About three years ago, I shared the most terrifying story – most fur parents can relate by personal experience or biggest fear imagined – my cat, Manny, almost died. He had a blockage in his kidneys and if I hadn’t Googled his odd behavior any quicker & acted any faster to rush him to the vet, I wouldn’t be here writing this post about him. All I can say is that there’s almost nothing worse than having your animal taken from your hands immediately upon arriving and just sitting in the waiting room there for hours, hoping and praying that moment wasn’t the last time you’d see him/her alive.

I rescued Manny when I was a freshman in college, at 6 weeks old. Being so young and separated from his mother too soon, along with his two brothers, I feared there was nothing I could do to provide a healthy stability in his short-lived life. Luckily, the vet visit I took them to shortly after finding them proved to be a huge relief; all 3 kittens were healthy & able to eat solid foods, just needed a few baths with Dawn Dish Soap to take care of the fleas. Manny’s adorable mustache and personality stole my heart & after finding homes for his 2 brothers, I kept Manny for myself. He lived in my dorm room my whole first year (not quite abiding by campus rules…whoops) and has moved from apartment to apartment, city to city ever since for the last 11 years. He’s been with me through EVERYTHING and is literally my whole world; I never imagined I’d share such an intimate bond with an animal, let alone a cat!

Manny’s almost fatal health scare put me in a position to rapidly change anything and everything I could in order to give him a better chance in never having to deal with such a situation again, especially in his now senior years. I changed his food to a medical wet food diet that could only be ordered via prescription. Knock on wood, Manny has been in the clear for 3 years now and a lot of it has to do with his diet. However, he’s definitely shown his dissatisfaction at times by refusing to eat his meal after begging to be fed; I mean if I had to eat the same thing every day for 3 years, I’d be sick of it too! So I started to look for other alternatives that I could start feeding him every other day to switch up his predictable meals & encourage him to still be interested in the medical diet. After trying several varieties of high-quality pet food brands (& subscriptions), Manny has made it known he prefers the taste of BLUE Wilderness™  the best.

We started out with BLUE Natural Veterinary Diet™ and have since switched over to BLUE Wilderness™ for a higher-protein option. Manny simply can’t get enough of it! What’s so great is that implementing these different, and more satisfying food options into his prescription diet allows for a “surprise” meal every day – he no longer turns his nose up to his food & overall seems a lot happier and has been embracing his wild side much more than before. Like cat zoomies on a daily basis! I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the BLUE Wilderness™ line is made with wholesome, grain-free ingredients that better suit the ancestral needs of the feline species today & thus, gives him more active energy to release. If I think about it, I feel very lethargic and sluggish most often after eating too much bread/pasta/gluten for my body to process. So it makes total sense Manny is all of a sudden a wild child with better nutrition going into his system.