If your cats are like mine, they love their cat treats. For years I was buying very small packages of treats for three to four dollars each to help bring a little happiness to my furry friends. I’ve also known that they were not exactly a healthy food for my cats but I figured the small amount once or twice a day wouldn’t hurt them.
I have since changed my thinking. For several years I have been learning about natural health for humans and have tried to apply some of that knowledge to our cats. It has been a slow process. I spent a few years buying frozen, raw food and then struggling to get them to eat it. My plan is to buy a meat grinder and make it myself but I’m not sure that will be any more successful. In the meantime, I feed them a quality, grain-free canned food (Earthborn Holistic) and a quality, grain-free dry food (Blue Buffalo Wilderness) but I could never find a healthy treat that they all enjoyed until I stopped looking for treats.
My alternative was to buy freeze-dried raw cat food and give it to them without adding water. I started using Nature’s Variety Instinct Raw and then switched to Stella and Chewey’s because I could get it in a larger package which brought my cost down to about what I was paying for the unhealthy treats, perhaps even lower. The best thing is, the cats love it.
A word of caution if you plan on trying this with your cats. It is meant to be mixed with water so don’t give them more than a few dry pieces so they won’t get dehydrated. Our cats seem to drink plenty of water so I don’t worry too much about that, but some cats don’t drink enough water. If that is the case, they shouldn’t be eating dry kibble either.
Our cats like both the Instinct Raw and the Stella and Chewy’s but they prefer the latter a little more. The down side to the Stella and Chewey’s is that it breaks into pieces easier than the Instinct Raw and you end up with a bunch of crumbs when you get near the bottom of the bag.
When I have nothing left but crumbs, I add water to it and give it to them as cat food. The reason I don’t feed it to them as their regular cat food is because it is a bit expensive to feed them that much (although it may be worth it) and, for some reason, the cats seem to prefer it dry.
Let me know what you think. Do you have a healthy alternative to treats in your home?
Bad Cat Chris 
We LOVE the Stella and Chewy food. The mom mixes it in with our grain-free canned food…about 50/50…and also adds a little water. We don’t get a lot of treats. In fact, the mom usually gives us our grain-free dry food as treats.
Sounds like your mom is looking out for you. You should ask her for a couple of peaces of the Sella and Chewey’s as a treat. You may like it.
That is a good idea. I will try that after we use up all the treats they got for Christmas.
I have that same problem with human treats. 🙂
My human gives us Stella and Chewy dry as treats too, and we LOVE it! When it’s just crumbs, she dumps them in a bowl and lets us eat it that way, like humans sometimes snack on dry cereal (my human found some chocolate chex recently, and that’s her cereal treat).
It seems we have many intelligent moms that read this blog. 🙂
Reblogged this on Bad Cat Chris and commented:
Here is a post from early 2015 for Throwback Thursday. A few things have changed since this post, like I now prefer Rawz over Blue Buffalo, but I still give them Stella and Chewy’s as treats and they have not grown tired of it.
I may give Stella and Chewy’s as a treat vs. the “regular” treats. Ted gets VERY FEW treats anyway but I’d rather he have something at least semi-healthy than the grain-rich normal cat treats.
Pam
I agree totally.