I`ve said it before on another thread but I give my young female cat two chopped day old chicks first thing each morning she seems to like them but first thing in the morning shes quite hungry, but she always has dried food available. Then late in the day (4-5pm) she gets a wet pouch/tin feed and thats it.

I don`t see why mice would be so expensive esp if bought frozen, in bulk. Chicks are about £10 for 200. To my mind, they have no added salt or sugar, they are a whole food, they are cheap and convenient and they help ensure good moisture intake.

At the moment my cats get a whole prey item 2 or 3 times a week as a treat, usually a mouse or a chick each.

In an ideal world (inc if I had the freezer space!) I would feed whole prey full time.

At 4 kg they would need about 200g+ of food per day.
An XL mouse only weighs around 30g, so one days worth of mice for both cats would be about 14 mice - even bulk buying online these cost up to 80p each; meaning it would would cost me up to £11.20 for one days worth!!

I looked at rats for two main reasons - for one thing all my research (and helpful folks on here) suggests that this type of diet should be as varied as possible, ie not just mice and chicks. And secondly rats work out cheaper by weight than mice - a day of rats would only cost around £3 if they would eat large enough ones.

Would also consider things like hamsters and gerbils, but these are even more expensive than mice.

Chicks being a by-product of the industry are dirt cheap, but wouldn't make up a complete or healthy diet by themselves.

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Colette if you have space Currys have an offer on the Norfrost 4cubic foot chest freezer, its £99 about 50cm square footprint, pretty good energy usage, they are perfect size inside to directly fit boxes from Honeybrook: quail / chicks. You can get 6 boxes in easily with space left over.

Whole quail are a good inbetweener, nowhere near as expensive as mice, a box of exlayers from honeybrook are under £20 for 6kg or about 25 birds.

I found that hamster was cheaper than mouse, at least from Kiezebrink they rough about £12/kg and mouse about £20/kg