Best Kangaroo Cat Food

Companies put many different ingredients into cat food. A lot of this is driven by a mix of nutritional guidelines, the cost of components, and marketing strategies. Getting ingredients like venison or salmon in the United States is easy. Kangaroo, on the other hand, is what the industry often calls a novel ingredient—something rare and unusual, and often ideal for cats who are allergic to conventional sources of protein.

Kangaroo meat is an ingredient that must be obtained from Australia. That means either producing all of the food there or having the meat partially processed and shipped across the ocean. Either way, that means generally higher costs compared to other ingredients.

For this reason, I decided not to evaluate the price as a significant factor in creating this list. You can’t compete on price with many other ingredients, and it doesn’t make sense to evaluate kangaroo cat food with that as a factor.

Top 7 Best Kangaroo Cat Food

What to see what our favorite cat foods are that contain kangaroo? Read on.

Koha Wild Kangaroo Pate

Koha’s wild kangaroo pate is one of the few popular and highly-rated kangaroo cat foods out on the market. Available in single cans (so you can try it at a much lower cost) and cases of 24, these 5.5-oz cans feature a minimum 11% crude protein and have kangaroo as their first ingredient.

That’s followed by vegetable broth, olive oil, and trace amounts of other ingredients, which means that for all practical purposes, this product is almost entirely kangaroo and not just chicken meat with kangaroo flavoring.

Koha Wild Kangaroo Can Nutritional Facts

This product has a relatively high amount of protein for wet cat food. That alone is a mark in its favor, but what impressed me about this product is its genuine commitment to being what it says on the label.

Many other cat foods are a mix of different proteins, but if you’re buying a novel protein, it’s because your cat needs to avoid others, or you want to feed them something unusual. Regardless of your reasons, this product accomplishes that goal.

Vetalogica Naturals Grain Free Kangaroo Adult Cat Food

An entirely Australian product, this cat food brand is one of the best dry options if you want to give your cat some kangaroo. Like most dried foods, it contains a number of other ingredients, including peas, potato starch, chicken fat, blueberries, and dried pumpkin. Kangaroo is still the main ingredient (not just a flavoring), but this product does have a wider variety of ingredients and flavors than our #1 choice for this list.

Vetalogicals Dry Mix Nutritional Facts

This product is a reasonable mix of protein and supplemental nutrition. Like most dry cat food, it relies on peas to provide both structure and nutrition. People often misunderstand the purpose of using peas, so to clarify, it’s not a filler ingredient.

Peas have quite a lot of nutritional value, and while cats require meat, peas are an excellent supplement when paired with other vitamins and minerals. In short, don’t look at the ingredient labels like the one for this product and worry that companies are using cheap fillers to get around providing you with the novel protein source you’re looking for.

Big Dog For Cats Kangaroo

The best way I can describe this food is “fresh.” Rather than being canned or dried, this is a mix of raw ingredients and avoid grains, flavors, and preservatives (although I suspect it has some additional vitamins and minerals to help ensure overall health).

Big Dog For Cats Nutritional Facts

This product is ideal if you want to give a more raw, natural type of food to your cats. However, there’s one catch; it’s limited to personal pickup in a few stores in Australia. Everything I’ve seen suggests this is a high-quality product, but the difficulty of acquiring it means you may be out of luck elsewhere in the world.

That brings up another important point: Sometimes, you can’t get certain types of foods. Not without truly incredible costs, at least. If you want to feed raw kangaroo to your cat, you may have to look for a local specialty supplier, and not just your local pet store.

Personally, I suggest inquiring with a specialty jerky store if there are any in your area. Many of these companies make their own jerky, and they may know how to acquire rare and unusual ingredients. Be sure to consult a veterinarian before making any raw meat a significant part of your cat’s diet.

Meals For Meows Dry Cat Food Turkey Adult

This is our first truly blended dry cat food on the list, and as the name suggests, it features a lot of poultry to go along with the kangaroo meat. The good part is that this helps bring the price down; even in Australia, kangaroo meat can be expensive, so mixing it with another protein is an excellent way to bring the price down to an affordable range.

This dry mix also includes yucca schidigera, a natural plant extract known to help reduce odors. That makes it a particularly good choice if your cat is, for lack of a better term, stinky. Particularly strong odors could be a sign of certain medical issues, so consider talking to your veterinarian before looking to food-based solutions for a smell.

Meals For Meows Turkey Mix Nutritional Facts

The main nutritional factor to be aware of with this product is the brown rice it contains. Rice is healthy for cats in smaller amounts, but it’s generally not as healthy for them as meat-based proteins. It’s not so devoid of value as to be a filler ingredient, but alternatives like peas are usually better for cats, which is why I decided to put this product lower on this list.

