How Many Meals Does Your Cat Need A Day?

In the morning and one meal in the evening this seems like a fine feeding schedule but if studies are saying that obesity kidney disease and other illnesses are rising could this really be the best way to feed cats or is there something better out there and if there is how do we figure it out well nature tends to show us how animals eat in a natural setting so let's see how cats naturally eat without us humans feeding them before humans domesticated cats they survived by hunting small prey animals like rodents birds and small amphibians 12 000 years later well after humans domesticated them cats still have the same instinct to hunt and are able to live outdoors just fine without us in fact today an estimated 480 million cats are feral meaning they're not socialized with humans at all and only know a life Outdoors.

so looking at how feral cats hunt could clue Us in on how many meals they eat a day and lucky for us between 2012 and 2014 a group of researchers actually investigated this for us what they did was place a small video camera on the collars of feral cats in two areas of Northwest Australia then released them back into the wild to observe their hunting patterns many hours of data was collected from the day-to-day life of a feral cat and surprise surprise the footage showed that most of their day was spent sleeping relaxing and grooming however these cats still hunted pretty often in fact each cat killed about 7.2 prey animals on a daily basis but the odd thing was 28 or two out of seven of the prey animals that they caught were not eaten this means that cats in the wild generally eat around five meals a day according to how these feral cats hunted.

okay what does this mean well if we want to go off of how cats thrive in the wild we can see that cats tend to eat many small meals throughout the day but the problem now is the average cat owner doesn't have time or isn't home long enough to feed this many meals a day so how do we turn how cats naturally eat in the wild into an easy feeding routine anybody can follow well we know that feeding two meals a day is pretty easy for most owners to do but not everyone can feed five small meals a day so what I suggest is going from feeding two.

How Many Meals A Day meals a day to feeding three meals a day now this may not seem like much of a difference but many owners including myself find that three small meals a day is the best way to feed adult cats Studies have also shown that feeding several small meals a day also led to increased activity levels which is a great way to maintain a healthy weight I've experimented with many different feeding routines from one large meal a day up to five small meals a day and what my cat Tangy seems to prefer the most is three split meals a day so if you already feed one meal before work and one meal after work all you need to do is feed a third small meal before you go to bed so if your cat eats four ounces a day you would split this total weight of food into three small portions it's an easy routine yet still closer to the amount of meals they naturally eat in the wild.

but of course every cat is an individual so it's up to you to figure out the best meal routine for your cat the only thing I would say not to do is free feed dry food and honestly I would suggest you stop feeding dry food altogether why well I explained just how harmful dry food can be in this Article.

Disclaimer :- All images are Ai generated.