Are dry cat food pellets too small?
Are dry cat food pellets too small? Why are they the size that they are? They are typically the size of a large pill for a human (they can look like pills). Is this a good size? I am going to question the decision of pet food manufacturers. They have decided that the pellets should be small. I say that they might be too small. Cats tend to hoover-up small pellets without chewing them. This must be wrong. From a cat’s standpoint the pellets are too small to encourage them to chew.
The natural instinct of some domestic cat is to “hoover-up” the dry food pellets. Some cats do chew on the pellets but not all of them. Too many cats suck them up and swallow them whole. To me this indicates that the size of the pellets has been carefully assessed by the pet food manufacturers as just about big enough. They may have got it wrong. Are more cats than they believe failing to chew the pellets?
So why don’t manufacturers just make the pellets a bit bigger? Just play safe and make them big enough so that cats have to chew on them and break them up?
The answer to my last question has to be centered around financial profit because everything the pet food manufacturers do is a response to the question, “How can we make more money?”
The first reason that comes to my mind as to why the pellets are small is because having conducted test with cats, the manufacturers discovered that they won’t eat large pellets. Large and hard ≠ inedible.
If that is true, it proves that dry cat food is defective because at the size they decided on, some cats don’t chew it. It is unsatisfactory in more than one way. The other problem is that it is too dry and it causes permanent, mild cat dehydration.
At a more subtle level, I will tell you why I think dry cat food pellets are too small. At the size you buy dry cat food there is maximum amount of air between the pellets. This allows the packaging to be as big as possible. You buy dry cat food by weight but are we unable to convert weight to value? We just look for a large bag of cat food. The amount of air between the pellets is at a maximum for the pellet size you see in the picture above.
If the pellets where much larger the bag size would be smaller. People would perceive this as poorer value for money and not buy the food.
These are my initial thoughts. I may be completely wrong. Whatever the reason for small pellets the answer will turn on financial profit, not cat welfare. Whatever the answer, it will prove that dry cat food is unnatural to the cat. Cats need food that contains 70% water; the amount of water in a mammal that is prey to a cat.