Feline's Pride Gourmet Chicken

Feline's Pride comes as close to a cat's wild diet as any commercial cat food: It's just raw meat, organs and bones, ground up with some added vitamins and minerals.

Ingredient quality

Mimics a cat's natural diet. Veterinarian Lisa Pierson makes her own homemade cat food for her cats, but she calls Feline's Pride "my favorite commercial diet." Pierson, a severe critic of commercial cat foods and strong proponent of raw diets for cats, says Feline's Pride closely matches her own careful ratio of meat, bones and organs -- close to what cats would eat in the wild.

Feline's Pride balances raw meat (chicken, in this flavor) with finely ground bone, organs (chicken liver, gizzard and heart), along with some organic egg yolk, psyllium powder and added vitamins and minerals to make a complete, balanced, everyday diet for your cat. Feline's Pride says that 40 to 70 percent of its foods consist of "organic meats that are humanely raised in our immediate area" in Florida.

"It's not easy finding premade raw foods that are up to snuff," writes the reviewer at CatNutrition.org, but Feline's Pride is "one of my personal favorites." Like Pierson, this reviewer makes her own homemade raw cat food, and she says Feline's Pride is extremely similar to her own personal recipe, which is "as close as I can come in my kitchen to reverse-engineering a mouse -- the perfect cat food." Still, some veterinarians caution against a raw diet, saying it could expose cats to harmful germs.

Product safety

Last recall was in 2010. In 2010, Feline's Pride recalled some of its raw chicken cat food due to salmonella contamination. Two weeks after the first lots were recalled, neither Feline's Pride nor the Food and Drug Administration had received any reports of salmonella infection related to the food.

A search of the FDA's online recall database shows no further recalls for Feline's Pride.

The company's website talks about the various steps it takes to make sure its facility is sanitary (including UV light wands to kill germs, grinders and mixers sanitized before and after each use with chlorine and 190-degree water, etc.) and its foods stay cold (including temperature monitoring on certain shipments).

Feline's Pride does not pressure-pasteurize its raw food to kill harmful germs, as Nature's Variety does. The American Veterinary Medical Association cautions against feeding pets unpasteurized raw animal protein, because it could harbor harmful germs. Some vets disagree with this, though, saying raw diets are best for cats.

Value

Don't forget shipping costs. Feline's Pride raw cat food comes in 2.5-pound tubs. You can also get bigger bulk sizes and pricier flavors like turkey, Cornish hen, duck and rabbit ($44 for 5 pounds of the rabbit).

The smallest size of Nature's Variety Instinct Raw Chicken Formula (*Est. $16 for a 3-lb. bag) costs a little less per pound than the smallest size of Feline's Pride Gourmet Chicken. Sometimes, Feline's Pride costs a bit less than Nature's Variety Instinct Raw, depending on what flavor you get -- but that's before frozen shipping. Unlike Nature's Variety Instinct raw foods (which are sold in big chain stores like Petco and Petland), only a few small resellers scattered around the country sell Feline's Pride, so you'll probably have to order it by mail. The price quoted here and on Feline's Pride's website includes the $11 to $13 (depending on your climate) you'll pay for the cooler and ice packs necessary to keep the food frozen, but not the regular shipping and handling charges.

The bottom line

Reviews rate Feline's Pride raw cat food very highly. It offers the closest thing to a wild diet in an easy-to-feed form -- but another raw cat food, Nature's Variety (*Est. $16 for a 3-lb. bag), is easier to find in stores and costs a bit less.