Why no mouse flavor?

This popped into my head while I was driving.

You have chicken flavor, beef (do wild cats attack and eat cows?), turkey, lamb, even fish. Yet the one animal that cats eat aren't made into a flavor.

Why is that?

Come to think of it, why is there no snake flavored food, or gourmet insect flavor??

Because pet foods are marketed to their human parents, and are primarily made from the garbage of the garbage of the human food industry.

There is mouse sold as pet food. They can be purchased whole frozen from places like RodentPro, or ground, at places like Hare-Today.


ETA: The largest pet food manufacturer in the world is Nestle-Purina (apart from Purina brands, among others, they own Beneful, Fancy Feast and Friskies). I believe Proctor & Gamble is next (they own Eukanuba, Iams, Natura (which is Evo, California Natural, Innova and others); Del Monte is the 3rd largest (with 9Lives, Kibbles n Bits, Meow Mix, Milk Bone, Pounce, Snausages). I believe Mars, Inc. is the 4th largest producer (they own Nutro, Pedigree, Sheba, Whiskas - and Royal Canin). Colgate-Palmolive owns Hill's. None of them have any incentive to make species-appropriate foods; these companies benefit at a minimum from purchasing power for the chemicals used in the foods or they're also able to put their waste products as a result of production for human products to use in pet food.

They would have to pay me a lot of money to find out what a mouse tastes like and replicate it.  There are people who have eaten snake at roundups, of course they say it taste like chicken.  Everything that people don't normally eat always taste like chicken.

I've had rattlesnake.  It most definitely did NOT taste like chicken!  Let alone the texture is totally different.

sivyaleah said:

I've had rattlesnake.  It most definitely did NOT taste like chicken!  Let alone the texture is totally different.

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Tasted like alligator to me.

LDG is right. Humans buy cat food, not cats. Humans buy what sounds good to them.

I believe one company that caters to humans who feed their cat raw sold ground mice, but has since discontinued selling it. I think ground mice smelled really bad--worse than tripe.
And LDG is 100% right: humans buy cat food and as such the audience for pet food is humans, so that's who the marketing is geared too. (Baby food use to have salt in it solely because manufacturers discovered parents tasted the food before giving it to their child. Babies can't really taste salt until around 4 months of age.)

I never really understood adding onion to the baby food that is made for the little ones just starting to eat solid foods.  It's been years since mine were babies but I know there is one with onion it.