Cat food for sensitive stomachs in multi-pet homes

Digestive sensitivity in cats is often down to food intolerance rather than a true allergy, and limited-ingredient or novel-protein diets tend to work best. The shared-bowl situation with your dog adds a real practical layer here — it's a common setup but it can quietly undermine everything you try to fix. Can you tell me what symptoms your Tonkinese is showing — vomiting, loose stools, or something else — how long it's been going on, and what they're currently eating?

Four months of twice-weekly vomiting on a shared supermarket dry food is a pretty clear pattern — high-cereal kibbles are a common trigger for cats with sensitive guts, and if the bowls are cross-used, you've got no control over what either animal is actually eating. Before I give you a direction, I need to know a bit about the dog — what breed, roughly how big, and is the dog showing any digestive issues too, or is it just your cat?

Classic Labrador. Right — here's the core problem: a food that suits a 30kg Lab with an iron stomach will almost certainly be wrong for a Tonkinese with sensitivities. You can't fix your cat by changing shared food, because the dog will eat the cat's food regardless and vice versa. The only workable approach is feeding the cat separately and giving your cat a food that's simple enough to calm the gut without doing any harm if the Lab occasionally gets into it. I'd point you to Applaws 100% Natural Dry Cat Food — the tuna variant. It's very high meat content, minimal grain, short ingredient list, and it's gentle enough for sensitive cats. If the Lab sneaks a handful, it won't hurt him. It also comes in a resealable bag which helps with freshness. It's straightforward, widely available on Amazon UK, and it's the kind of ingredient profile that tends to resolve this pattern of vomiting within three to four weeks.

It's genuinely the hardest part of this. The most reliable method people find is a microchip cat flap or a raised feeding station — somewhere the cat can eat that the Lab physically can't reach. A simple shelf or washing machine top does the job for most people with a Labrador. Feed your cat on a schedule rather than free-feeding, pick up the bowl when she walks away, and the dog loses his opportunity. It takes a week or two to establish but it becomes habit quickly. Without some physical separation, any diet change will be difficult to evaluate properly.

Good plan. Give it four weeks on the Applaws with consistent separation and you should see the vomiting reduce significantly. If it doesn't settle after a month of clean feeding, that would be the point to involve a vet to rule out anything else — but in my experience this setup resolves most of the time once the diet is controlled. Good luck with the Lab.