That said, this is also something of a limited-ingredient product. Besides the turkey and kangaroo meat, and the brown rice, there isn’t much more than trace amounts of anything else in this mix. That makes it an easier choice to buy if you want to avoid allergens, gluten, and other potential issues.

Kangaroo-MAINT Feline

I wasn’t sure where to put this product at first. This is a long-term maintenance diet with about 12.7% crude protein overall. When researching it, however, I came across something unusual: This company also explains the nutritional aspects as a percent of its dry matter, which I haven’t seen very often from American manufacturers.

Looking at just the dry ingredients, the protein is rated at 51.66%, which is significantly higher than most of the competition. It also has 19% fat, which is similarly high.

Kangaroo-MAINT Wet Cat Food Nutritional Facts 

The major limitation on this kangaroo cat food is the fact that it’s a veterinary food, not an option for the general public. In other words, you may need to get authorization from your vet before you can even purchase this product, and that’s not considering finding the best ways to get it in your country.

That said, this product explicitly meets the Association of American Feed Control Officials’ guidelines for adult cat maintenance, which is something some products on this list can’t say.

Koha Roo Chicken and Kangaroo Pate

Koha is one of the few larger suppliers of kangaroo-based cat foods, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that they got onto this list twice. Unlike our #1 option, this is a blended mix (hence being lower on our list) that features chicken as its main ingredient. Kangaroo is a relatively smaller portion of this product and exists more for flavor than true nutritional value.

The main reason this product is still on the list is that I think this product is a good way to test whether or not your cat will eat kangaroo meat. Chances are they’ve eaten chicken in the past, so that smell and flavor shouldn’t deter them from trying this wet cat food. If they turn their nose up, though, you may want to look for a different novelty protein instead.

Koha Roo Chicken And Kangaroo Nutritional Facts

Aside from the meat-based protein sources, this product has limited ingredients other than trace amounts of vegetables and the usual suite of supplements. Most companies have to meet minimal standards for nutrition in their wet and dry foods, which means providing numerous vitamin additives in a form that won’t be ruined by time spent processing or in a can.

Overall, this is a healthy product, but not my top choice if you want to focus on kangaroo as an ingredient instead of as a flavor.

Ivory Coat Chicken & Kangaroo with Coconut Oil

Another Australian product, Ivory Coat’s dry mix contains high amounts of both chicken and kangaroo meat, followed by tapioca, peas, chicken fat, and assorted other ingredients. They advertise a minimum of 36% crude protein, which is slightly on the higher side of normal for dry cat food. This is also a limited-ingredient mix, as many kangaroo-based cat foods are, which helps cats avoid common allergens.

Ivory Coat Mix Nutritional Facts

The reason this product only comes in at #7 is the use of tapioca—basically a filler ingredient. While it does function as a source for carbohydrates, which cats should have in appropriate quantities, it’s not a particularly good ingredient for cat food.

This product wouldn’t have even gotten onto this list if it didn’t also have peas, which do provide nutrients. Honestly, I believe this product could entirely eliminate the tapioca, replace that with peas, and be fine.

Given the filler here, consider buying these and using them as kangaroo-flavored treats, rather than your cat’s main food.

Best Kangaroo Cat Food FAQ

Here are some answers to common questions about cat foods that contain kangaroo.

Do Any Cats Hunt Kangaroo In The Wild?

Yes! Surprising though it may seem, feral cats in Australia are known to hunt some kangaroo populations (though often the smaller breeds, rather than full-size kangaroos). Experienced cats are outstanding predators, so if deliberately introduced into a particular area, they can cull kangaroo populations.

That said, kangaroos don’t have many natural predators, thanks to their size and speed. To an extent, humans are more dangerous to kangaroos than cats are, thanks to encouragement by the Australian government for managing local kangaroo populations.

Of course, that digresses from the main point, which is this: Cats do eat kangaroos, so it’s a completely valid source of protein for them.

Where Can I Actually Get Kangaroo Cat Food?

This is the trickier question. Kangaroo cat food is plentifully available in Australia, where local manufacturing facilities can process meat, add nutrients, and churn out wet, dry, or raw food as needed. Kangaroo-based cat foods are much harder to find outside of Australia, since one way or another, they almost always require importing meat.

People have reported seeing kangaroos a few times in the United States, but these reports are often spurious and difficult to confirm. When real, these animals may have escaped private zoos or enclosures. Whatever the truth of the matter, there is no serious, large-scale kangaroo farming in the United States.

If you want to get kangaroo cat food, look for local suppliers or import companies and ask what they do to manage the safety of imported foods. Products could be exposed to excessively high or low temperatures during transport, and that can seriously impact the overall quality of the food. It is always better to do your research when buying novel ingredients for cat food.