I would venture to say that cats like ham and bacon for the salt.
In a previous life, I was heavily involved in making a leading brand cat food. The “meat-by-products” found on the label was largely made up of pig stuff.
I’ll go into more details if you want.
All the cats I’ve known would kill for ham. Itv was The Food of the Gods. Midnight actually cries “Ham!” when she wants any lunch meat. All our cats will gladly eat Pork, too.
It clearly has nothing to do with what animals “a Cat Will Eat in the Wild”. I can’t imagine even a troop of cats downing a wild pig. But they love the meatr. And that argument doesn’t explain the many Beef and Steak cat foods. Or Deep-dea Tuna, for that matter.
Please do! This could make an interesting “Ask the” thread!
basically there is dry vs wet food. I’ll just provide some details of the wet stuff.
There is a large table that has workers throwing frozen meats into a huge grinder. Usually fish (cheap tuna types) would get thrown in here if the recipe called for it. Large vats of “poultry-by-product” would then get added. The bins are about 3000 gallons and can be anything except feces, feathers, beaks or feet. Here also is where the vats of cow or pig parts get added. The pig stuf is usually a slurry of left over pig…just like the poultry above. Also if a slurry wasn’t called for, actual organs got added; livers, spleens, lungs.
It got all cooked togther with a bunch of other materials for consistency, taste, and general health of the cats (vitamins, minerals, gaur gum, TiO2); then loaded into cans and cooked with a huge pressure cooker (the one I worked with was 6 stories tall).
THe cans were then dumped on a conveyor to be properly labeled, packaged and shipped.
I got more details, but you get the idea.
Well, yuck! I guess the slurry part is the animal byproducts on the label. I usually don’t gross out about odd cuts of meat but someting about having it all dumped into a huge vat gets to me.
Do you have cats? Do you feed them the food you helped to make? If not, what do you feed them?
I don’t have any now, but when I did, I fed them the brand I worked with (I didn’t get any perks, discounts, cut rates or whatever). The cats loved the stuff.
The large vats of pinkish white meat slurry was interesting to see. I wasn’t grossed out by it, and it didn’t have a particular odor.
I’ll check when I get home, but I’m pretty sure one of my cat’s food is pork-based (it’s prescription, one flavor only!).
I can’t find an ingredients list on the website, but I know it’s on the cans.
Were there bones in the slurry?
There’s not supposed to be any large bone chips. I don’t remember seeing any (not that I looked hard) in the slurry. THere probably was ground up chicken bones in the poultry slurry, less likely in the pig stuff. Again, I can’t be for sure. Any bones in the final product were usually pretty small and would get cooked down to a very soft consistency during the pressure cooking. If large chips were found during quality checks, the whole lot could be tossed.
The Neville kitties are Jewish, so they don’t eat pork. They do eat (and love) gefilte fish.
Well, their food isn’t kosher, so they aren’t eating anything that is obviously a pork product. If there were pork- or ham-flavored cat food, I wouldn’t buy it for them. And they aren’t going to get ham or bacon that we’re cooking, since we keep kosher. I do cook Morningstar Farms veggie bacon, but I’m not sure that’s OK for cats, so they don’t get any.
This opinion from a Chabad rabbi seems to imply that it would be OK to feed your cats pork-based cat food even if you kept a kosher home.
I avoid feeding them anything that’s too obviously non-kosher. If it says in large type on the bag or can that the food contains non-kosher ingredients (shellfish, pork, or a mixture of meat and dairy), I won’t buy it, though I don’t read the ingredients list to check for those things as I would if I were buying human food. I don’t buy them special food for Passover, either.
I can see how *you’re * Jewish, so you wouldn’t want pork in the home. But I am curious- how are the cats Jewish?
I see my cat as Zen, so I don’t think you’re crazy, but still I am curious.
Our cats certainly eat pork. We had some last night, and the voraciously ate what we gave them.
They get Hanukkah presents instead of Christmas presents, and love gefilte fish, so they’re Jewish kitties 
They might be kind of Ju-Bus (who practice both Judaism and Buddhism to some degree), though. I think the “meatloaf” position, where they tuck all their legs under them and stare off into space, might be the cat equivalent of the lotus position. I like to think they’re meditating when they do that.
The other thread had two possibilities I liked:
-
every part of the pig is used, the extra bits go into sausage
-
pigs and cats both are carriers of toxoplasmosis, which can harm babies* in utero. *
I checked the can, and the food I linked to above is indeed pork-based. The first two ingredients are pork, and pork bi-products, IIRC.