Obligatory cat picture tax.
Warning up top this gets pretty TMI about my cat's gross bowel movements, but I mean we're in a cat food subreddit surely this is par for the course. I'm also realizing in hindsight this post got a lot longer than I expected it to. Thanks if you read it all.
My cat is 9 years old, his name is Rupert. I'm aware that this is something people will chide me for, but I've never given him wet food until recently. I work weird hours and have almost always relied on an automatic dry food dispenser for his feeding to be at consistent times, and figured he was perfectly happy and healthy with his dry-only diet. I even got a running water fountain to encourage him to drink more water.
A few months ago, I took him to the vet for a checkup after my other cat passed suddenly, and the vet implied in no uncertain terms that, in his opinion, I had to be giving him wet food. Especially because he's a bit overweight (16 pounds-- I say only "a bit" because another vet once weighed him, saw he was 14, and said "Huh-- he's 14 pounds, but he's not fat, I can feel his ribs, he's just huge.") and by his metric I was also overfeeding him on dry food anyway. Idk.
So I started giving him Friskies pate along with cutting down on his dry food. This was seemingly going fine, but my cousin told me that Friskies was, according to her vet, the "McDonalds of cat food" and I should start feeding him something better for him, especially if I was concerned about his weight. She recommended the Wellness brand. I was doing that for a bit. He was being very picky about it, and after landing on what I thought was the exact flavor he liked (chicken, mince not pate), and feeding it to him for one of his two daily meals, I thought we were good. Then I noticed that he had started bootscooting, and in hindsight it's obvious that this started around when I started giving him wet food, including the Friskies not just the Wellness brand, but this wasn't apparent to me until a couple weeks in, after he also started having pure wet diarrhea. After the second day in a row of wiping his butt, I debated with friends because I was like, I mean the vet said I need to give him wet food, what should I do? And they were like, if he's having diarrhea and bootscooting and he literally never did before you started giving him wet food, maybe just cut out the wet food and go back to normal. So I did. And his bowel movements immediately went back to normal.
Cut to a couple months later. He occasionally gets dandruff, it comes and goes, and I noticed it has returned today. (Part of me is wondering in hindsight if this is a seasonal thing with the winter.) I also noticed when trimming his claws that they seemed to be a bit brittle and broken up, like there were tufts of fabric in them that I thought were just wrapped around, but were kind of stuck in the cracks of his claws. This is leading me to believe he has a general dehydration problem that the water fountain hasn't been enough to fix. But, historically, it seems after a whole life without wet food, it doesn't agree with his tummy.
All this long-winded context to say, a friend mentioned to me once cat puree pouches, like pouches that are essentially toppers for food that introduce slightly more hydration into their diet but is not an entire can of wet food. I'm looking at the Tasteful brand puree toppers, and wondering if the Tasteful brand is good, or should I be looking at a different brand, or is this a red herring and there's something else I should be looking into to help with his hydration? Maybe some kind of supplement along with the pouch?
Some added context, the dry food I give him is Purina Cat Chow Naturals, and he only really gets treats before and after getting his claws trimmed, which are those dry Temptations treats. He also gets the occasional Churu, like once a month maybe.
