[quote MacMagus]Feeding the same food all the time is probably not healthy for your cat.
Imagine eating peanut butter sandwiches every day for a year. Even if it's on a mixed whole grain bread, you're undoubtedly missing nutrients.
I buy two small bags at a time of different brands of food and mix them together in an airtight jug for my cat. I don't pay much attention to brand except that I avoid Iams because they're cruel to animals, Purina because I am fairly certain that it contributed to the death of one of my cats and anything exceptionally cheap.
I check to make sure that the protein content is high and the ash, corn gluten and organ meat content is low, which generally puts me into the premium stuff. And I have a bag of Science Diet tartar control food, which I mix in with the other stuff at about a 1:5 ratio. It keeps her teeth clean and white and her breath smelling nice.
One side-benefit to this diet: My cat is not a finicky eater.
Except a peanut butter sandwich isn't designed to be a complete diet. Pet foods are. There's even a statement on the bag to let you know. If you're feeding a diet tailored to address a specific problem (bladder stones, liver disease, whatever) this statement WILL say it isn't appropriate to feed healthy animals as a maintenance diet.
Dry food can get rancid, as one person posted. It is also prone to getting storage mites. These are harmless unless your pet develops an allergy to them. We recommend that dry food is stored in an airtight container, and that you don't store more than a month's supply. You should wash your container out with hot, soapy water in between fillings.
In general, if you are sticking with a national brand, you are probably taking care of your pet's nutritional needs. Most pet animals probably get better nutrition than most people in this country. And FWIW, for *any* brand of food you can find someone who thinks it is the bomb, and another who would not offer it to their worst enemy. My cat eats Purina Pro Plan. All of my pets have eaten Purina products. I don't necessarily recommend them as a given diet may not have the same outcome in other people's pets based on their specific animal's individual metabolism, etc. I never cared for the way my dog's coat looked when she was eating IAMS...yet I see plenty of dogs on this diet with great coats. Kira just did better on Pro Plan.
As far as feeding cats, specifically...any dry food probably has far more carbohydrate to it than they are really designed to deal with. Felines are pure carnivores, and as such, they have much higher protien needs than most other companion animals. Given what is available to people now, feeding a canned diet makes more sense--it is higher in protien than a dry food simply due to how both foods are manufactured. We see a lot of diabetes in cats these days, and it took us a while to understand that part of the reason for that was probably how we feed cats.
(Though I will cop to being a poor example to follow...my kitty Kiko eats dry food nearly exclusively
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Mmmmmm, its past lunch time here...
Jackie
