I have been feeding my cats Blue Buffalo kibble almost exclusively for the past ten or eleven years, and my cats are doing great with it. Two of my cats, from the same litter, are twenty-two, and a third will be twenty-two next month, while the baby is ten years old. One of the older cats has arthritis but it is managed very well with Cosequin, and the twenty-two year-old had to have a couple of teeth removed a couple of months ago. Other than that, my cats are healthy and active, and I attribute this to a good diet.
I came to Blue Buffalo when one of the older cats began losing fur. She was biting and scratching at everything she could reach and, as a result, her fur was completely missing in spots. She looked like she had mange, except that I don't think cats get mange. After a few veterinary visits and some time on steroids, it was suggested that she may have a food allergy, and that cats are commonly allergic to corn, soy or wheat, which are the most common ingredients in cheaper cat foods, and even some of the more expensive ones, such as Science Diet, which is what I had been feeding.
There are several premium cat foods on the market that don't use corn, soy or wheat, and I tried some other excellent foods before I discovered Blue Buffalo. My cat's fur problem cleared up within a couple of weeks but it seemed that one or another of my cats didn't like whatever it was that I was feeding them. Then we came across one of the Blue Buffalo representatives at Petco one day, and decided to try Blue Buffalo kibble.
All of my cats liked Blue Buffalo, and still do today. They like a great deal of variety in canned foods but are happy to be eating Blue Buffalo kibble day in and day out. I do rotate between the different recipes available from Blue Buffalo, but I don't think they would mind eating the same one all the time. Even in canned foods, my cats all like the Blue Buffalo recipes, but I include many other brands in their canned food selections.
Only recently have I begun feeding them canned food on a regular basis, and that has to do with their age. Poor hydration can be a problem with older cats and, with four cats, it's difficult for me to tell how much water each cat is drinking. To make sure that they are getting some hydration, I have begun giving them a 5.5 ounce can of canned food, split between them, in the morning and at night.
While I initially switched to Blue Buffalo for the sake of the one cat who had developed a food allergy, I soon found that all of my cats were doing very well with it. Although I had thought they were healthy before, the difference after a month or two of eating Blue Buffalo was dramatic. Things that I had attributed to age were reversed. Today, at twenty-two, my cats are as active and playful as they were at twelve. When I took the two older ones to a new veterinarian, he thought they were eight or nine, not twenty-two. In the eleven or twelve years that I have been feeding Blue Buffalo, my cats have not had a flea problem. Blue Buffalo is not marketed for flea control but I think that a healthy cat has a built-in resistance to fleas.
Their basic diet remains kibble, however. I free feed them kibble, meaning that they always have kibble available to them. There are many good brands of kibble, as there is in canned food. My choices are to look for something without corn, soy, wheat, by-products, or gluten of any kind. Both kibble and canned food should have poultry, fish or meat as the primary ingredient. Every now and then I will do a taste test, setting out a bowl of another kind of suitable premium cat food along side an identical bowl of Blue Buffalo, and the results are nearly always the same. The first day, they will primarily eat the new food, as if exploring new and interesting tastes, but the first bowl to be emptied is always the Blue Buffalo. Cats like it, and it's good for them.
A few things to consider...
Premium cat food is more expensive than grocery store brands when you are comparing cost per pound. However, most of what you are buying in a grocery store brand (and some more expensive brands as well) are ingredients that cats don't digest well, such as corn, soy and wheat. Cats eating grocery store brands will have to eat more bulk in order to meet their nutritional needs, and much of that will be deposited in the litter box. On a diet of grocery store brand cat food, cats are more likely to gain weight, much the same as people whose diet consists mainly of junk food.
After switching to a premium cat food, such as Blue Buffalo, it is not unusual for the cat to eat a lot of food at first, as real food may taste better to them than what they were eating before. At some point, often within a week or two, the cat may begin to eat considerably less. This does not indicate that the cat doesn't like the new food anymore; more likely, it means that the cat's body is telling him that he doesn't have to eat that much. Cats on premium cat food are more likely to regulate the amount of food that they eat than are cats on grocery store brands, but it might take a few weeks for that to kick in.
Cats don't know how to read labels, so it is your responsibility to learn how to do that. I will let my cats eat whatever they wish, but only after I have limited their choices to foods that are good for them. Blue Buffalo is not the only healthy cat food on the market, and your cat may do well on another premium food. I think there's something to the Life Source bits that makes sense to me, and my experience has been that they have done very well with Blue Buffalo.
I could say more, but I've gone on too long already.
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