What/when do your pets eat?

I was gonna housesit/dogsit for this elderly couple who baked mini-meatloafs w/veg for their dogs, and gave them each 1/3 of a thing of Beneful soft (moist?) food every day at specific times. The whole thing kind of freaked me out.

my cat eats EVERYTHING. everything.

do cats like spicy food?

My dog does the floor shark vacuum thing, but sometimes when I spill things and draw his attention to it he runs away with his tail between his legs and hides under the bed. "But this is DELICIOUS DUCK GRAVY, wtf dog."

my cat doesn't seem to eat fruit, but she will steal cherries and bat them around for hours.

I have an old cat who eats fortune cookies, crackers, chips, bread, scraps of chicken and pretty much anything he can get or you give him off of your plate. The look on his face the other night after he greedily scarfed the bit of rabe I jokingly gave him was priceless.

A friend of mine feeds her dog a little of whatever she cooks plus some good-but-most-people-refuse-to-eat meat from the local butcher's.

She's a vegan, and since I don't eat meat I asked her whether that wasn't gross for her, and she was just all practical and "dogs have short intestines, humans have long ones".

A practical vegan! That's so great.

I only give the kitties crunchies -PetGuard premium which costs just about the same amount of money as three gallons of gasoline.

However, the guy across the street continues to feed every small mammall in sight. Skunks, raccoons, kitties - they all feed in his yard or on his porch.

Also, I have seen my kitties go indoors with him! I suspect that more canned food occurs in that house.
It's a guy who loves cats! And other four legged creatures!

I'm happy as long as my cats are happy. When they stare at me on their way INTO the neighbors home - where, I am convinced, that they are feasting on fancy feast and other canned food - all i can do is call them. And they silently walk away, towards the canned food.

We've spoilt our little fuckers so they need feeding about 5 times a day, or 4 times a day if we're both at work. So I usually feed them in the morning, my wife feeds them when she gets in, then they get more halfway through the night and again after we give asthma cat his medicine.

My doggie eats about a cup of Royal Canin Adult crunchies with a small can of Pro Plan wet food mixed in, twice a day. Sometimes she won't eat when I feed her- yesterday, she didn't eat at all. I don't know why. After a day of not eating, she eats like crazy tho.

I've been giving Lou Lou mostly IAMS Indoor Cat dry food, plus a few cans/week of Fancy Feast and the occasional small helping of canned tuna. Since reading about cats' nutritional needs and the suitability of various cat food brands, though, I'm going to get some Natural Balance canned food and Innova EVO dry food and start transitioning her to those. I've begun (until I can get to the expensive-cat-food store) by reversing the proportions of canned vs. dry food -- increasing the Fancy Feast and decreasing the IAMS -- and she's just vacuuming it up, and has been more active and energetic. Don't want her to get fat, though.

I had heard that dry food helped clean cats' teeth, but apparently dry food is too brittle and crumbly to have any abrasive effect (Lou Lou doesn't really chew hers anyway), and their overall health is much better served by quality wet food. Most dry cat food has grain in it, and cats need a very-high-protein/low-to-no-carb diet. See http://www.catinfo.org/index.htm.

Since Drac is now diabetic, both cats get Purina DM - freefeed on the dry stuff (they eat about 1.5 cups every 24 hours between the 2 of them), and 1/6 of a can (about a tablespoon) of wet once a day. Morrie rarely deigns to eat the wet stuff. The diabetic formulas are the highest protein to carb ratio commercial foods available.

Drac is a cute name for a kitty. Sorry he (she?) is diabetic.

I have 2 cats: One, 1.5 years old, will eat whatever you put in front of her. The other is 17, underweight, and finicky, plus she has kidney problems. We will feed her ANYTHING she will eat, the richer and fattier the better. She seems to like (human) tuna a lot (uninterested in expensive raw sushi tuna, it seems), so she gets plenty of that. Last week, I discovered that she totally loves chicken livers, so I'm gonna be getting her as much of those as she'll eat.

cat gout?

I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think it's gout. The vet said she was having kidney failure, so he prescribed these IV fluids we give her 2x a week, which has put her kidneys right. He also said to avoid high-protein foods and give her more fatty foods. Honestly, though, we're just happy to get her eating anything.

A side-effect of giving old kitty a high-fat diet is that the young upstart has turned into a walking sausage.

bahahahaha

Fat kitties make me amused. :)

I was thinking you might be giving your cat gout with that diet. (not something I think it actually worth worrying about in a 17 year old cat, btw.)

We did have another cat who had arthritis -- the treatments for that (steroids) made her diabetic, so we just tried to keep her as comfy as possible until we had her put down when she developed a huge face tumor.

In answer to the topic question, we keep dry food out all day and give wet food at night when we get home from work and sometimes in the mornings.

