My Kitten (now 7 months old) used to love wet food. He would get a table spoon the morning and a table spoon at night and eat it all up right away and get so excited when he saw me take his cans out. Now he will still get excited and come over and eat quickly but only eat for a few minutes and barely eat half of what I put down. I think I even tried putting his dry food away for the afternoon to see if he would finish it, but he doesn't. I usually refrigerate the left overs and use the next day so I don't think they are going bad or anything. I use Life Abudance/Instinctive Choice from healthypetnet.com.
How can I encourage him to eat more wet food? I heard it is very good for their diet compared to dry?
If you want to encourage him in eating canned, you can remove all food and when he's hungry give him the canned until he eats the amount your comfortable with and then give him back his dry to nibble on between meals.
He may be slowing the amount of total food he eats. If he's eating less canned but not consuming more dry it may be that his growth rate is slowing down and he just doesn't need as many calories right now.
He's actually eating more dry, so I will test out taking away his dry food when I get home from work and only giving him his wet food at night and then putting his dry food back out in the morning. Hopefully he eats it all! It just seems like such a waste to keep putting the wet food out when he doesn't finish it and it goes bad within a couple hours.
Kittens do go off of wet food - and some never want it again. You may want to try some that will be more appealing (although they always seem to be a food not as "good" as one wants) Food changes do risk GI upset, so that is a factor in offering others. Since he still comes and eats, you may just want to reduce the amount per serving and be thankful he wants it at all.
I have a similar situation with my 6 1/2 month old kitten. He used to eat every meal with gusto and all canned or raw food, various types. But his eating has slowed down. We've gone from 4 meals to 3. And he'll eat 2 types of wet food only (Wellness Kitten formula and Nature's Variety Raw medallions).
Now he seems generally not as hungry, and all he wants to eat is dry food --but I want him on a diet of mostly wet.
Feeding time takes a lot of my time because I don't want him to become a DFA : Dry Food Addict.
Recently I've been putting dry food on top of the wet food and he will eat the top layer and some (or if I'm lucky) all of the wet too.
Also, it sometimes helps to sprinkle grated cheese or shredded cheese over the wet.
At times, I have to spoon feed him to get him to eat. Interestingly, when I do, he'll usually eat the wet food. Whereas if I leave it down, he'll walk away and I'll have to throw it out. My friends laugh at me for the spoon-feeding, but I believe a healthy diet is important and I have the time.
