Hill's Science Plan Sensitive Stomach & Skin Adult Dry Cat Food with Chicken - 7kg

Sensitive Stomach & Skin Adult Dry Cat Food with Chicken is a complete dry food for adult cats, made with chicken. It is the everyday Science Plan recipe for this life stage, sold without a prescription.

Key Features

• Digestion: Prebiotic fibre to feed the gut's own useful bacteria, with highly digestible ingredients.
• Skin: Vitamin E and omega-6 fatty acids.
• Heart And Kidneys: Taurine and balanced minerals.
• Age Range: Adult cats.
• Pack Size: A single 7kg bag.

Sensitive Stomach And Skin, Realistically

• This is a highly digestible everyday recipe with prebiotic fibre and added vitamin E and omega-6. For a pet that is simply a bit delicate on ordinary food, that is often enough and it is a sensible first thing to try.
• It is not a diagnosis. Sensitive stomach is a description, not a condition, and the causes range from eating too fast to inflammatory bowel disease, parasites and food allergy.
• Skin is the same. Itching, licking paws, recurring ear infections, scurf or bald patches point to fleas, mites, infection or allergy far more often than to the food, and in this climate skin disease is the commonest reason pets end up at the vet. More than a couple of weeks of itching is a vet visit.

Why Cat Food Looks Like This

• Cats are obligate carnivores: they cannot make enough taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A or vitamin D for themselves and have to take them in ready-made from food. That is why a complete cat food is not just a dog food with a different picture on the bag, and why cats should never be fed a vegetarian diet.
• Taurine is the one most people have heard of. Without enough of it cats develop heart muscle disease and go blind, which is why it appears on the front of every bag. Any complete cat food supplies enough, so this is a reassurance rather than a differentiator.
• The balanced minerals Hill's mention are about keeping magnesium, phosphorus and calcium in proportion rather than simply low, because both too much and too little cause problems.

Cats And Water

• Cats evolved to get most of their water from prey and have a weak thirst drive, so a cat on dry food alone often runs mildly short of water. That matters for the urinary tract and the kidneys, which are the two things most likely to shorten a cat's life.
• Practical fixes: more bowls than you think you need, away from the food and the litter tray; a wide shallow bowl so the whiskers stay dry; and a fountain, since many cats drink more from moving water. Adding some wet food to the day is the single most effective change.
• In UAE heat and air conditioning, check the bowls twice a day. Cats drink less from water that has sat out and gone warm and dusty.

Feeding, Storage And The Range

• How much: start from the chart on the pack by weight, then adjust to what you can feel. You should find the ribs easily under a thin layer of cover. Weigh the food rather than using a cup, and count treats towards the day's total.
• Changing over: move across gradually over about seven days. A sudden switch is the usual cause of a loose stool that then gets blamed on the food.
• Storage here: keep the bag sealed, cool and out of sunlight and use it within about six weeks of opening. UAE heat turns the fats in kibble stale faster than the packaging assumes, and that is the usual reason a pet goes off a food it used to like. Keep it in its own bag rather than tipping it into a bin.
• Who makes it: Hill's was founded by an American vet, Mark Morris Senior, who formulated a kidney diet for a guide dog in the 1940s. They run feeding trials on their recipes, which is why they can say clinically proven where most brands cannot, and the main reason the range costs what it does.
• Science Plan is not Prescription Diet: this is the everyday range for healthy pets. Prescription Diet is the separate therapeutic range for diagnosed conditions, sold on a vet's recommendation. The names overlap confusingly and they are not interchangeable, so if your vet has set a diet, ask them before changing it.

Good To Know

• This listing is the 7kg pack.
• Complete dry food. Nothing needs adding to a complete diet.
• Keep fresh water available at all times.
• Store sealed, cool and out of sunlight. Use an opened bag within about six weeks.
• Science Plan is a non-prescription everyday food, not a veterinary therapeutic diet.
• Made by Hill's Pet Nutrition, part of Colgate-Palmolive.