Just because a cat lives to an old age without ever eating high quality cat food doesn’t mean it’s good for them. Giving your cat premium food not only adds years to their life, but life to their years.
This is no different from modern human beings, who often eat processed foods and other unhealthful items in abundance, but can still live to be quite old. However, choosing this sort of lifestyle makes it much more likely that you’ll contract illness or develop uncomfortable issues in your body.
At Snappy Tom, we always use real chicken or fish as our number one ingredients, as by-products are just fillers that don’t offer any nutritive value. By-products are the remnants of animals after the higher quality cuts have been removed. By-products often have bits of head, sinew, organs, feet, bone, or scraps. Of course in the wild, cats would naturally get some bone or organ in their diet from eating an entire mouse or whatever else they catch, and experts generally agree that finely ground bone is a good addition to cat’s diets.
What’s important is that these ingredients are listed on the label of your cat food, rather than just being in there without being mentioned. Also, if by-products are included, it should be accompanied by a high-quality cut of meat, like real chicken or fish.
Cat food manufacturing plants are rumored to do some highly questionable things when it comes to making cat food, such as using livestock that has diseases, or at the worst dead zoo animals and animals that have been euthanized.
Because our products are processed in our own facilities and not assigned to cheaper third-party processors, we are able to maintain strict quality control over everything we do.
Our pet food is processed in the same facilities as human grade food, and is therefore approved by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. This is in contrast to the old fashioned ‘feed grade’ kibble that can contain by-products, chemicals, fillers and other ingredients defined as unfit for human consumption. We take pride in this distinction and believe it speaks to the quality and integrity of the products we put to market.
For these reasons, while a named by-product can be acceptable, we urge you to choose a recipe with whole, named meats, and stay away from unnamed by-products.