Feeding cats with sensitive digestion
At the age of 2-3 months, the kitten is usually weaned from the mother cat and begin to offer additional food: wet and soaked in water, dry. It was then that the pet manifested features of digestion, including sensitive digestion.
How to find out that a cat has sensitive digestion?
As a rule, it appears at a very early age, so if your cat has this feature, you may encounter its typical manifestations soon after it appears in your home.
The most prominent signs of your pet’s digestion sensitivity are:
• Unstable appetite;
• Vomiting;
• meteorisms;
• Weak and fetid stool;
• Stools rare and excessively dry, causing difficulty with bowel movements.
In this case, it is very important to immediately choose the right diet for the kitten, and later the adult cat, designed specifically for pets with sensitive digestion. This stabilizes the state of the gastrointestinal tract and subsequently helps to avoid problems when converting a kitten to a diet for adult animals.
Such a diet can be PRO PLAN® Delicate for adult cats or PRO PLAN® Junior Delicate for kittens. It is important to remember that the cat is not suitable 1-2 times a day feeding, permissible for dogs. To ensure normal metabolism, it is necessary to feed it 3-4 times a day, and a kitten up to 12 weeks of age – 5-6 times!
How to teach a cat to proper nutrition?
To teach a kitten to eat properly, it is best to combine dry and wet food at an early age. At the same time, at a certain time of the day, the kitten should receive wet food, and the dry one may be freely available in the bowl for the entire remaining time. Then the animal can eat it when it wants.
There are no strict standards, what proportion of a daily calorie cat with sensitive digestion should receive from the dry, and what – from a wet food. Therefore, a combination of 50% calories from dry and 50% from wet food is often recommended. If your cat drinks little water, then the caloric ratio of wet and dry food should be increased to 75% to 25%. If for some reason you cannot often give your pet wet food, then it is better to give so much dry food that it provides 75% of the daily calorie intake, and wet food 2 times a day – in the morning and evening.
Which feed to choose?
As well as other cats, pets with sensitive digestion, it is important to eat foods that are high in protein, for example, PRO PLAN® Delicate food. Its sources in this feed are specially selected for pet’s sensitive digestion. The calorie feed for kittens should be higher than for adult cats, and kittens should receive more feed per kilogram of weight than adults.
Often, kittens and cats with sensitive digestion are very picky in their food, so the rations for such animals are especially controlled and are especially carefully eaten for food.
Can I give the cat extra food?
It should be remembered that kittens and cats with sensitive digestion with a properly selected diet do not need treats or additional vitamins. On the contrary, additional feeding can negatively affect the condition of their digestive system. There is only one exception to this rule: if the supplement is prescribed by a veterinary specialist.
PRO PLAN® Delicate full ration feeds already contain all the necessary vitamins and minerals, have the right ratio of calcium and phosphorus, added taurine for the prevention of heart disease, as well as the OPTIRENAL® complex to protect your cat’s kidneys. And the PRO PLAN® Junior Delicate kitten ration is additionally enriched with docosahexaenoic fatty acid (DHA) necessary for the development of the kitten’s nervous system and retina.
