Sea Food Only?

When we switched to canned food from dry I looked over all brands and flavors at my local grocery stores for foods that did NOT contain any BHA, BHT, ethoxyquin, carrageenan, or any type of fruit or vegetable (corn, wheat, rice, soy) as a whole, as a starch or as a gluten and listed a muscle meat as the primary ingredient. This left me with a handful of flavors from Fancy Feast that met the criteria (Chicken Feast, Turkey and Giblets Feast and a few sea food based options).

Our oldest cat (12 years) will only eat the seafood based cat food. In fact the only thing we have been able to get her to eat that is not seafood based is a fully cooked rotisserie style chicken. However, I keep reading that it is bad to feed cats that much seafood, since it can cause hyperthyroidism and elevated mercury levels.

So my questions are how do I get her to eat the chicken or turkey based foods? Should I just keep feeding the sea food based foods? How likely are the problems that can be attributed to sea food based cat foods?

If you are having trouble finding cat foods that do not have any of the ingredients you don't want in them, a pet store will be your best friend.

There are many many different ways to get a cat to eat a different food, and I can't give any links right now seeing as I'm techincally at work (<__<), but some of them are to sprinkle something tasty on top (parmesan cheese, freeze dried treats, regular treats), slowly mix the two foods together or hide the new food in the old food, or go cold turkey and put down the new food and ignore any begging.

If your cat Truely won't eat anything besides fish, I would advise at least better brands, because companies like Fancy Feast use the cheapest possible fish and that means higher levels of mercury and other hard metals. :[

Hi, ScottP! Welcome to TCS!

There are several tricks that can be used to help a kitty transition from one food to the next. CatInfo.org has a great article (Transitioning) that goes into a lot of detail; I'm sure you'll find information in there that will be helpful. In the meantime, here's a short list of things you can try: drip a bit of tuna juice over the new wet food, or sprinkle catnip, Parmesan Cheese, Forti Flora flakes, fish food flakes (weird, but it works), or some crumbled up freeze-dried meat treats (Whole Life's chicken works wonderfully on my kitties) over the food.

If you'd like to find more foods that fit your parameters (which are great ones, by the way), you can use petfooddirect.com. Not only does the site have a huge variety of foods, it publishes both the ingredients lists and the percentage analysis.

Also, if you can, I'd recommend feeding your kitties a rotation of foods; this will keep him from becoming fixated on any one product (a problem if they change or stop producing it) and will protect him from potential quality control issues by diluting them. Before I switched to raw, I was feeding my cats 21 different varieties.

Good luck!

AC

Thanks for the suggestions. I may try the mixing of the seafood and other flavors first, then go from there. I'll post back results in a week or two.

Originally Posted by ScottP

Thanks for the suggestions. I may try the mixing of the seafood and other flavors first, then go from there. I'll post back results in a week or two.

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Awesome. I love it when people come back and tell us how things went!

AC

Can you get poultry with a very tiny bit of shrimp, calamari, tuna, salmon or caviar, or mix it yourself? That's how I get Jamie to eat wet food. He even deigns to eat just beef or poultry a couple of times a week now.

Originally Posted by ScottP

When we switched to canned food from dry I looked over all brands and flavors at my local grocery stores for foods that did NOT contain any BHA, BHT, ethoxyquin, carrageenan, or any type of fruit or vegetable (corn, wheat, rice, soy) as a whole, as a starch or as a gluten and listed a muscle meat as the primary ingredient. This left me with a handful of flavors from Fancy Feast that met the criteria (Chicken Feast, Turkey and Giblets Feast and a few sea food based options).

Our oldest cat (12 years) will only eat the seafood based cat food. In fact the only thing we have been able to get her to eat that is not seafood based is a fully cooked rotisserie style chicken. However, I keep reading that it is bad to feed cats that much seafood, since it can cause hyperthyroidism and elevated mercury levels.

So my questions are how do I get her to eat the chicken or turkey based foods? Should I just keep feeding the sea food based foods? How likely are the problems that can be attributed to sea food based cat foods?

Click to expand...

I would recommend buying whatever flavor (Chicken, Beef, lamb etc) and brand (Fancy Feast, Friskies, Chicken Soup For The Pet Lovers Soul, Evo etc) you want and then mix some juice from human grade tuna with it. Then slowly remove the amount of human grade tuna juicy you use with the cat food.

Just as a side note, I have never had an issue with any of my personal cats eating mainly seafood type foods. However all but one of my personal cats are female and well do not love seafood .

I would only add that you should read the ingredients in FISH based wet cat food. The kind that Ritz use to love was "adult seafood", but mackerel was the third ingredient. The first two were chicken broth and chicken (chicken liver was the fourth).
She is now on a Fancy Feast classic fish bender. If she is very hungry, she'll eat half a package of the good quality stuff (Wellness, Soulistic, Werva), but then turn up her nose/mouth as the case would be.
Ritz has a strong preference for fish, unfortunately. But she loves loves loves chicken/turkey baby food (only ingredients are chicken and water). Go figure...