Ping pong ball, huh? I'll have to see if I can find one and try that out.

Amarna meets me at the door when I come home from work, meowing full blast and hates it if I delay in immediately feeding her. As soon as I put her dish on the floor, she buries her nose in and starts to inhale it--when she horks it up, her thrown-up kibble completely intact, so I know she doesn't chew it on the way down.

PetsMart

Wow--I always thought it was "PetSmart!" I don't really pay attention to the sign.

I always thought of it that way too, Kathy A.

Me too!

Now I know they'll support me if I have more than one pet. One less obstacle to my becoming a crazy old cat lady....

I may have typed it wrong.

We feed our boys Hill's Science Diet C/D (wet and dry) because of Taz's history with urinary tract issues and mix it up with Wellness and Merrick. Also, we will feed them cans of light tuna upon occasion.

Our cats, too, LOVE the dry food and are fairly ambivalent on the wet food- depends on the flavor of the night. Taz likes the chicken/poultry flavors more and Marley likes seafood. We give them about a 1/4 c. (heaping) dry cat food in the morning and they split a can of wet food at night.

Chiming in late, but I'm in the kitty corner with Windsparrow and Sean. Cat food makers seem to make cat food with two things in mind: 1) profit, of course, and grain is cheap filler, and 2) ingredients that sound healthy to the human owners., like "healthful grains" and "low fat". Cats don't need a lot of fat, but stripping the natural fat out of their meat isn't good either. Even fat cats don't need human diets - they need meat, and no grain at all.

I give mine Wellness brand, as it's available here (I never even heard of those other brands, but I'll look for them now) and it meets my criteria of no grain and minimal meat by-products. FWIW, I leave dry food out all the time and feed wet food maybe twice a day - upon demand :-). Leo eats when he's hungry. He's 13.7 lbs now at a year and a half, lean and well-muscled according to the vet yesterday. He won't eat "human" food at all, except for occasional nibbles of cooked chicken or turkey.

I've also found a brand of wet food called Wholesome Goodness, available in the grocery, that has lots of real meat, some carrots and peas (wild cats get their vegetables from eating their prey's stomachs - cool, huh?), and no grain. Leo loves it. I don't give it to him as often as he'd like, I'm sure, because it also contains unspecified vegetable oil and some cane sugar, which I'm sure is not particularly good for cats. I doubt a small amount will hurt him, though, especially when the bad is offset by the good of the actual meat.

Also FWIW? Leo doesn't barf, and doesn't hack up hairballs. None of the cats I've had since I've started feeding high-protein no-grain diets have had barfing/hairball problems. I truly believe it's the grain.

The only places I know of around here to get pet food is either Pet Supplies Plus (my usual source) or PetSmart. Jewel has a small selection that costs waay to much, and I don't know of any organic coops here at all--we have the usual chains (Jewel, Dominicks, TJ, Whole Foods) as well as some small grocery stores that are privately owned, but no coops.

There are about a million specialty pet stores in Chicago proper from what I can tell. It's like every single person who has the idea that they should open a business decides that business should be a petstore. I don't know how the market supports them all (I suspect it doesn't). Anyway, it got in my subconscious and I had a dream (the night after I road my bike 100 miles and was sleeping in a school gym)that I opened a chain of petstores and there were different stores for each kind of pet. The one for cats was called "The Cats of SomethingPlace, Jr." and the one for birds was called "Bird Up!" which is the proposed name of my new band!

My cats get the diabetes food--wet and dry. I guess they are okay on it? They like to eat it anyway. And they are 14 and seem to have their wits about them as much as they ever did.

Eighty messages on cat food! It's my motherfuckin' luckiest day ever!

I'm going to have to start reciting baseball draft picks from the fourth round down now just to maintain my sanity.

Thanks a lot, cat people! Look at the psychic damage you've inflicted on me.

Pet supplies is a HUGE business. Conventional wisdom says that peeps like me, without kids, still have money to spend and affection to give. So we give it to our pets.

It's true for me, anyway.