Why It's Worth More to Pay for Premium Cat Food: An Experiment

A few summers ago, we had a cat food crisis - we were out of cat food and the pet store was closed. That meant there was no food for supper or breakfast for the cats unless drastic measures were taken. So I decided to do a little experiment. I decided to buy my cats a bag of what I consider to be crappy food. I'm a pet food snob and normally only feed premium brands. Let me tell you about my experiment.

I firmly believe there are three grades of pet food - high, medium, and low. Your low quality food is your Farm and Fleet type food - the main ingredient is ground corn and corn and more corn - all totally filler with no nutritional value., Your medium grade stuff that you find at places like Wal-mart - brands like Iams and Purina that are more nutritious and have more meat and less filler. Your higher grade foods are the foods that you only find at pet stores and special order like Fromms and Canidae. Working at the animal shelter, I often witnessed first hand at what a huge difference the type of food could make in an animal as far as quality of coat, stool consistency, etc when you changed a dog or cat that had been eating low grade food to a medium grade food. The difference was always very noticiable within a week.

I went to K-mart and spent WAY too much time reading ingredients labels. I quickly decided that I was NOT going to spend $13 for an 8 lb bag of Iams food when I can buy the cats' usual food (Nutro) for $11 once the pet store opened. So after much debating, I decided that since this food was only NEEDED for two days, I should just buy something I normally wouldn't and not spend more than $6 on it. I couldn't bring myself to buy the brightly colored corn corn and corn based food for $2 either.

So I settled on a bag of food, brought it home, and the experiment began. I decided since it was "average" grade food and only 3.5 pounds worth that I would feed the cats just this for the duration of the bag to prove to myself that all the things that I've preached to people about pet food for years are true.

On their normal food, the cats get each 1/3 cup of food every morning and every night. On this food, the recommended serving is over triple that! So although I only paid $5 for my bag of food, having to feed three times as much meant they were going to go through it three times faster than they would their normal food. But what was worse was that you could not tell that they're getting any more food. While of course I couldn't see any weight difference in the short amount of time, I noticed that the cats acted just as hungry as they always did despite the amount of food they were eating.

There was one place where you COULD tell they were eating a lot more food. The litter box! The cats may not have acted like they were eating any more, but they were definitely pooping three times as much!! While it partially could have been the increase in the amount of feces, the litter box also smelled a lot worse and the consistency of the poop was not nearly as good as it was on their old food.

So let's do the math here. I paid about $6 less for this bag of food than I would pay for their regular food. Only, they're going through three as much in the same amount of time, so I would have to buy three bags of this food for every bag of the good stuff. So $11 for my premium food. Or $5 for the "average food" Times the three bags I'd have to buy in the same time period would equal $15. Reason 1 why the premium food ends up being better.

And, if there was still a small price difference in favor of the medium grade food, it was easily outweighed by the fact that the litter box needed to be cleaned at least twice as often. I will gladly pay the extra 50 cents to not have to scoop poop twice a day. They were eating more, yet still seemed as hungry. To me, if I eat something in large quantities and it doesn't fill me up, it's probably not very good for me and I'm thinking the same about this cat food! If these were not my cats and head just been random lab animals, I would be curious to see if over several more weeks, I would haved noticed a gain in weight (more food, higher calories, etc) and a loss of shine in their fuzzy coats. I am betting that we definitely would see a difference because generally when cat owners come over, they admire how smooth and soft my cats' coats are and say that they wish their cats coats were that good and when I ask them what they're feeding their cats, it's almost always junk.

Conclusion? When that bag of average grade cat food was gone, my cats went back to their old food. They seemed happier, I was able to feed them much less and scoop the litter box much less, which made me happy, so premium cat food it is!

Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/267310/why_its_worth_more_to_pay_for_premium.html