| Country of origin | New Zealand |
| Available from | Pet Circle, |
Feline Natural is the feline version of the K9 Natural. This is a freeze dried raw food, so retains more nutritional content than a kibble would. Before feeding it to your cat you mix it with water to rehydrate. Cat’s aren’t very good at finding water sources, and given water intake is absolutely vital to their health I find this an huge bonus to feeding a food such as this.
Let’s take a look at the Chicken and Lamb formula, with a Chicken and Venison formula also available.
The comments I hear most about this food are the cost per kilo which seems excessive compared to other kibbles, so it’s worth understanding a bit about freeze drying to put this into perspective. Your average chicken breast or piece of beef is mostly water, around 70%. Freeze drying will extract the water content and leave the important part of the meat with all nutritional content intact. What that means, with K9 Natural being mostly meat, is 1 kilo of this stuff was significantly more in weight prior to freeze drying.
We find only 6 ingredients in the food, with every one being meat. There’s no grains and fillers, and next to no carbohydrates. Cats are obligate carnivores so this is very much in keeping with a natural diet. I note the K9 Natural formulas for dogs now include fruits, vegetables, vitamins and minerals, so I wonder if they’ll change the cat formulas accordingly. I would see this as an improvement, as I wonder if the current recipe would cater for all nutritional requirements if fed exclusively.
Green Lipped Mussels are an excellent source of omega fatty acids and glucosamine, great for joint health and all round well being.
The only downside of this food is the cost. You can argue you get what you pay for, but this is very expensive as it’s only available in small bags. I’d love to see this available in larger bags which work out To keep costs down you could always feed your cat a quality kibble in the morning and this in the evening, or something like that.
Highly recommended!
Ingredients
Chicken, Chicken Bones, Lamb Heart, Lamb Liver, Lamb Kidney, New Zealand Green Lipped Mussel
I switched to both Feline Natural and Ziwi Peak when my burmese boys reached 10 months of age. They Love it! especially the dried freeze variety of the feline natural. I mix both the freeze dried and the the wet food together to give it a more hydrated texture.
I still have some royal canin kitten biscuits left over which I have tried to give them every now and then, and they have turned their noses up at it.
I dont think you can go wrong with both of these products. Yes they are pricey, but compared to some of the supermarket cat food, I believe these two products are better for my boys in the long run.
You sound like an expert and I’ll place a lot of weight in what you have to say, but there is absolutely no proof that glucosamine has any effect whatsoever.
If you give bone broth which is pretty much full of glucosamine and chondroitin, hyularonic acid and collagen, than give extra collagen with rosehips, colostrum and MSM. These do work, my girl has luxating patellas on both back legs, since being on these she hasn’t been in pain. She screams with even the tiniest pain, so since she hasn’t screamed, she mustn’t be in pain anymore.
One thing I can say for certain doesn’t work is green lipped mussels. Tried for 3 months what a waste of time.
I use Bioglan joints plus and this works for me too. So I do think that some do work, I think the issue is finding what works for you and your pets (unique) body chemistry.
Because for some people nothing works, whilst for others the cheapest stuff works.
Also noted that joint oils for people don’t work, but for dogs they do. But maybe cause the dog ones are like the absolute best quality, whereas the human ones are usually the cheapest to produce and the worst quality. To get the quality stuff you have to pay like 4x more, not meaning you’ll get any benefit regardless.
Now actual joint supplements inside of foods are useless, never noticed any effect. I think the amounts are honestly just too small. Small dogs require a minimum 500mg glucosamine and than 1000mg for medium and 1500mg for large. Dog foods are usually around 400mg per kilo of food. They need 500mg a day, so if a small dog only eats 100g that’s only 40mg per day. No wonder it has zero effect. Even Orijen wouldn’t meet the minimum daily for small dogs.
Best to just buy a supplement with like 4-5 different joint stuff in it and give the minimum over a 3 month period (minimum time). Because at least that way they get the full dose per day and it may actually work. Even the vet joint stuff doesn’t have enough for the minimums.
Glucosamine is used to treat arthritis in humans as well as often being recommended by vets, but that said with any ingredient in pet food it’s often hard to ascertain whether there’s any real benefit, or any real benefit to a specific dog. Questions such as “is there enough of the ingredient to provide benefit”, “is it a quality inclusion of the ingredient”, or “is the research sufficient” are all valid and can be speculated upon. In the case of glucosamine you could well be right given this page on the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (US) states “Major studies of glucosamine for osteoarthritis of the knee have had conflicting results.”.
HI, are there reviews for cat wet food? I’m wondering about ziwipeak vs feline natural for wet food…any thoughts? Thanks for a great website
Hi Jane, no wet food reviews as yet but generally if the “dry” food is rated highly then the wet variety will be equal (or better). Both Ziwipeak and Feline Natural wet foods are really good (with a price tag to match), and there’s no reason you shouldn’t feed one, the other, or both!
This was my favourite back up to prey model raw for ferrets until they changed the recipes to include too much plant matter for my liking; I’d probably still feed it to a cat though 🙂
The new ingredient list for the Chicken/Lamb:
Chicken, Lamb Heart, Lamb Kidney, Lamb Liver, Lamb Blood, Flaxseed Flakes, New Zealand Green Mussel, Dried Kelp, Vitamin E Supplement, Zinc Proteinate, Canola Oil, Manganese Proteinate, Thiamine Mononitrate, Vitamin D3 Supplement, Folic Acid.
Well at the end of the day flaxseed always helps with skin and coat but fish definitely helps better, without kelp they would need to supplement with synthetic vitamins so I prefer the kelp, I’d imagine it’s similar to the dry seaweed I eat tastes awful but full of vitamins and minerals you may not get often enough.
Not sure why they decided to use canola oil though, the dog formulas use sunflower oil which is better but olive oil is best.
There’s a dog food out there that puts like 500ml of olive oil in each big bag of kibble, not sure how much is in the smaller bags, but that’s a lot regardless.
Ziwipeak canned used to have olive oil, after the change they no longer do 🙁