How much dry food to feed a kitten

How much you will need to feed will depend on the nutritional requirements of your cat, as well as the quality of food. High-quality commercial diets tend to have more nutritional value, and hence you may need to feed less per day. This is especially important for cats that may struggle to get enough nutrition, such as growing kittens, and high activity or elderly cats, and also means the cost per day of premium foods is often less than you might expect.

To help guide you, high-quality cat foods will state a suggested daily amount to feed your cat per day. This is a useful start point but is not suitable for every animal –just like us, cats have different metabolisms and nutrition is not ‘one size fits all’. With this in mind, monitoring your cat’s condition is the best way to moderate how much you feed your cat, making sure you are always giving enough to keep your cat’s weight stable at their optimum size. The packet guidelines, however, can give you a helpful start point.

Just like us, weight alone is not an appropriate measure of how healthy a cat’s diet is. Making sure your cat is a healthy size can be done using body condition scoring.

Irrespective of the type of diet and type of cat, weighing the food you give should always be part of the daily routine. This is much more accurate than feeding by eye, keeps the diet stable, and means that diet can be adjusted more easily.

Cat feeding is a crucial topic for anyone who decides to adopt one, small or large. One of the main questions concerns the daily amount of food to be fed to the feline to satiate him and make him grow in a healthy way. What about you, do you know how much a cat has to eat?

How to calculate food doses?

Before filling your cat’s bowl with kibble, it is advisable to consider the age, habits, lifestyle and his physical characteristics. An adult cat has different needs and requirements from a few months old kitten. Furthermore, it is necessary to evaluate what type of food you intend to give the cat: dry food or wet food?

If the cat eats wet food, the correct dose of food is about 40 grams per kilo of body weight, for example an animal that weighs 4 kg should eat 160 grams of treats per day. However it should be specified that in the cat’s diet there cannot be only wet, but this must constitute at most 20% of the total.

If the cat eats dry food, the correct dose of food is about 40 grams for each kilo of weight, and the total divided by three, because dry food is more concentrated than wet and to obtain the same requirement, a smaller amount is needed.

So be careful not to stuff the bowl when it is empty; cats, in fact, have a tendency to eat everything they find inside, just for the sake of emptying it, but then they will have to deal with diseases such as obesity, just as happened to the cat Bazooka, which was continuously fed by its elderly owner, up to weighing 16 kilos!

Feeding the cat throughout the day

How many and at what times of the day should the cat eat?

An adult cat must eat no less than three times a day, especially if he feeds on biscuits it is recommended to let him have eat several meals throughout the day. In any case, the first rule to adopt is certainly to follow the indications given on cat food package.

A kitten up to six months old  needs a lot of energy, so it doesn’t need a large quantity of food, but rather a series of closer snacks, even four, five a day.

Other factors must always be taken into consideration: a cat living in an apartment is more sedentary than a cat living in the garden, the latter burns more calories and has a higher energy requirement, consequently it needs more food. A tip we give you is to always feed at the same time and in the same place, away from the toilet box and in a quiet corner, cats are known to be creatures of habit.

Sterilized cat, what to do?

When it comes to cat feeding, it is necessary to know whether she or he has been neutered or not; most domestic cats are, in fact, sterilized.
A sterilized cat varies greatly in his lifestyle habits and also changes in the metabolic level: partly because of boredom, partly due to hormonal disturbances, the cat will find itself spending much more time eating or requesting food.

It is a good rule to feed him with special food for castrated cats (which must contain sodium, rich in vegetable fiber and with few calories) by administering two or three times a day and avoiding leaving them available, so as not to entice him to eat continuously and risk the overweight. For a 4 kg sterilized cat, which prefers to stay warm to sleep and has an energy requirement of about 200 kcal, a can of 85 g per day wet and a ration of 30 g of dry will be sufficient.

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