My boy had a brush with FUS - he did not require surgery thankfully but was quite sick and was put on a prescription diet for a while, which is what prompted me to look very carefully at what I was feeding my cats (well, that and the asian pet food poison scare...).

I decided the stuff my vet had me giving him was essentially acidified garbage... I looked at the ingredients it had all of the nasty byproducts, glutens and carbs that probably caused his problem in the first place with acidifiers thrown in to counter act it all.... So I did lot of research, a lot of searching and decided, against the advice of the vet to take him off of the prescription diet.

I switched my two to a 100% meat based canned diet and have had no problems at all since then (and yes they both now have beautiful, very soft, very shiny coats and no bad breath - which was not true on the prescription diet...). I tried a water fountain, but both mine totally ignore it - well at least they didn't drink from it..... The girl used to get big kicks out of taking it apart and pulling the charcoal filter out to play with.... The boy gets a splash of extra water in his food at each meal to force him to get a bit of extra hydration.