FOOD & NUTRITION

My wife likes to pure vegetables - like peas, carrots and sweet potato - and mix it into our cats canned food. Is this okay to do? Are there any vegetables that should never be added to the cat food? We also add some cranberry powder (made for cats), along with some hairball powder. We trying to be to health-minded, but can we be causing potential problems?

When Blazer tipped the scale at 29 pounds, his owner knew it was time to take action. He has always been a big boy, explains Susanne Jenkins of her tabby cat. But over the course of one long winter, he simply blew up. He was living with four dogs and getting into a lot of dog food.

If you think youre noticing more and more grain-free pet foods on the shelves, youre right. According to data in the Dog and Cat Food Ingredient Center -which examines pet food trends and ingredients - 73 percent of manufacturers producing dry cat food in the United States now have at least one grain-free product.

I am fostering an adolescent stray mother cat and her three kittens (I picked them up when the kittens were about one-week-old) and I fed her a high-quality wet cat food the first few days.

Today, you can find at least 50 cat foods on the market with promises on their labels that claim everything from weight loss to reduced calorie to weight management. But just what do these phrases mean? Unfortunately, whatever the manufacturer wants them to.

Much in the same way that stress affects humans, it can also affect cats. While brief periods of stress can help cats to survive dangerous situations, recurrent or prolonged stress can be harmful for them both physically and emotionally.

November 2017 - Full Issue PDF

Ahome-cooked diet for your pet sounds great, and it certainly appeals to the emotions, says Cailin Heinze, MS, VMD, DACVN. But realistically, the vast majority of these diets I see cats being fed are not nutritionally balanced because just using whole foods that are typically consumed by humans is usually not enough to balance a cats diet.

A home-cooked diet for your pet sounds great, and it certainly appeals to the emotions, says Cailin Heinze, MS, VMD, DACVN. But realistically, the vast majority of these diets I see cats being fed are not nutritionally balanced because just using whole foods that are typically consumed by humans is usually not enough to balance a cats diet.

I remember that there used to be a lot of talk about the dangers of BHA, BHT and ethoxyquin used as preservatives in certain pet foods. Have they been replaced by different ingredients, or are there simply fewer concerns about them now?

As a feline veterinarian and enthusiastic traveler, I try to combine my two passions -cats and travel - whenever possible. I succeeded in the Netherlands when I visited the Poezenboot, a floating cat shelter docked on Amsterdams Singel canal. My luck continued in Burma, where I visited a Burmese Cat Sanctuary on Inle Lake. And fortune struck again recently in Puerto Rico, as I came upon Save A Gato, a volunteer organization run by a dedicated group of cat lovers that cares for the abundant feral cats of Old San Juan.

In my feline-only veterinary practice in New York City, not a single day goes by without a client asking me: What is the best diet for my healthy cat? These days, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to answer this (seemingly) simple question. Many people feel that cats should be fed canned food only, and that dry food is extremely unhealthy for them. …