Feeding Older, Toothless Cats

appreciate hearing from you if you have experience with feeding older cats
without many teeth left....

thanks...
Jan 527-0175
Mark 546-2468

Hi Marc,

One of my cats had his jaw broken by a dog a few months back and had some dietary restrictions for a while. He managed soft food just fine...except he drooled a little. We didn't even offer him any crunchies for two months. For a time, we thought the Vet was going to have to remove half his jaw bone. She told us that cats with jaw bones or teeth missing could manage to eat soft food just fine. She'd seen it lots of times. We did find some small packets of soft "crunchies" for him and I mashed them up a bit.

I've given older cats chicken stock as well, warmed up a bit and also tuna juice poured off from canned tuna when one thing or another prevented them from eating solid food.

Hope this little bit of info helps.

Stryx

Hi!

I had an elderly, toothless kitty. We successfully fed him with 100% soft canned food for years. Make sure it is soft and a bit warm (microwave) and kind of pile it up so that he can get his mouth around it. I like Innova canned food --- buy it at Friendly Feed in Fulton in the large can size, around $1.25/can.

Also adding liquid (broth, etc) can make it soft enough that he can lap it up. You have to feed these toothless ones more often.

good luck!

Hi--

I have an older cat who, when I adopted him 4+ years ago, was already 12 and toothless (he'd had to have all his teeth removed because of infection and decay after he'd been rescued off the streets).

Quite amazingly, he prefers and does just fine on dry food (I use ProPlan by unanimouis vote of the household--3 other cats besides this one). Cats apparently have very hard and tough upper palates, and can crunch dry food against it. Truth be known, even with teeth, they don't chew dry food as much as we would think, so being without teeth doesn't make much difference. (Maybe you could ask your vet about removing your cat's remaining teeth if they aren't really doing him/her any good??)

This particular cat, now 16 (by the best estimates), is the fattest of them all, and within a few months of getting him, I resorted to ProPlan Weight Management for him--and all the others love it as well, although I keep the regular formula available at all times too.

Hope this helps--I've really had no problems with this issue at all.

Nancy