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Wellness Core Cat

Posted in Uncategorized | August 27th, 2011

Cat hates Wellness CORE and canned food .. what to do?

I have a 9 year old cat and a 3 year old cat. In the last couple of months I started doing alot of research on cat food. I was feeding my cats Iams Healthy Naturals. (which they like) .

Now I know the importance of feeding quality ‘holitistic’ dry food. My 9 year old will eat small amounts of canned food but my three year old REFUSES completely!

I bought Wellness CORE last week and both my cats hate it! ( I should have saved my receipt) I swear my 3yr old cat didn’t eat for the past week. I finally poured her a bowl of just healthy naturals and she gobbled it up. Poor girl, I want her to be happy and healthy. I don’t care about the cost of the food. I hate two great pet food stores near me.

Question. Is Healthy Naturals by Iams really really bad or just bad? If they didn’t like CORE, do you think they probably won’t like Innova Evo either?

Is it mean to not put any dry food down for a few days to try to get my 3yr old female cat to eat canned food?

any body?

Iams HN: Below are the ingredients. It’s not the worst I’ve seen but it’s still not great food. Remove the grains and it would be ok though:
Chicken, Chicken By-Product Meal, Corn Meal, Brewer Rice, Ground Whole Grain Barley, Chicken Meal, Dried Beet Pulp, Dried Egg Product, Natural Chicken Flavor, Sodium Bisulfate, Potassium Chloride, Fish Oil (preserved with mixed Tocopherols, a source of Vitamin E), Animal Fat (preserved with mixed Tocopherols, a source of Vitamin E), DL-Methionine, Dried Apple Pomace, Dried Carrots, Brewers Dried Yeast, Dried Peas, Vitamins (Vitamin E Supplement, Vitamin A Acetate, Niacin, Ascorbic Acid, Calcium Pantothenate, Biotin, Thiamine Mononitrate (source of vitamin B1), Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (source of vitamin B6), Vitamin B12 Supplement, Vitamin D3 Supplement, Riboflavin Supplement (source of vitamin B2), Inositol, Folic Acid), Calcium Carbonate, Choline Chloride, Dried Spinach, Dried Tomato, Minerals (Zinc Oxide, Manganese Sulfate, Copper Sulfate, Potassium Iodide, Cobalt Carbonate), Rosemary Extract.

See my answer to your other question about how you might be able to get your kitties to eat Core after all.

It’s not the taste that draws them in, it’s smell. And sometimes texture. Core I believe is rather small pellets with not much in the way of coating. Evo on the other hand is larger round bits and it’s rather crumbly. My point being that it’s more likely to have a smell than the Core does.

My own experience was that neither cat really cared for the Evo when I first presented it. But when I mixed it with Meow Mix, they’d eat some of it and I gradually increased that amount until they were eating it all up. Now they adore it!

But I actually changed to a different dry food later on, but that’s another story.

I just realized that I may have forgotten to suggest this idea when trying new dry foods: If you put some of the food they like in another container and add some of the new food, the old food will coat the new and make it smell more familiar so they may be more likely to try it. Let this container sit for a day or two to really meld the odors. This worked for me!

And no, you don’t want to starve your kitties into submission, tempting as it is. You can try it a little for a while, but personally I would give up after an hour or two. If kitty is refusing to eat what’s put out, I’d give her something else. You can cut back slightly to give their appetite a keener edge, though.

The problem is that cats are very prone to hepatic lipidosis which crops up if they go too long without eating. Anything after the 24 hour mark can be dangerous.