Carnilove is grain-free, potato-free cat food in both dry kibble and wet pouches. The Active Duck & Pheasant recipe runs 36% protein with 75% animal ingredients. Its most useful feature is one the bag barely mentions.
Every Carnilove dry food is chicken free
Chicken is one of the most common things cats react to, and it turns up in most dry cat food, often as chicken fat even when the flavour on the front says something else. Carnilove's dry range leaves out both chicken meat and chicken fat entirely.
If your cat has itchy skin, over-grooming or loose stools and you've been trying to work out what's causing it, that makes this an easier brand to test than most.
Which range
Active recipes are formulated for sterilised cats, which is most pet cats in this country. Duck & Pheasant is 3,557 kcal/kg with added fibre and prebiotics, so a neutered cat gets the protein without the calories running away. Duck, salmon and turkey, lamb and wild boar, beef and venison.
True Fresh is built around fresh meat as the first ingredient, in single-flavour recipes like turkey, beef and duck.
Both are grain and potato free, though two of the True Fresh recipes include buckwheat and lentils. Buckwheat isn't botanically a grain, but if you're avoiding grain-like carbohydrates altogether, read that label.
Wet, dry, or both
Both, if you can. Cats take most of their water from food and many don't drink enough to make up for a dry-only diet. Carnilove is one of the few brands here where you can feed the same range wet and dry, in gravy or jelly, with a kitten pouch as well.
The pouches come in duck, quail, turkey, wild boar, trout and pheasant, which is a useful spread if your cat is bored of chicken and fish.
Being straight about the herbs
The pouches are named for catnip, valerian, camomile and dandelion, and the dry food lists sea buckthorn, ginger, blueberry and cranberry. Look at the inclusion rates on the ingredients panel and most of those sit at a twentieth of one per cent. They aren't doing much.
Buy Carnilove for the 75% animal content and the absence of chicken. Those are the parts that will make a difference to your cat.
Who Carnilove isn't for
Cats on a proper veterinary elimination diet. Chicken free is not the same as single protein: the Duck & Pheasant recipe also contains turkey protein and hydrolysed liver. If your vet is trying to isolate one protein, you need a prescription diet, not this.
And if your cat is well, holding weight and happy on what they're on, there's no reason to change. Acana and Orijen go higher on animal content if that's what you're after, though both are chicken-inclusive and dry only.