What is the best type of food for your cat?

Q: I am getting many mixed answers when asking what I should feed my cat. It seems everyone I ask gives me a different answer (vet, animal control officer, cat owners). I have a 1-year-old calico who is overweight. She eats about 1 to 1½ cups of dry weight control food daily and no wet food. — Margaret Knoll, St. Paul, Minn.

A: These people gave you these answers because they were satisfied with the way their own cat did on that particular food. All cats react differently to different types of food, just like humans. Each cat will react differently to a prepared diet.

After a lifetime of feeding hundreds of cats, I have learned that a cat on a diet of dry food will usually be overweight, shed quite a bit more than normal and throw up a lot of hairballs, and produce very voluminous stools. I have also had cats on a dry food diet that were in spectacular condition.

When I kept cats on a diet of raw food, every one of them was in great shape and had very small stools, so we used very little cat litter. However, the raw food was really expensive for me to continue to use and I have found that if I keep my cats on a diet of just canned food then it is a nice compromise between the raw diet and the dry food diet. To my eye they are not in as great shape as they would be on a raw diet, but still are in much better condition than when I kept cats on a diet of just dry food.

My point here is that rather than just listening to all these different people spouting their opinions, you should try feeding all these different foods to your own cat and see which one fits your budget and lifestyle. This way, you can make the best choice based on the results that you see yourself.

Q: We have a double yellow head Amazon parrot now for the last seven years. He lives in a big cage in our den where we spend most of our time. We cover his cage around 8 p.m. even though he is still awake. We read on the internet that a parrot must have 12 hours of sleep every night since they live on the equator, so the light cycle is 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. Would it be better for him if we put him in a different room of the house so that he can sleep for 12 hours? — Danielle Mckenzie, Portland, Ore.

A: What you read on the internet about parrots needing 12 hours of