Purina’s ‘Felix As Good As It Looks’ cat food allegedly making cats very ill

A lot of people think that a change in recipe of Purina’s Felix As Good As It Looks in March 2021 has resulted in cats becoming sick with vomiting, kidney issues and lethargy. Purina say that the only change they made in the recipe was to remove added colours and they say that every recipe is still 100% balanced and complete. The removal of colours does not change the nutritional composition of food.

Nonetheless, there is so much concern among a group of cat owners that they set up a Facebook group called Cats Recently Affected by Felix Food. It has 29.4 K members as at the date of this post which is March 7, 2022.

It’s hard to get to the bottom of this because Purina haven’t found any links between the food and sickness but a good number of cat owners have provided anecdotal evidence that when their cat(s) ate the food they became sick. The problem is that sometimes cats become sick coincidentally at the time when they were eating this particular cat food. They may have been on Felix cat food before and after the minor change in recipe and then fall ill coincidentally for other reasons. I am not saying that that is the case and neither am I defending Purina. I’m just illustrating the kind of difficulties that people are going to have to establish a connection.

In the meantime, the obvious answer is incredibly straightforward: simply stop giving your cat this particular brand of food. There is a vast choice out there and you can find a huge range of brands many of which will be of better quality.

Felix As Good As It Looks is what I will call middle of the range in terms of quality. You can buy better and you can buy worse.

However, this group of people have started up a campaign to get the food removed from shelves at supermarkets and pet shops.

Purina have carried out extensive checks and not found a link. One cat owner, Julie Ashley, who has five cats between the ages of 18 months and 14 years said that her eldest cat was badly affected and developed projectile diarrhoea, the smell of which was indescribable, she said. She took her eldest cat to the vet who did blood tests and administered steroids but she did not improve. The vet suggested that she change foods.

Within 10 days of changing the food her cats had fully recovered except the eldest who had been affected the worst. For her, it took two more weeks to return to normal. She feels disgusted and betrayed because she had trusted the food for a long time. She is the administrator to the Facebook group and also the person who created a petition. She is the campaigner because she is also contacted Purina, Trading Standards, her MP and various shops to get to the bottom of it and seek help.

She said that the company refused to provide the results of their laboratory testing on the food on the basis that she wouldn’t understand it and it was too technical. She plans on obtaining independent testing. She asked what Purina had tested for in their check on the food and they refused to help, she said. Although Purina is adamant that there are no problems.

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Another cat who experienced loss of appetite, lethargy, and nausea is ‘Catsby’ who lives with London-based actress Thea Butler. She joined the Facebook group and changed the cat food at which time her cat started to feel better. She believes that something is going on because of the large number of people who have reported problems.

Like I said, I’m not defending Purina but these kinds of groups can encourage people to chip in and describe their cat’s health problems which will be similar and they may as a consequence see a link without evidence between the illness’s symptoms and Felix cat food. It is a difficult one but I must return to the most important aspect of the story which is that no cat should be ill for more than a short time because all they’ve got to do is to change the food. Perhaps the problem is that they will not recognise the fact that this food might be causing the illness.

A Google search will quickly resolve that problem.

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This is Blue who fell ill. He died. He was 17 years old. Laura Alice Jackson, his owner thinks it might have been coincidental. I agree as if he died of kidney failure it is very typical for elderly cats.