How many times a day should you feed a kitten?
Weaned kittens need more attention than adult kittens. During the kitten’s growth, it is necessary to provide it with a wholesome food in order to provide it with all the necessary nutritional values. Wholesome meals will contribute to the proper growth of a small kitten and will be the basis for the proper development of the skeleton and the building block of the whole body. High-quality, well-composed food is one of the most important things to pay attention to when having a developing kitten. The second thing is to plan a proper feeding schedule for your little kitten.
How many times a day to give a meal?
When we have a small kitten that has recently been weaned from mother’s milk, you should first choose a wholesome meal. It is worth mentioning that small kittens lose the ability to digest lactose, which is contained in milk, as they grow. Therefore, after weaning from mother’s milk, we do not give kittens, as well as large cats, milk.
When a small kitten is in the growth phase, its demands for building materials are many times greater. Therefore, small kittens should have a meal delivered several to several times a day. We should not feed a small kitten like an adult, e.g. giving it food only 2 times a day. The meal should be divided into several smaller portions. This will contribute to better digestion, faster absorption of nutrients from food, and prevent too much overloading of the stomach.
A complete meal for a small cat
There are many good dry and wet foods on the market, as well as we can prepare a meal ourselves based on RAW (or BARF) nutrition, the latter being the most recommended. The preparation of raw meals provides the best quality nutrition for cats during their growth and adulthood.
When you decide to feed with dry or wet food, you should choose one that will be properly composed and wholesome. You can read more about dry food in the article Dry food – what to pay attention to?. In addition, it should be borne in mind that in the case of providing meals to a small kitten in the form of dry food, it must have constant access to fresh, clean water.
A good solution is to soak the food with water to get the consistency of a mush. This method is great for kittens that have recently been weaned. When our kitten is getting bigger and his teeth will be strong enough to cope with dry food, then we can give up giving soggy food.
Constant access to food
If our pet is one of the cats that will be great at feeding ad li bitum, this is a very good solution. In other words, it is providing the kitten with constant access to food for 24 hours, which will contribute to the elimination of demanding for a meal. We as a caretaker only observe whether the bowl is empty and refill the amount in the bowl. This type of feeding works well with dry food. If we feed the cat with raw meat or canned food, we also need to measure the amount of food in the bowl so that they are regularly eaten and there are no putrefactive processes, especially in the case of thermally processed wet food.
Looking at the nature of the cat and its lazy lifestyle, serving meals continuously makes sense. Cats can take food from a bowl up to several times a day, in small portions. Therefore, when the cat is hungry, it goes straight to the bowl and does not constantly ask for food.
