[spirite]

BFF tuna & chicken

Although my kitties don't seem to like actual tuna too much (though they love tuna juice), I'm thinking of trying this. There are two tuna & chicken flavors. One is 4EVA and the other is Chuckles. Does anyone know what the difference is? Is one pate and one chunks?

 

[LadyK]

I believe the 4eva is shreds/chunks in gravy and the chuckles is flaked in aspic.

 

[spirite]

I'm frustrated. Small rant:

My suddenly super finicky little Celia is making her mommy's life supremely difficult. She won't eat the same food twice in one day or for two days in a row and sometimes, after loving a food the first 3 or 4 times, she won't touch it anymore, so I'm looking for a variety. She'll only eat chicken and turkey 3 or 4 times a week; what she really likes is whitefish.

However, cat food manufacturers are so into these human-type foods (chunks in gravy, "stews," "entrées," etc.) that despite the huge variety, if your kitties only eat pate, like mine, the options are pretty limited. If there's a flavor my girls like that isn't pate, I need to put it in the food processor, then take 2 knives, scissor-fashion, to it, followed by mashing with the back of a spoon before they'll eat it.

And then there's my pet peeve: vegetables, especially carrots. What exactly do carrots add to a cat's diet that they're in so many grain-free foods? My girls won't touch them, even in pate. I bought something today (I don't remember what - I bought 4 or 5 different brands in various flavors) that has spinach in it. That means I was desperate.

I think I've bought 10 or 12 brands in various flavors in the past 3 weeks or so and found 3 winners: MaxCat oceanfish, Blue Wilderness turkey, and Wellness Core chicken, turkey & chicken liver. This last she absolutely inhaled, mostly I think because of the texture - it had very few little bits of bone. For the other two, half of the can goes to waste because once she runs into too many pieces of bone, she won't eat any more.

The only Wellness Core fish flavor has salmon, and she literally backs away from a plate if she sniffs salmon. I bought it anyway, hoping that maybe the other flavors will mask the salmon - we'll see.

Sigh.

 

[spirite]

Thanks, LadyK! I may try the 4EVA then. I've tried other aspic/consomme foods and they turned their noses up at them.

 

[marie73]

Merrick has a soft, pate style called Cowboy Cookout.

I don't have a food processor, but shouldn't it turn any kind of cat food into pate/mush?

 

[Jacq]

I had the opposite problem for a long time - Io only ate shreds and chunks, and I could not, for the life of me, find anything but paté in the 13 oz cans.

Merrick also make a "California Roll" fish flavour in he same line as Cowboy Cookout. The Wellness (not core) makes a pretty firm paté that comes in about 400 flavours, lots with fish.

Have you tried Tiki Cat? It was a huge hit here but I don't like the weird can size (and I try to limit Io's fish meals to about 10%, since she turns into a horrible monster if she gets too much).

 

[spirite]

Oh my threads have been mushed. Momentary confusion!

Marie73, one would think that! That's what I thought when I bought it specifically for this purpose. But it always leaves some pieces and never quite gets to pate.

Marie and Jacq, thanks for the suggestions. I did look at the Merrick, and they all have that favorite ingredient...:?

I also bought Blue Wilderness chicken & trout and am keeping my fingers crossed.

Well, the up side of this quest is that the kitties at the adoption center at PetSmart continue to get a lot of donations of canned food. :catmilk

 

[lovetimesfour]

Merrick Before Grain is a good pate. comes in four or five flavors. No fruits and veggies. By Nature 95 % is a good pate, also no fruits and veggies. They both have carrageenan though.

By Nature Organic, is good, too.

 

[laurief]

Have you tried the EVO 95% meat varieties? They contain little to no veggies and come in a variety of flavors (all pate).

Be careful about feeding too much fish. Not only is it highly addictive, causing your cat to reject anything BUT fish, but there is also a significant concern regarding mercury poisoning with diets too high in fish content.

I have found that a kitchen blender does a much more thorough job of pate-izing canned cat foods than a food processor can. Just toss whatever canned food you want to puree into the blender with a small amount of hot water and let 'er rip.

Laurie

 

[lovetimesfour]

Have you tried the EVO 95% meat varieties? They contain little to no veggies and come in a variety of flavors (all pate).

