Cat food should come in realistic flavors
Cat food should be made with meat that cats naturally hunt, like mice and songbirds, instead of things like tuna, deer, and duck. Somehow I don’t think that would go over well with cat owners though.
Edit: weird typo
66 replies
My cat can have deer flavored cat food the second he can manage to take down a deer.
i go to WF store , and the meat department said, some of the customer buys the bougie things like the unprocessed frozen venison, buffalo, liver(that is also for human consumption) or other parts for thier Pets some really are into this trend.
Sometimes I’d go by the meat department or to a butcher and ask them if that they had any of the trim or little side cut up bits left over that was suitable for my cat. Cats love that shit. and the butcher would just throw that shit away anyway.
So… like by that logic, should dog food come in crap flavor?
Cat crap. Other dog crap. My crap. Chicken crap.
vibe
Ah yes, the sophistication of Cat Fudge.
Now with added barf!
These things are already being processed for human consumption, and they're perfectly nutritious for cats.
cat food is marketed to people and not to cats. cats are broke
also, where tf do you get farmed songbirds
I assume they were not farmed.
that just makes it even less available
Ye. Ngl, I had only half understood your "farmed songbirds" sentence when I first wrote that, so my comment didn't actually make a lot of sense, sorry.
Yeah. You're probably not getting farmed songbirds, without people flipping out. I assume it's not hard to farm them, just horrible PR, because people aren't as conditioned to ignore their suffering.
Buy two pet rats and breed food forever
This is not allowed in many countries, like Germany for example.
Does it become legal if the rats are euthanised before feeding them to the cat?
I think that's how it works in the UK
I am in no place or have the qualification to give a legal answer, so this is just as far as I know from talking with people who own reptiles which are fed mice.
It is not allowed to use living animals as food, and the animals have to be put down in a humane and painless/stressless matter.
So it sounds a lot like in the Uk, yes
Here's the thing though, tuna is, for completely random reasons, absurdly tasty to cats, because it has both of their favorite flavor chemicals, that otherwise are always in different foods, in one.
So yeah, you know what? I would never want to deny my little asshole the opportunity to taste something unnaturally delicious.
"Here little girl, let your mind be blown in a way you could never experience in the wild. Now please stop eating plastic."
My cat is allergic to seafood or something. She vomits every time she eats tuna cat food, multiple different brands. Land meat is never an issue though.
My idiot is going to need a "dust bunny with small stones" flavor.
before doing this, they should focus on making appealing (to cats) prescription food because it's stressful enough when you have to put your cat on a special diet, without them having super limited options.
My cat is allergic to chicken.. chicken.. its in every cat food, even most the fish flavors.
There are chicken free (wet) cat foods out there. He doesnt eat any of them except one. My bear be eating the same shit everyday, happily, I guess. But he do stalk the toaster oven for tendies.. you gotta watch him
Tuna and deer, ok; but are you sure cats are incapable of hunting ducks?
Chickens and rabbits are also small enough that some cats might hunt them (at least when they aren't fully grown yet), and I'm pretty sure cat food with their meats does exist.
I was actually thinking of turkey, but wrote duck instead. I laughed out loud at the thought of my cat trying to take down a wild turkey.
The real reason is farming and phytosanitary needs. The animals used need to be cheap enough to make sense to feed a pet, and farmed in a way where you can be sure your product won't give cats worms or other parasites. Cats also don't really eat the hair and hide, or feathers, of animals, so you ultimately have mammal, birds, and fish as categories. We already farm mammals, birds, and fish for humans, so the systems are already there.
That being said, I used to feed my little house panther raw food, which was a little frozen gore nugget of rabbit or chicken or duck. She loved them. Loved, loved, loved them. She's caught pigeons and rats before, so it's really not that far off. It's not like either would present vastly different nutrition as compared to a mouse or a rat or song bird anyway.
I assume the issue here is how much bone and fur/feathers you want in your cat food. Butchering mice like cattle would be very labor-intensive, but I'm not sure whether that's actually an issue considering that cats already eat mice. Mouse bone and fur probably isn't very nutritious for cats though, so that would inflate the weight of cat food.
