Cats Need Plenty of Water With Their Food

The first paragraph of that page is as follows: If I could have the reader of this webpage take away just one word from this discussion, it would be "water." If your cat is on a properly hydrated diet of 100% canned (or homemade) food - and no dry food - you stand a very good chance of never needing to read this webpage. Water is an extremely important nutrient that contributes to overall health in every living creature. Couple this with the fact that cats do not have a very strong thirst drive when compared to other species, and you will understand why it is critical for them to ingest a water-rich diet. The cat's lack of a strong thirst drive can lead to low-level, chronic dehydration when dry food makes up the bulk of their diet especially if they have any level of kidney insufficiency. A cat's normal prey contains approximately 70 - 75 percent water. Dry food only contains 5-10 percent water whereas canned foods contain approximately 78 percent water. Canned foods therefore more closely approximate the natural diet of the cat and are better suited to meet the cat’s water needs. I hear the reader saying: "But my cat drinks a lot of water so dry food is just fine for him!" A cat consuming a predominantly dry food diet does drink more water than a cat consuming a canned food diet, but in the end, when water from all sources is added together (what’s in their diet plus what they drink), the cat on dry food consumes approximately half the amount of water compared with a cat eating canned food. Water intake of cats on dry vs canned food Put another way, a cat on a canned food diet consumes approximately double the amount of water consumed by a cat eating dry food when all sources (food and water bowl) are considered. This is a crucial point when one considers how common kidney and bladder problems are in the cat. Think of canned food as 'flushing out' your cat's bladder several times each day. Please keep in mind that when your cat starts eating a more appropriately hydrated diet of canned food, his urine output will increase which is a very good thing for bladder health. Because of this increase in urine production, litter boxes need to be scooped more frequently or more boxes need to be added to the home. Please see The Litter Box From Your Cat’s Point of View for reasons why I strongly feel that clumping litter is the only sanitary choice of litter to use for cats. Non-clumping litters do not allow you to remove all of the urine and are not sanitary litters.