Flint River Ranch Super Premium Cat & Kitten Health Food

Flint River Ranch provides all the nutritional needs in a unique shape cats seem to like; a solid contender.

Flint River Ranch foods are highly touted by its distributors, who post numerous testimonials on their sites. (The company operates through a MLM philosophy.) However, the story told on various distributors' web sites gives a confusing picture of the ingredients in this product. On the one hand, "There are no food by-products such as corn, cottonseed, corn cobs, citrus pulp, [etc.]"On the other hand, examining the label, one sees that "ground yellow corn," "corn gluten meal," and "corn germ meal" are the second, fourth, and ninth listed ingredients, respectively. Corn is a cheap carbohydrate filler, and it is alleged to cause digestion problems in some cats. Therefore, this "ingredient splitting" on the label may be of concern to some, as it is to me.

If you see a cat in the wild stalking through a corn field, it won't be to munch on corn, but to prey on the mice that eat the stuff. In fact, the amount of grain found in a mouse's or rabbit's stomach is about the amount of carbohydrate a cat really needs.

Cats are obligate carnivores, and their digestive systems simply are not "tooled" to handle large quantities of carbohydrates. Some cats are allergic to corn. My Joey was as a kitten. He had terrible diarrhea until I switched to a kitten food without corn, and he was almost instantly cured.

The last word is "read the label," as Flint River Ranch suggests, and if it seems right for your cat, you're probably on the right track.