Be careful about feeding too much fish. Not only is it highly addictive, causing your cat to reject anything BUT fish, but there is also a significant concern regarding mercury poisoning with diets too high in fish content.

I have found that a kitchen blender does a much more thorough job of pate-izing canned cat foods than a food processor can. Just toss whatever canned food you want to puree into the blender with a small amount of hot water and let 'er rip.

Laurie

Agree with little or no fish. Not just because of the mercury. Too high in phosphurous, and more likely to cause allergic reactions because of the histamines.

I feed no fish.

 

[Jacq]

I have a photo of Io after eating one of the Merricks, I think "Grammy's Pot Pie" - she also picks around the carrots the peas. It was sooo funny seeing this sad little pile of veg in the bottom of her bowl. If she doesn't eat them, they can't hurt her, I figure

Not only is it highly addictive, causing your cat to reject anything BUT fish,

This is why we limit our cat's food - the 'little monster' comment up there. The health benefits are a nice added bonus (though I don't think those apply to the crustaceans/shellfish, which are also limited in her diet.)

When I was trying lots of different foods, I gave her an Almo Nature tuna and shrimp flavour. She loved it, but then was really picky afterwords for a while. A few weeks ago, my partner gave her a single shrimp from the dinner plate, and she did a Jekyll and Hyde thing - she just MROWED at us for an hour, and wouldn't even look at her dinner plate. (Needless to say, she was sent to bed without supper that night).

 

[spirite]

Thanks so much to everyone for the suggestions and health information.

So far, she still does like chicken and turkey, just not too often. But I'll remember to limit the amount of fish.

She wouldn't touch the Merrick Before Grain tuna; I'm going to try the chicken and the turkey.

I am trying to train her that she gets two tries. If she doesn't like a new food, I'll give her something I know she likes and if she turns that down, that's it. She has gone to bed hungry a few times, but she's learning. This morning, I tried another new food: Canyon Creek Ranch trout & crawfish. This is the one that has spinach - and sweet potatoes. She took a few licks. I tried again an hour later. Same reaction. I guess she's just not going to eat her vegetables.

Neither my local Petco or Petsmart carries EVO, By Nature or Almo Nature, but I discovered that there's a natural foods pet store near me, so I'll go poke around there.

I tried Tiki Cat a long time ago and had no success, but maybe it was the particular flavors I tried. I'll give it another go.

I found a brand online called Petite Cuisine. Has anyone heard of it?

 

[lovetimesfour]

My Bridge Angel Boy loved Petite Cuisine Sesame chicken. It's not grain free (has rice in it) and I always picked the carrots out. I feed mostly grain and fruit and veggie free foods but there are a couple foods in the rotation that have peas, carrots or potatoes. I always pick them out.

 

[spirite]

My Bridge Angel Boy loved Petite Cuisine Sesame chicken. It's not grain free (has rice in it) and I always picked the carrots out. I feed mostly grain and fruit and veggie free foods but there are a couple foods in the rotation that have peas, carrots or potatoes. I always pick them out.

Oh, rats. More carrots. I really don't get it. Do any cats actually like them? So far, it seems like they all either leave them on the plate or have wait staff who pick the offending vegetable out of their food for them.

There are even cases where the carrot picker-out then provides room service.

The owner of that job will remain unnamed, although she believes she could provide a justification. :crazy

 

[lovetimesfour]

Oh, rats. More carrots. I really don't get it. Do any cats actually like them? So far, it seems like they all either leave them on the plate or have wait staff who pick the offending vegetable out of their food for them.

There are even cases where the carrot picker-out then provides room service.

The owner of that job will remain unnamed, although she believes she could provide a justification. :crazy

Carrots are cheap, is one reason. Also, because pet food manufacturers count on humans not being aware that cats are carnivores and derive no nutrition from vegetables. They load the foods up with them so the human will think "wow this must be a great food look at all the fruits and veggies". Fruits and vegetables are good for humans, but do not benefit cats. They are filler, not much better than grain.

