firefighterjake said:
Well I know this is about dog food but since Hass mentioned it . . . what do folks feed their cats for "good food." I've always just fed them the cheap stuff in the past . . . but I would be willing to spend more if it makes a difference.
Jake, the primary trouble with the cheap food for cats is that it's half carbs, which they can't digest properly and ends up either going to waste or to fat. Check out this site,
www.catinfo.com, which is the most comprehensive treatment of cat nutrition I know of.
You want as grain-free a food as you can find, for one thing. I feed Innova Evo canned, which is closer to the raw diet cats ought to have but which most of us can't manage, than any other. Another good one but much more expensive is Wellness, which also has some grain-free varieties. These carbs get put into a lot of otherwise very good cat food (Felidae is one, California Natural another, Wysong, and there are others) because pure protein is hard to make into a (necessarily cooked) food that holds together in a can and isn't slop. Dry food is always higher in carbs, and correlated with urinary tract problems particularly in neutered male cats, for reasons nobody's been able to really figure out.
Cat nutrition is harder to figure out because they're not ominvores, like dogs, and nobody wants to bother putting money into studying it seriously since cats haven't the commercial value working dogs have. So it's more of a crap shoot, so to speak. Still, we do know some things, and most commercial cat foods don't conform to what we know.
If for no other reason, bear in mind that the horrible melamine poisoning a few years ago that resulted in a terrible number of unnecessary pet deaths was from a completely unnecessary ingredient -- basically, flour -- bought cheap from unscrupulous Chinese sources by mass-market pet food makers to make the cat food look more appealing to *human beings* and not for any reason relating to animal needs. Not a single one of the premium makers use this crap and none of them were involved in that disaster. That alone is reason enough, IMO, to pay the extra $$ for the good stuff.