if I fed him that little...he'd eat my face off or something.

He gets between 1.5 and 2 can of wet food per day, but I don't feed ANY kibble. Occasionally he'll get snacks (for instance yesterday they shared some of the raw organs from a chicken I bought to roast) or the odd potato chip that falls on the ground and I'm to lazy to try and beat him to it.....

I HAVE to feed my two separately. I shut Book up for about 20 minutes. What he hasn't eaten in that time either goes to MowMOw (if it's not a lot) or gets put up and added into his next meal (if it seems like a lot of food). I'd say most of the time he finishes up everything in 20 minutes.