 

[cinderflower]

i just bought a black and decker food processor for $10 at target 15 years ago and it still turns any kind of cat food into mush, if they pick around the chunks, but they've stopped doing that. i've mostly found the kinds of foods they like though, and i don't try to feed them anything with chunks of vegetables in it.

they loooove tiki cat, unfortunately, the chicken and salmon. they also have chicken and tuna though. they like fussie cat a lot too, it's primarily fish. it isn't pate though. hound and gatos is pate, and it's 98% meat. i think it's pretty high in fat though. my cats seem to like the rabbit the best.

a little hunger goes a long way sometimes. while it's not a good idea to let a cat go 24 hours without eating, mine could never hold out longer than missing dinner. if they learn that's all there is (because sometimes that's true! ) then they're more likely to eat what's there. i made the mistake of, "oh here, houdini, you don't like that, let me get something you do," until i realized that he was just going to do it every meal time because he could. a lot of people freak out if their cat hasn't eaten in 8 hours, but that long isn't going to hurt anyone.

he was also the fish addict, and i have scaled any of the fish flavors way down. tiki cat chicken and salmon is a treat and they know it. you can do this though and i've found it to work very well: cat-man-doo sells bonito flakes in an 8 oz. shaker for 7.99. it's crushed as well so you don't have to use very much. it's very smelly and works on almost anything he won't eat. i know if he walks away from it still, it's probably disgusting. lol

 

[shouldigetacat]

Can you get an independent pet store to bring in some canned ziwipeak for you? No veggies, and it is a hard pate type. "Raw" but I would assume since it's canned that it is still pressure cooked. I've personally never met a dog or cat that won't eat it.

 

[spirite]

I tried the blender, as Laurie suggested, but it wasn't any more successful than the processor. It's probably partly because there just wasn't enough food in it - one 5.5 oz. can. My girls together will only go through about 1 1/2 cans in a day.

The other issue is that the Celia cat (that's how I refer to her when I'm annoyed) loves Fancy Feast oceanfish & cheddar ("cheddar"), a desperation purchase a few weeks ago when this finickiness started. The stray that I feed gets FF, and when I saw the cheddar flavor, I thought she might eat it since she likes dairy. Alas. She does. The stuff is SO nasty that it might take an ax to make pate out of it. Yech. But other chunked or flaked foods don't come out the way my girls like it either. To give you an idea, I add water to Wellness Core, which is the smushiest pate I've found.

I went to the natural pet food store today to get some more of the Wellness chicken, but I didn't have a lot of time to look around. I did see that they had Evo, BFF, and Tiki Cat. Shouldigetacat, I haven't heard of ziwipeak, but I'll look for that too.

My Margaux is like your kitty, cinderflower, and if she won't eat it, Celia almost certainly won't. I tried to sneak the Wellness salmon in this morning. Thank goodness they wanted nothing to do with it, because the smell nearly knocked me over.

The Celia cat is learning the hard way. When I say "That's it. No more food," she'll either take a few licks or just go away and not ask for anything else. She has gone 12-16 hours without food a few times, and that's fine, especially since she's too chubby. But sometimes, she only eats for a total of 5 or 6 minutes all day. Then I feel bad.

 

[cinderflower]

i blame fancy feast lol. that used to make up a large part of my cats diet, and when i first started trying different kinds, they tried to hold out for it. i finally got rid of all of it and didn't bring any more in the house. same way with dry--at first houdini was going to try to hold out for it and i got rid of all i had.

i felt a little bad at first too when one wouldn't eat, but mine will eat eventually regardless. it was almost like he would glare at me too, like, "**** you for making me eat this," lol. it gets easier. there are some kinds they will never like, but after a couple of months experimenting, you should have it narrowed down to a few. sometimes they go through a phase where they'll eat it, then they won't, then it's okay again so i don't know.

 

[spirite]

Yep, once they finish the stuff in the cabinet, there will be no more. Yech, yech, yech. They might be doing the phase thing with it though, because they didn't show a lot of interest the last couple of times. That would make it easier to eliminate it from their menu, I guess, though I feel like cats only have a long memory for things that are potentially hazardous to them (like anyone in a white labcoat).

I run into a former student at PetSmart every now and then, and he's very knowledgeable about cat food. Yesterday he was at Petco, which confused me. It turns out he actually works for Blue. When I told him about the FF oceanfish & "cheddar" thing, he said it would probably be healthier to just give the cat a wedge of real cheddar.