Cat food is available in fish, chicken, duck, lamb, venison, and beef flavors (plus probably more that I’m not aware of), but I’ve never seen pork-flavored cat food. How come? Is pork bad for cats? Ours will certainly beg if we have pork chops for dinner, and they got a tiny bite of bacon on Christmas day, which they devoured. (I didn’t give them much because I was worried about the sodium content).
For that matter, how come no one makes mouse-flavored cat food?
It’s quite obvious that it’s because cats in the wild have no hope of downing a pig, therefore catfood only comes in meat flavours that cats could catch and kill in the wild, ie chicken, fish, duck, sheep, cow, deer… or would that be moose?
And mouse is less a main course than an appitiser. It’s important to avoid mixing up the courses and offending your cat.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen duck-flavored cat food. And they make beef, I don’t think a cat could take down a cow! To be realistic, it should be mouse, rabbit, sparrow, fish and occasionally squirrel flavored foods. Maybe cricket and June bug, too.
That’s a good point! Why not pork? My guess would be that it would be too expensive. We humans eat pretty much every part of the pig, so there probably isn’t a ready supply of scraps, unlike with other animals that we waste significant parts of.
Because it takes a fairly skilled surgeon to skin and butcher a mouse?
All I can say is, you’ve hit on a question I’ve asked myself many times. The best answer would be an enquiry to the manufacturers. You’ve inspired me to make it, and I will report back.
ENugent, what a damned interesting question. And I’ve never thought of this before.
Betcha I’ll be up nights wondering from now on, though.
This may tie with my all-time frustration stumper that lasted for two years. Namely, if they call residents of Nigeria Nigerians, then what do they call residents of Niger?
I eventually found out they’re called Nigeriens (note the frenchish e instead of a) But lord did I wonder in the meantime.
In the UK you can easily get duck and rabbit catfood – I occasionally send some rabbit back to my inlaws’ cats as a treat. You can also get salmon flavor (as opposed to tuna or generic ‘fish’ flavor).
I think the deal with mouse flavor is simply that mice, being small creatures with not a lot of meat on them, would be expensive to raise and process in sufficient bulk, considering what a can of catfood costs and how many mice you’d need for each one. Besides, let the fat kitties go catch their own damn mice.
Most hot dogs do not contain non-skeletal meats since they are required to state this on the package and it grosses out consumers. However, this is not true of some brands of chorizo and meat loafs (e.g. pickle loaf, pimento loaf, etc.)