Kitten Feeding Questions

A reader at Yvonne's Shine Blog asked a couple of interesting questions about her kitten that we thought was worth a post.

Her nine month old kitten is an eager eater, maybe a little too eager, and snarfs down his food a little too quickly. As a result he throws up. Her vet has suggested feeding several smaller meals a day which is a good idea and should help control the regurgitation problem. 

 

Kittens should be fed three to four times a day up to about seven months of age. After that you can back them off to twice daily. So a nine month old kitten will do just fine being fed twice daily. This works out well for most people that work and can't get home in the middle of the day. This kitten could be fed morning and evening and then before the owner's bed time to limit the amount he gets.

 

As far as the second question about when to switch to adult food, I did a long detailed post over at the PurinaCare blog on just that topic. I'll summarize here.

 

By nine months of age kittens look like adults but they are not fully grown yet. Ideally they would be on kitten food up to a year of age. The really rapid growth phase for kittens is in that three months to six months time period. They can need up to twice as many calories per pound during this time and kitten foods are more energy dense than adult foods.

 

That being said, the world is not going to come to an end if a nine or ten month old kitten is eating a good quality adult food. 

Comments

[Arden Clise]

Good article. Actually, you don't need to feed kittens kitten food ever. A good quality food is much better over a designated kitten food. As soon as they can eat solid food they can eat "adult" food. Purina wants you to believe that you need kitten food so you'll spend more money.