Kitten food

Your kitten’s organs, muscles, tissues, and skeleton all grow exponentially during the first few months of life. To ensure a healthy future, give your furry friend kitten food that delivers all the energy and nutrients their body needsto get bigger and stronger.

Another part of your kitty’s system that needs a boost during this time is their brain. Your feline Einstein needs brain food to understand their little world and learn good behaviour.

According to one study (Kelley et al., 2004), omega-3s, especially DHA, are essential for developing brain cells and improving trainability. Most kitten food contains omega-3s, but veterinary kitten food has the optimal amount to meet your little one’s needs. Let’s have a chat and chew it over together!

Your kitten probably acts like a tiny tiger, and like a tiger, they’re a carnivore with unique nutritional needs. Unlike their omnivorous canine counterpart, your cat’s digestive system is designed for more protein and processes food differently.

Your kitten needs a lot more protein to fuel their growth and meet their energy needs as a young hunter. So make sure you’re serving up healthy kitten food with quality proteins in the right amounts to foster their development.

Animal proteins and amino acids

Proteins from animal sources are best for your kitten’s nutrition. To work properly, your fur baby’s diet needs to have a good balance of animal and vegetable proteins. Kittens also need proteins that their developing digestive systems can easily digest.

These proteins should deliver all 11 essential amino acids, among them taurine. A taurine deficiency in your kitten could lead to long-term heart disease or even blindness.

Talk to your veterinarian! They can help you choose the best kitten food with the proteins your kitty needs, not to mention all the other nutrients essential to their growth and development.

Your kitten is very active, growing quickly, and devouring small meals at a time. Their weight is easy to maintain at this stage so free feeding may seem like an okay solution. But make no mistake, it’s not.

After the first few months, your kitty’s growth slows down. And once they’re altered, their calorie needs drop significantly. At that point it becomes easy to overload them with calories, causing excessive weight gain—especially with indoor cats who don’t go outside to play or explore.

What to do? Develop good habits from the start. Avoid free feeding: measure—or, even better—weigh the portions you feed your kitten.

And be sure to monitor their growth with your veterinary team. We have tools to determine the perfect daily ration for your little kit and adjust it as they grow and change.

With this kind of guidance, you don’t have to rack your brain to find the ideal serving size. And with carefully calculated and evenly distributed portions of kitten food, you reduce your kitten’s odds of being overweight or obese—problems that lead to other health issues like:

• Urinary problems
• Diabetes
• Osteoarthritis
• Skin conditions

Smart food strategies are another good habit to incorporate into your kitten’s life. This involves using feeding methods that play into their primary feline instinct and behaviour. To better understand what that involves, read our article Fabriquer des stratégies alimentaires pour son chat(in French only).

Did you know that kittens, and cats in general, naturally have a low thirst drive? A cat’s metabolism is also able to function with very little water intake. These traits inherited from their ancient ancestors make them prone to urinary problems.

What can you do? There are certain strategies you can use to help kitty drink more water and stay hydrated:

• Feed your kitten wet (canned) food, which contains more water
• Add water to their dry kitten food
• Choose the right bowl—one your kitty likes
• Place bowls in strategic, quiet locations
• Try giving them different types of water:
  • Chilled from the refrigerator
  • From the tap
  • Bottled
  • Filtered
  • Demineralized
• Add some flavour with tuna or clam juice
• Opt for a pet water fountain

With these tips, your kitten will learn to drink more water—and like it! For more on this topic, read our blog article Allez minou, bois un peu plus d’eau…. (in French only).

To keep your kitten from becoming a fussy eater, introduce them to different kinds of foods and textures within the first 4 months. That includes dry and wet kitten food and treats. At this age, they’re more willing to try something new and remember it fondly, and they’ll be more accepting of changes in their diet later on.

For variety, incorporate a small amount of wet (canned) kitten food into their diet once a day. Why? Because it provides a different texture and can help them avoid urinary problems and maintain a healthy weight.

Treats are also a good way to help young cats explore different tastes and textures. We know treats make your fur baby happy, but don’t go overboard!

To make sure these new options don’t create an imbalance in your kitten’s nutrition plan, ask your veterinary team for advice. We can recommend specially formulated treats, wet foods, and other products and show you how to properly integrate them into your kitten’s diet without overfeeding.