Anyone who has cats will verify the truth of the saying “Dogs have owners, cats have staff”, and they can be pretty particular about how their staff behave into the bargain. I am servant to two cats, a bad tempered and grouchy, but still somehow lovable, mother, known simply as Mamacat, and her sweet natured, shy and incredibly dim daughter, Mau.

This weekend they took part in a trial, with three cat foods lined up for their delectation.

From left they are:

1. Burgess Supa Cat (Rabbit & Chicken Flavour) - a good value premium cat food we occasionally buy in Newry, which happened to be around. I don’t think its available in the Republic of Ireland.

2. Lidl’s Opticat (Flavour not stated) - the premium cat food from Lidl, since I know from experience they won’t touch Coshida, the cheaper option, at all.

3. Whiskas (Tuna Flavour) - Probably the market leader and easily the most expensive of the three.

First up to taste was Mau, who seemed surprised to see three bowls and had a sniff at them all before choosing where to start. Supa Cat it was.

Later she was joined by Mamacat, who always gets first pick and again went for Supa Cat, so like the dutiful daughter she is, Mau moved aside and went to the Whiskas bowl instead.

At that point I left to go to Podcamp Kilkenny (of which more later). By the time I returned in the late night it was pretty clear what the their opinion of Opticat was:

They had eaten some though, so it’s not like they found it entirely inedible, and by morning it too was almost gone.

So will I buy Opticat again? Yes, I will. It may not be the favoured food of my cats but they ate it. It’s very well priced and looking at the ingredients and nutritional information on the packs is easily on a par with the others and may actually be slightly better.

Notice the Whiskas bowl - most of those left behind are the green pieces. They always leave a lot of these. According to the pack these contain 4% peas. I don’t have any idea why you’d want to feed peas or any other veg to cats - they are carnivores, don’t need them and generally speaking don’t like them. But then they don’t buy the food, the packs are designed to appeal to their devoted servents.

Back to Podcamp, which was where I spent Saturday. This was a really great event, lots of interesting talks and even more interesting people to meet. John Keyes did a very thorough round up of the day and seems to have attended most of the same talks as I did, so I won’t repeat that all here.

Darragh caught me on the hop in his talk about blogging when he brought this humble blog up for discussion, but it was all good and in fact a few people there, and in conversations later, had very interesting ideas about where this blog should (or could) go in the future. Mmm.

Later had a very pleasant evening on the town in Paris Texas and Tynans pubs in Kilkenny, with most convivial company and lots of lively chat. Hats off to Ken, Bernie, Krishna and all others involved in organising the event, they did a great job.

Tags: Cat food, Kilkenny, Podcamp

Posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 10:11 pm in Taste Test
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