We have a little walking sausage, too! She gets 1/4 cup of Science Diet Light in the AM, and some light wet food in the PM. Seems to be working well, but she will eat anything that doesn't eat her first. The first week of her diet found her splayed out on her belly, scooping old pasta and dust out from under the stove and eating that.

Our other cat is a lithe grazer, and we let her eat whatever, whenever.

They love Feline Greenies, freeze-dried salmon chunks, and dried tuna flakes.

Dried fish flakes are like cat crack to some cats.

They totally lose their shit over them.

Drac is a cute name for a kitty

They are actually Dracula and Moriarty (from a line in a Kinks song), FELV/FIV+ brothers that Mr. Jaq fostered and then adopted almost 9 years ago. We never expected them to last this long, due to the FELV/FIV (which they got from their mom) - the vet said they probably last 4-5 years. They both only started developing real health problems in the last year or so.

scooping old pasta and dust out from under the stove and eating that

hahahahahah! omg.

my cat eats a bit over half a cup of dry innova EVO everyday, fed half of that in the morning and half of that in the evening. sometimes some canned/wet evo. he's been eating this since abt january and seems pretty happy with it and is very soft!

i'm not going to go on a rant abt high-carb cat food b/c i don't want to get all upset but i will say that i'd attribute my cat noam's death due to diabetes to it and that even the brands you buy at the vet's office are really high-carb. i don't know, the whole pet food industry is really weird for a variety of reasons...

if i leave a rice cake (i like rice cakes okay) on a plate with nothing on it, my cat will try to take it away and eat it! unadorned rice cakes are almost the only thing he does that with! but only if there's nothing on them haha

My cats also go nuts for Ritz crackers. Will delicately pluck one out of the sleeve and RUNOFF.

hahaha
mmm ritz crackers

My dog is a banana fiend. it is the only food he will try to steal out of my hands.

so

my cat, she eats2 of those small cans of wet food every day, and then a handful of dry. i think a lot of ppl still do dry food only, which i've heard from vets is less healthy. supposedly the wet food is the protein. and my kitty, she's skinny!

our cats eat science diet hairball control senior. if I give anything else to my older cat, he gets massive shits. he has stomach cancer and hyperthyroid, neither of which we are really treating (he gets prednisone but that's it).

he also eats any scrap of anything our kid drops on the floor, so, lots of cheerios, bits of bagel, scraps of turkey, rasins, and sand

Normally my dog eats Purina One dry kibble ("triangles") out of a bowl all day. She carries it over to the rug by mouthfuls, sprays it around and then eats one by one.

The vet said she had some sort of digestive irritation and gave her an subcutaneous fluid injection for being dehydrated.

For about an hour she had a liquid hump on her back, then the liquid migrated to two spots under each armpit so she had water boobs. She kept trying to scratch them.

Now it went away, thank goodness, but she is eating Hill's Science Diet I/P and antibiotics for the next week. Her test came out negative for parasites, though, yay.

my cat goes so nuts for bonito flakes. it's an amazing sight.

My dog loves corn cobs.

btw, Drac's diabetes has resolved itself for now, just with a change in diet. Yay for no daily injections & blood testing.

Haha to water dog boob implants! Poor thing, I hope that gets resolved and the antibiotics don't mess up her stomach even more. Drac also had FUS once (crystals in his urine, ow ow ow) and had to have a big rehydration shot. He looked like a fur-covered water balloon for a day and was truly pissed off by it.

Oh that's good news for Dracula. I had to give insulin shots to a cat named Wilma for a week, it was horrible.

I should have taken a pic of the water boobs but they're gone now.

My kitty gets about a 1/3 a can of Wiskas morning and evening; she does this odd about-face every six months or so where she'll only eat the fish ones, and then hate those and only eat the meat/chicken ones. Annoying when I have cans of food she won't touch. I supplement that with a bowl of crunchies of whatever's avaible: sometimes Purina or another "mature cat" formula, sometimes just the cheapy supermarket brand (which is "beef injected", which makes me lol).

She'll go nuts for raw chicken scraps, tuna, and roo though. But we dont let her eat too much roo (even tho you can buy raw roo just for cats) because I read somewhere it is too rich and can give 'em the runs. And I dont want a poopy cat in my house :/

Nor do I, but walking the cat seems untenable. Those scientists who make genetic freak animals for food should next tackle the problem of the poopless cat.

Roo? Kanga-roo?

Poopless cat already perfected and available for purchase now:

http://i27.tinypic.com/5chbg3.jpg

Our 120lb dog eats a bowl of pedigree large dog kibble a day. The bowl is suprisingly small-average. ive had labs that out eat this dog by two-three times as much per day.

fattey labs, admittedly <3

Ya lib, kanga-roo. It is a fine meat here in ausland. Rly! Its very bloody tasty.

my cat ate a raisin yesterday! not even i will eat raisins.