Hello Friends,

I am a 13 months old male cat and he seems to be always hungry. The breeder we got him from fed him raw food. When we first got him, we tried to continue on the raw food. However, we already had a female bengal that was brought up on dry food. Our female was not found of the raw food and even vomitted it a couple times. It was getting hard to manage having two different diets so we decided to put both of them on dry food. However, my male always seems to be hungry. He will constantly moew for food. When we eat something he wants our food. Even after feeding him the dry food, he will eat a couple nuggets and leave it behind. He seems really unsatisfied with the food. To make matters worst, I haven't been able to sleep in for over a year now. He will come in my room and meow and meow away. If that doesn't work, he will then bit my feet or put his paw in my face. He also bits on paper or carbon as if that is some sort of food. Can anyone please share some advice. Is the food I am feeding not good enough? Should we switch back to wet? He is currently eating this food:
http://www.hillspet.com/en/us/products/pd-feline-zd-dry

Thank you,

Even if you are feeding a good quality dry food, most cats still need supplements to it. The dry food doesn't provide enough fat or water (unless the cat likes to drink water). So I can believe your cat feels unsatisfied, especially a growing one.

If you can feed him raw snacks, that might be best given the situation. Otherwise, he might enjoy snacks of canned cat food, baby food, cooked egg, cooked chicken or beef, cubes of cheese, yogurt, etc. Some cats even like fruits and veggies. (I have one cat that begs for salad greens)

Is there a specific reason why you are feeding a specialized diet food like that? Here's the thing...

a) Hills food is crap. Just look at the ingredients! What he's eating is mostly rice, with a little bit of organs thrown in. Where's the meat? Holy Cow! Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they generally are built to eat a diet of exclusively meat (and other animal organs etc), and he's definitely having a hard time getting that nutrition from that crap food.

b) Male bengals generally get to be ~50% larger than females, so his nutritional needs are different from hers.

c) Even if you were serving him a really high quality dry food (which you are certainly not) it would still mean that he'd have to eat considerably more of the food than if it were a quality wet food, because there is always quite a bit of filler in dry food. Of course this doesn't bode well for your female either on that diet. So I'm back to wondering why you chose that food in particular.

That said, full disclosure, I feed mine a combination of wet and dry. I do that because it is a compromise, and with my schedule and life it sometimes requires that food be left out for them for longer periods of time than would be safe if it were strictly wet food. Plus as my cats are getting older, they have very strong opinions about what they want to be fed. But I do get them really good stuff, and 50% of it is wet and/or raw.

If your cats insist on "swapping" when they are fed different foods, then what you may have to do is feed the separately (in different rooms). I've had to do that before with other cats I've owned. But you need to do a LOT better with him nutritionally, for sure. Don't blame him for being hungry and waking you up etc., you've got to be the one to fix this.

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The little monsters 3

By the way, here is a handy guide for evaluating food:

http://www.littlebigcat.com/nutrition/s ... -pet-food/

I've grown a bit more skeptical of this, particularly after the Blue Buffalo debacle a couple years back, so I think it makes a lot of sense to also use your eyes and nose when evaluating, particularly canned food. If the food in the can looks like it might be palatable to you, and you can recognize the ingredients as being quality meat (i.e., you can identify the meat and it looks human-grade), and your nose tells you that it's decent stuff, then it probably is.

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The little monsters 3

All cat foods have feeding recommendations. My bengal eats all the time, sort of. He's a grazer! He isn't happy with three meals a day. Every time he wakes up from a nap, he heads straight to his bowl. Your bengal isn't full grown yet so you should probably not limit the amount of food he eats. That is ... as long as he is healthy and there isn't a tapeworm or something else going on.

Hello Paw Friends,

I really appreciate your replies. It has been more than helpful!! I understand that I have changes to make in terms of his diet so have taken your feedback very sincerely and will apply them :)

Thanks again for all the helpful tips !!

Keep us posted.