The real reason is farming and phytosanitary needs. The animals used need to be cheap enough to make sense to feed a pet, and farmed in a way where you can be sure your product won't give cats worms or other parasites. Cats also don't really eat the hair and hide, or feathers, of animals, so you ultimately have mammal, birds, and fish as categories. We already farm mammals, birds, and fish for humans, so the systems are already there.

That being said, I used to feed my little house panther raw food, which was a little frozen gore nugget of rabbit or chicken or duck. She loved them. Loved, loved, loved them. She's caught pigeons and rats before, so it's really not that far off. It's not like either would present vastly different nutrition as compared to a mouse or a rat or song bird anyway.

Catfood actually comes in three flavours: Gills and Fins, Beaks and Feet, Lips and Seaholes.

There was! There was a brand of mouse-based cat food.

"Fresh Sparrow Flavour" on the bag: cat gives it five stars, owner returns it on the spot

I used to feed my cat raw quails. Obviously they were feather free and I would tear them apart just so there wasn't a mess on the floor but the cat very much enjoyed his meals.

Here's the thing though, tuna is, for completely random reasons, absurdly tasty to cats, because it has both of their favorite flavor chemicals, that otherwise are always in different foods, in one.

So yeah, you know what? I would never want to deny my little asshole the opportunity to taste something unnaturally delicious.

"Here little girl, let your mind be blown in a way you could never experience in the wild. Now please stop eating plastic."

My idiot is going to need a "dust bunny with small stones" flavor.

Lots of good arguments in here for duck and tuna, but what the hell is Friskers thinking with Turkey and Cheese?

before doing this, they should focus on making appealing (to cats) prescription food because it's stressful enough when you have to put your cat on a special diet, without them having super limited options.

My cats wouldn't know what to do with a mouse if they had one. I had a cat (RIP Tasha) whose favorite thing was turkey. Every time I had some in the oven, she went apeshit.

I like the image of a house cat taking down a full tuna now that it's got the taste. Just don't give it the taste for human

My cat can have deer flavored cat food the second he can manage to take down a deer.

Cats can and will eat tuna and duck in the wild. They'd eat deer, too, if they could take one down.

cat food is marketed to people and not to cats. cats are broke

also, where tf do you get farmed songbirds

The cats here have had more than enough songbird flavored food. There are no more songbirds here.

So… like by that logic, should dog food come in crap flavor?

Why would cat owners take issue with it? I'd gladly feed her that if it was available and it's what she liked.

instead of things like tuna, deer, and duck

Tuna and deer, ok; but are you sure cats are incapable of hunting ducks?

Chickens and rabbits are also small enough that some cats might hunt them (at least when they aren't fully grown yet), and I'm pretty sure cat food with their meats does exist.

These things are already being processed for human consumption, and they're perfectly nutritious for cats.

Buy two pet rats and breed food forever

Farming song birds for cat food sounds expensive.

It's going to cost at least 10x what you'd pay for chicken. I don't think there is enough demand for it

I saw some cat food at a specialty store that claimed it was made of 100% rabbit.

I assume the issue here is how much bone and fur/feathers you want in your cat food. Butchering mice like cattle would be very labor-intensive, but I'm not sure whether that's actually an issue considering that cats already eat mice. Mouse bone and fur probably isn't very nutritious for cats though, so that would inflate the weight of cat food.

Mice can be farmed so it's viable, songbird though i'm not too sure so it would be a bit hard.

Maybe they should also have something like cricket or grasshopper. Or maybe cockroach flavour 💀

Chicken: cat could theoretically take down a small one

Fish: some cats catch fish

Those are the best options imho