I feed my cat other, lesser cats. hur hur hur. (sorry)

We feed our cats various dry foods but given the weekly throw-ups, we're looking into alternatives too.

We use Pro Plan in our house mostly because we get it free most of the time.(Wife works at petstore.) I heard canned food rots cats teeth they need the dried food to clean the teeth. (Some sort of scraping crap off their teeth action is needed.) My cat actually swollows the dried food whole and he started getting all kinds of nasty gum build up. So we bought bigger sized food and he has to chew it now. Now his teeth sparkle .

Our cat used to vomit, but we started really managing the amount of food we feed him and that seemed to fix the issue. He only gets half a cup twice a day.

This is going to sound dick-ish but... "the cheapest dry stuff we can find". 9Lives and MeowMix are the predominant brands we purchase but occasionally we get the budget store-clone brands like ValuTime or OurFamily. Our vet kept extoling the virtues of the more expensive foods but the cats eat it regardless and we still have incidents of furballs even with the fancier stuff so it seemed kind of pointless.

Here comes Luna to scold me and my poor pet ownership d20 skill check...

We feed our cat half a can in the morning and some dry at night. Seems to work out ok.

wow... so you have one of those "hemingway" polydactyl cats? pretty freaky

I have a friend who works in a high-end pet food store (I've always been surprised something that specialized can make it, but the store in question has been around for over a decade now) and is pretty knowledgeable in this area. If you like, next time I see him I can ask what dry cat food he recommends and why.

Thought I'd throw that in there, otherwise I can't help you (100% dog person).

There are lots of great choices out there as far as dry and wet foods go. Some cats will do fine on grocery store kibble while others need a prescription diet. Of course, I'd recommend the higher quality diets for all animals (Innova being one of them) but it's the owner's prerogative.

The problem I have with cheaper kibbles are the filler and by products parts. Both of these are the two main ingredients. "Meat by products" includes random parts of chickens (bones, feet, brains, etc.). The filler is grain products, most of which aren't even digestible and have no nutritional value. Cats are true carnivores. This means they should be eating as close to 100% meat as possible.

The last thing I'd like to add is that cats don't need and can't tolerate variety very well. They should be fed only one type of diet. Switching their diet will upset their digestive system and leads to diarrhea and vomiting. If you are switching to another type of diet it should be done gradually.

My wife's had 2 cats break 20 years and 2 cats get close(18 and 17, I believe).
My advice?
Plain. Old. Purina.

I feed mine Iams Multi-Cat and 1/2 a can of Fancy Feast each. I used to stick with strictly dry food diet, but the newest addition requires a higher protein diet, so the other two benefit as well.

Science Diet. If it's good enough for Cornell vet's it's good enough for us and we have 4 cats!

We feed Maya just the President's Choice (in-house brand of Loblaws, a Canadian supermarket chain) dry food. Interestingly enough, even though this is the "cheap stuff", she's never really liked anything else we've gotten her. We ran out of food one night and gave her some of the Purina our tenant feeds his cat and she turned her nose up at it. We fed her wet food for a while when she was younger but after a while, she started eating less and less of it.

We feed ours Iams indoor weight control. We have fed them both Iams their whole lives and haven't had any problems. The shorthair never throws up, I can never remember her throwing up once. The long hair will throw up from hairballs once a month or so just because we don't brush her enough.

We'll also give them a small cat of Iams wet food every month or two or those new wet pouch food Iams has.

I have never heard of Innova, how much is it per pound? Both of the vets we've had have said Iams is a good food, and the cats like it and don't have problems so we never felt the need to switch.

I switched one of my cats (the other is on a prescription diet for urine crystal formation problems) to Science Diet's Light Hairball Control formula. He was on normal hairball control, that didn't help much, but the Light version (he needed to lose a little weight ) actually helped SIGNIFICANTLY with how often he throws up. Only once every few weeks now, which is far preferable to the previous frequency. Just had his checkup two weeks back, he's doing great.