I feed the dry Meow Mix as a supplement...you can wet it with water if you want, but wet food always spoils quicker. Bear in mind too that canned wet foods can have small sharp bones in them. My call ducks have no problem swallowing the dry food down, but always be sure to have water for ducks if they have food in front of them.
When I was a wildlife rehabillitator, we used dry cat and dog food as staple bases for our wild animal diets. This was back in the days before all these specialized commercial diets came out. If you read "Animal Inn", a hardcover by Virginia Moe, you will get some idea of some of the things we did; it is written for youngsters as something of a non-fiction story but has tried and true methods in it. I was fortunate enough to work with Virginia while she was in her later years but still very active in animal husbandry. Anyway, the dry foods have the bone meal and meat meal that is hard to come by at a feed mill now, and they are readily available everywhere; they were easy to get at the store and a good substitute when we ran out of some of the more exotic ingredients we got from the zoo and used in combination with them.
My freebie ducks that I got last summer (which started me onto the road of call duck madness) were literally raised on moistened dry dog food. The owner who gave them to me got them as a gift and did not want them, so only had cracked corn that was too large for them. Dry dog food was a lifesaver for these guys, because she had dogs but wasn't going to buy special foods for unwanted ducks! They did very well on it until they came my way and I got them duck pellets to go with dry cat food.
