I’m not a pet-feeder. I have been around animals all my life (and will be for the foreseeable future), and I’ve seen a lot of animals eat, sleep, and otherwise behave in ways that I don’t consider normal behavior.
When you have the choice of feeding your pet an unfamiliar food or a familiar food, what is your first instinct? Is the instinct to eat that particular pet food or the instinct to feed a pet that you know it will eat? This is the question that dog owners ask themselves most of the time and the reason why many pet owners do not feed their pets the same food often.
So the question is, should you feed your pet the same food as you do your pet? As it turns out, this is more of a “should” than a “will” question.
The instinct to feed your dog the same food as you has a lot to do with your relationship with your dog. Your dog is not a “member” of your family and therefore you should not dictate to it what it eats. If you do have a dog, you should know the dog’s food as soon as you walk out of the door. Otherwise, you may be giving your dog the wrong idea.
If you were to start feeding your dog the same food as you do your pet, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment. That’s because, as we discussed in the intro, the fact that dogs are carnivores means that they will take any animal food that is readily available and try to digest it. You are going to have to watch your dog constantly to ensure that it doesn’t eat the same food that you do and that it isn’t taking on additional nutrients that you don’t have.
The first step to correcting this mistake is to make a list of what your dog eats. It should be a list of foods that your dog likes which are both tasty and have a small amount of protein in them. The next step is to put that list of foods in a box that you keep in your dog’s food bowl. This will ensure that your dog doesnt pick up on the wrong food.
For the sake of this example we’ll use a cat. When your cat is on a diet of only bananas and kibble, the food that you eat is automatically diluted with the cat food. If your cat is on a diet of only bananas and chicken or fish, it wont dilute it.
The reason I bring this up is because cats are super sensitive to dilution. If you feed them a diet of only bananas and chicken or fish, they will go crazy and find it harder to get the kibble and bananas. Of course this kind of thing has happened before to a lot of us. So how do we deal with this? We have to make sure that we feed our cat a diet of something else to dilute the kibble. This is where selective feeding comes in.
To dilute the kibble, we have to find something that is not as kibble-y. Cats like to eat different things and can go through stages when they are fed the same thing over and over again. There are several things that work well for this. I think the best thing is to give your cat a choice and always look for a cat food with a low moisture content of less than 50%, or if you don’t like that you can always cook the kibble yourself.
The best foods for cats to dilute the kibble with are fish or chicken. Chicken is a little more expensive than fish, but the chicken is less kibble-y and also a better choice. If you try to feed your cat a mix of the two, you will have to go more often.
