Hi. My name is Dr. Uri Burstyn, I'm a veterinarian in Vancouver B.C.
and I'd like to welcome you to my series of practical skills for pet owners
How to get your cat to eat new food
Today's video is going to be a little tutorial on how to get your cat to eat new food
Now, we often have to change cats' diets for a variety of medical reasons
and, as most cat owners know, cats can get pretty finicky about their diet
The way vets describe it is that cats develop food affinity, or food addictions, quite easily
Now, cats typically get obsessed with food if it's the only food they've had for a long time
They're neophobic, they don't like change too much, and while taste is important to them,
they actually get quite particular about texture as well
and unfortunately, when we have to-- Oh, hi
Unfortunately, when we have to change their food for medical reasons,
we often don't have a lot of choices in terms of taste and texture
Food is a tool, like any drug or surgery,
that can be used to maintain the health and welfare of our little patients
Yes
And unfortunately in some cases a food is the most powerful intervention we have,
such as kidney disease, diabetes, obesity
So, if you're lucky and you have a cat like this who'll eat anything
You simply take the new food that your vet prescribed, you put on the table
And voilà. And this is always worth trying
Now a lot of people talk about gradually transitioning foods
And, sure, if you're just changing foods at home, gradually transitioning them does make sense
When we're talking about clinincal diets,
where this is a tool that we're using to manage a specific health condition
I don't bother with doing the slow transition if it's not necessary
Put the food down, the cat eats it
You just thank your lucky stars because your life just got a heck of a lot easier
Now, if you're not so lucky and your cat doesn't want to eat the one food that will save its life
What do you do?
Well, there's a couple things you can do
The most important thing to realize when you transition cats
is that cats don't like change, so you've got to take it slow and easy with them
You give yourself lots of time, you make the diet change, which is what we call it: a diet change,
you know, a two-week, three-week, month long project. It's a project
There's no specific timeline, we should do it as fast as we can, but we're not going to be rushed
What we wanna do is: we wanna give the cat some choice
We also want to get the cat used to the new food
and a classic way of doing that is to just start
a little bit of the old food, and start mixing in with the new food
You could be changing from wet food to kibble, kibble to kibble, wet food to wet food
It doesn't really matter what you're changing from and to
The basic principle is: you add 10% new food, 90% old food on day one
On day two, you go up to 20% new food, 80% old food
And so on and so forth, by little 10% increments
until, at the end of that, your cat's just eating the new food
Now, if we stall anywhere along this process
for example if the cat eats the food when it's fifty-fifty
but once you go over that they start sort of turning away and being a bit off their food,
you can always just take it back one step
going back to fourty-sixty, and then push it up to fifty-fifty again
This is what I mean by taking your time and making this a longer term project
So, gradual mixing-in of the new food and the old food typically does the trick for most cats
Now, there's certain things you can do to speed the process
and make the food a little bit more acceptable
We don't want cats to ever starve so sometimes we offer two dishes side by side
One has a mixture of new food and old food, one has just the old food
So if the cat really turns their nose up they can just eat from their old food dish
And then you slowly decrease every day, you decrease the amount in that dish
until it's no longer enough to keep them full and then they'll hopefully pick at the new food dish,
again, having had time to get used to the smell and the flavour and the texture of the new diet
You can also try to disguise the flavour of the new diet and we have a couple tools for that
One that I really like to use is: you simply go to your local supermarket
and get tuna in spring water
Now, tuna is typically sold in spring water or oil, not the oil one
Tuna in spring water, and you use just the water from that can
to sprinkle it on the food. Most cats love that flavour
and it helps them accept the new-- (laughs)
helps them accept the new food a little easier
In terms of other ways to flavour the new diet that makes it a little bit more acceptable
we don't have too many options, and to be honest with you,
typically in these cats you don't want to feed them anything other than the prescribed diets
so you are gonna be a little bit limited with it
but in some cases it's okay to mix in some other protein
like tuna or lean chicken meat to flavour the food
Often that's unnecessary and you should only be doing that if the vet says it's okay
because in many conditions where we use diets, such as kidney disease,
feeding a high-protein meal like that is actually quite harmful,
so you don't really wanna do that on your own
Always check with your vet before you make any changes like that
So another thing you can do to flavour the food
that is typically okay in most health conditions
is a product from Purina called FortiFlora
I'm not, just-- Full disclosure
I'm not sponsored by Purina, they're not paying me to say this
This is actually something I use in my practice all the time
It's a probiotic powder, it's hydrolised protein,
so, it's okay to use in cases where you have inflammatory bowel disease or food allergies
and cats seem to quite like the taste of this so if I sprinkle this on the food
it does really encourage Mr. Pirate to eat as well as many of my patients
who are reluctant to try a new flavour
Normally I don't need to encourage Pirate to eat
but I do use it sometimes with him if he's on antibiotics
or if he's having tummy upset. It's quite good
But we also use it for encouraging cats to eat
adding a little bit extra flavour that they typically quite like
Some cats don't really like this
that's because they're cats and that's the way cats are
they're all weird, they're all individuals, and all have their own preferences
So we talked about a few things: we talked about gradual mixing of the food,
We talked about flavouring the food with something that's gonna make it
really acceptable to the cat, something really tasty
and then, again, we talked a little bit about probably the hardest thing
which is to have patience
and of course not making any significant changes without consulting a veterinarian first
if you're trying to change the food for medical reasons to manage some health issue
because there could be factors that maybe not everybody's aware of, that your vet should be aware of
So, with this approach, I find that I can get just about any cat to eat just about anything
There'll always be the odd one that just will refuse to eat the food you want them to eat
In those cases you just have to find a workaround
or do without that one really powerful tool when managing their health
But I would say, what do you think, Pirate? 90% of cats?
90% of cats plus can be gotten to eat anything if you use this kind of approach
Anything else?
What do you think, Sir?
I think that's it
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