Hey Pet Parents & Pet Lovers,
I’ve been a longterm consumer of Blue Wilderness products. Actually, every single cat in my life has eaten Blue Buffalo’s food at some point. (Well, other than Kalista who was way too picky to even try it.) Other than Blue Buffalo’s controversies, I’ve found their products to be high quality and reliable. In fact, Blue Buffalo is one of the only foods that got Beau to lose weight/stay conditioned, and once we strayed away over to Royal Canin & Science Diet we started experiencing a fairly quick weight gain. But what can you do when you kitty has to eat a certain type of food to stay healthy.
Either way, I thought since Kalista wasn’t a huge fan of Blue Buffalo’s kibble I would try their treats out instead. So let’s get cracking and let’s see if Blue Wilderness Tasty Salmon Flavour Treats are worth taking a look at!
Ingredients
Salmon, Chicken Meal, Potato Starch, Peas, Brewers Dried Yeast, Chicken Fat, Natural Flavour, Citric Acid, Potassium Chloride, preserved with Mixed Tocopherols, Oil of Rosemary
My thoughts on the Ingredients:
To start off we have a whole protein which is great, however I’m a bit sad to see Chicken Mean & Chicken Fat in this ingredient list. I understand that a large amount of cat foods use Chicken based ingredients to fill in the missing protein, however I feel bad for cats who are allergic to chicken. It’s fairly difficult to find an untainted treat/food. Next we have Potato Starch, Peas and Brewers Dried Yeast. Eh… not so great ingredients. Although it’s difficult to say how much of these ingredients are actually in the mix, the fact that all three follow each other makes me believe that this isn’t the greatest treat. Having that much starch and yeast can potentially change the pH in your cat’s stomach and may cause difficulty when it comes to digestion. (This is specifically true of Potato Starch and Brewers Dried Yeast, I’m fairly supportive of cat foods and treats using peas.) The remaining ingredients look fairly standard, although the extra oil of rosemary for antioxidants and other benefits (though I don’t think there’s enough in there to say it’s going to do much.) All in all, it’s also a fairly short ingredient list, which is great, since they definitely could have put in more fillers if they wanted to. (Glad they didn’t!)
Guaranteed Analysis
Crude Protein (min) 28.0%
Crude Fat (min) 12.0%
Crude Fibre (max) 3.0%
Moisture (max) 10.0%
My thoughts on the Guaranteed Analysis:
To be honest, I really like the guaranteed analysis of this treat. It’s got a great amount of protein, a fair amount of fat and an average amount of fiber and moisture. Nothing in it sparks a red light for me, and I would go as far as saying that it looks similar to a cat’s ideal nutritional needs in their daily diet (GA wise, not ingredient wise.)
Other Product Features
- No Corn
- No Wheat or Soy
- No By-Product Meals
- No Artificial Preservatives
- No Artifical Flavours
- No Artificial Colours
While all of this is true, a huge controversy arose in the year 2015 in regards to Blue Buffalo using By-Products. This obviously sparked a lot of distrust with the company as they are known to be a top leader in the “natural-holistic” food community. This information didn’t cause me to boycott Blue Wilderness, as much as it made me want to research more into the company and see if there were other controversies that I should know of. For me, fillers are the real killer in a pet food, and by-products come shortly after. On top of that, in general, I believe that brand transparency/trust is extremely important to pet owners, which is something Blue Buffalo lost in me.
How do My Cats Like It?
Beau absolutely adores this treat, although he’s not allowed to have treats anymore! Kalista, again being the picky kitty that she is, also loves this treat! Actually, we’ve been using it as a food stimulant every so often when she refuses to eat. To this day, this is the only Salmon Flavoured treat/food she will eat (since she’s pretty much a Chicken addicted girl!)
Conclusion
All in all, I would give this treat a 4/5. It’s hard rating treats since you have to go in realizing that they are going to be fairly unhealthy, which is partly the case here. Would I feed my cats this treat regularly? Probably not, maybe once a week when training them or if they’re being extremely good, but I would also trust this a lot more than feeding treats such as Purina LUV and Temptations.