Yay--she's a lucky cat to have you.

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My babies
Aber, Ragnar, Kelso (the corgi trio), Daisy (our rescue mystery-mix puppy), Ellie, Henry, Gwennie, Jezebel (the kitty quartet), Blake, Chaucer, Molly and Milton (the kittens), and Bingo the African Grey parrot

Over the Bridge:
Pippin: 1/6/08-17/5/11
Freja: 11/8/10-30/10/10
Kirby: 11/8/10-1/11/10

"Praise liberty/The freedom to obey/It's a song that strangles me/Well, don't cross the line" Billie Joe Armstrong

Personally, when I stock up up from P@H (my stand by for when they refuse to eat the better stuff I try them on ) I get Hi-Life wet, and Applaws dry.
Mine just prefer Hi-Life to Natures Menu.
Hi-Life do a fish range and a chicken range (12 pouches to a box), I have only tried the chicken range in the Natures Menu, but they all eat both ranges from Hi-Life.

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listen to the lady above! this is exactly what i do..

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I knew you were going to say that.

Hun, I really think you should take the time to learn more about cat nutrition and the different type of cat foods, and why some are better than others. There are plenty of threads on here.

Sorry, can you say that in plain English please.

At the end of the day, you do what you want to do. Plenty of people on here have told you that if you want the better cat food (and save money) you need to order online. The offering of good cat food in local shops, that is complete food, is very limited. But hey, an online shop cannot give a live show of caged animals held in substandard (often but not always) conditions. If that is your main motivation for going to go to a petshop, well, then there is no arguing.

Na, just fibre I should think (though beaks and horns possibly are a good source of certain minerals), which is why I keep harping on about being good quality food, where the by-products being used are openly declared and buying a food that contains a good ratio of by-products to meat.

Yes, the conditions of farm animals is often atrocious but don't forget that the pet food industry uses the unwanted parts of the animal destined for human consumption (as well as some other things, such as one day chicks etc), so any problem you have with the condition of the animals going into your pet food should fundamentally be a problem you have with human food.

I guess you could always buy organic (though unfortunately that doesn't always mean that they are the happy free ranging animals that the image evokes) or you buy your meat/pet products from independent farms/manufacturers who care more about their livestock. However, that bumps up the price of your food as well as that of your cats quite considerably. It also doesn't mean that they then will not use fillers of some kind (or more by-products) in order to make it more affordable (and to increase their profit margins).

Feathers are about 90% protein (keratin) and once treated are widely used in animal feed - cows, chickens, pigs, not sure how much is used in processed pet foods and how it would be declared.

Some early research:

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/24/4/399.full.pdf

and this site (scroll down) has lots of links to nutritional values:

Farm Wastes Recycling links: chicken feather uses, feathermeal, etc.

I prefer to feed them whole and attached to the animal they came from.

Very interesting cookiemum - like you, however, I would prefer the feather ratio to remain relative. Note though that in order for the feathers to be digested they need to be cooked, so in their natural raw form would just be fibre. And even once converted into feather meal, its digestibility is still lower than other meals. The mind boggles though what can be utilised now.

But I refuse to starve them Go Cat, burns and Whiskas/Felix is the only things they will eat continuously. I have tried, trust me, but they both stopped eating for days when trying higher quality brands. My girls coat became flaky on some of the better brands, when I forced her to eat them, and she started pulling her fur out even more than she already does.

The way I see it, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I wish they would eat better, but they just won't. I hate feeding my dogs HQ food, and not them!

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Photography