I think you'd just pour a bucket of them into an industrial blender along with some catnip and wait til it's paste ..
I like the image of a house cat taking down a full tuna now that it's got the taste. Just don't give it the taste for human
Mice can be farmed so it's viable, songbird though i'm not too sure so it would be a bit hard.
Maybe they should also have something like cricket or grasshopper. Or maybe cockroach flavour 💀
Ha, I forgot about insects! We also need to add spider and house centipede to the lineup.
Cat food flavor "Oops, all centipedes!"
Open the can and all the centipedes scatter.
Oh, so interactive food! The cat gets to hunt them on their own. Like reptiles do when live fed, which is one of the reasons humans farm mice (aside from laboratory experiments)
You can get cat food with crickets as the protein.
Song bird farming would be illegal in the US
Catfood actually comes in three flavours: Gills and Fins, Beaks and Feet, Lips and arseholes.
Edited for autocorrect
"Oops! all cloaca"
Lots of good arguments in here for duck and tuna, but what the hell is Friskers thinking with Turkey and Cheese?
"Maybe them cats wanna turkey and cheese sammich!"
"OK, grandpa, let's get you to bed..."
"Tarnations, boy! Im tellin' ya they want a dat gummed sammich! Turkey and cheddar! Hold the bread! "
It mimics their natural diet in the wild of hunting roaming wheels of parmesan and violent flightless birds 10 times their size.
The cats here have had more than enough songbird flavored food. There are no more songbirds here.
I wouldn't mind the mice but songbirds? Too artistic to be sacrificed for my fat cat's potential enjoyment, sorry. 🤷♂️
Have you actually read their lyrics?
Yeah it's all porn, kinda lame really, but hey sex sells so no wonder they've built an industry around it.
The birds are doing 2 Live Crew covers!
I saw some cat food at a specialty store that claimed it was made of 100% rabbit.
My cats wouldn't know what to do with a mouse if they had one. I had a cat (RIP Tasha) whose favorite thing was turkey. Every time I had some in the oven, she went apeshit.
gecko
Cats don’t buy the food.
Mine do! I told them I was such of their freeloading and got them their own fridge. They even pay rent too!
I used to feed my cat raw quails. Obviously they were feather free and I would tear them apart just so there wasn't a mess on the floor but the cat very much enjoyed his meals.
Why feather free? I think it's also good for the digestive system.
Because I would buy them from an Asian supermarket in a frozen 12 pack. I would also buy mature chickens for $3 a bird and cut them in quarters and hand feed those to my dog. It was very good for teaching him to not bite me when crushing the bones right next to my hand.
Food food should come with non-marginal nutrient value.
I can’t be the only one who has thoughts like OP‘s without taking a shower.
Is this ADHD associated?
Chicken: cat could theoretically take down a small one
Fish: some cats catch fish
Those are the best options imho
Some big cats catch deer too.
Cats can and will eat tuna and duck in the wild. They'd eat deer, too, if they could take one down.
Don't tuna weight over 400lbs? I'd love to see a housecat bring one of those in my front door. Maybe leave the head on the doorstep.
They don't always weigh that much and they start off fairly small.
Tuna are saltwater fish. In what environment can cats hunt saltwater fish? I don't think they could ever realistically interact.
Cats that live near ocean shallows. Egyptian Maus are known to catch them.
"Fresh Sparrow Flavour" on the bag: cat gives it five stars, owner returns it on the spot
Farming song birds for cat food sounds expensive.
It's going to cost at least 10x what you'd pay for chicken. I don't think there is enough demand for it
Why would cat owners take issue with it? I'd gladly feed her that if it was available and it's what she liked.
There was! There was a brand of mouse-based cat food.
ngl I wish keeping your cats indoors was the law. too many assholes let their furry murder machines roam and get splatted by cars and spread disease.
my cat lives indoors and is fine.
Haha the assholes have come out to downvote someone who doesn't want their shitty animals eating the birds.
fuck all y'all