Healthy DIY cat treats your vet would approve

When it comes to supporting your feline friend’s best physical and mental health, proper nutrition is a must.

While a complete and balanced diet does the heavy lifting when it comes to providing all the essential nutrients in the correct ratios, healthy treats can be a great way of offering your feline friend a little culinary TLC without tipping the figurative and literal scales in the wrong direction!

Here are our top tips for healthy homemade treats for cats, including snacks that your cat is likely to love, which ingredients to avoid, and how to make and store treats safely.

Why vet-approved treats matter for cats

Offering your cat a variety of tasty treats can be great for:

• Providing environmental enrichment through new smells, tastes and textures
• Rewarding your cat for desirable behaviours
• Keeping your cat happily occupied (if combined with a puzzle toy)
• Offering your cat multiple feeding opportunities per day, as is their natural preference
• Showing them a little extra love!

However, unhealthy treats, treats containing harmful ingredients, or any treat in excessive amounts can be detrimental to your cat’s health.

Treats should make up no more than 10% of your cat’s daily caloric intake, with the remaining 90% coming from a complete, nutritionally balanced cat food that meets AAFCO or FEDIAF standards. This is because treats tend not to contain all the nutrients your cat requires to stay healthy in the long term, so if your cat regularly fills up on snacks, they could develop nutritional deficiencies. Additionally, eating too many treats on top of regular meals can predispose your cat to obesity, which can lead to significant health effects including:

• An increased risk of diabetes
• An increased risk of osteoarthritis
• An increased risk of urinary health issues
• An increased risk of certain cancers

Unfortunately, some commercial treats are very dense in calories with relatively high amounts of carbohydrates, so while your cat may find them delicious, they aren’t exactly waistline-friendly! Healthy home-made cat treats (fed in limited amounts) can help strike the right balance between positively tickling your cat’s taste buds without throwing their long-term health goals way off.

Key ingredients for a healthy cat diet

Cats have evolved to be obligate carnivores, which means they need to eat specific animal-based nutrients (obtained from the muscle, bones and organs of prey species such as small rodents, birds, reptiles and insects) to stay healthy.

This is because they lack certain metabolic processes to digest and utilise the plant forms of some nutrients as dogs can, so have specific dietary requirements for:

• Certain amino acids such as taurine and arginine
• Preformed Vitamin A in animal tissue (as they cannot synthesise it from beta-carotene in vegetables as some other animals can)
• A higher proportion of baseline protein compared to dogs (ideally combined with moderate amounts of fat and minimal amounts of carbohydrates)

Additionally, some cats can have a low thirst drive and therefore may fail to drink enough water on their own (although the use of feline water fountains can help encourage more water consumption). Providing a moist or semi-moist diet can help to ensure sufficient hydration in these cats to support good urinary tract health.

Healthy homemade cat treat recipes would be ideally based on a foundation of animal protein, such as:

• Plainly cooked (unseasoned) chicken, turkey, beef or lamb meat
• Plainly cooked/tinned oily fish such as salmon, sardine, tuna or mackerel, with bones removed to prevent choking (other than softened tinned sardine bones)

You can then add small amounts of healthy extras to act as binders and provide more flavour, such as:

• Cooked egg
• Plainly cooked mashed pumpkin or sweet potato
• Plainly cooked brown rice flour or oat flour
• Natural, unseasoned meat/fish broth (containing no onion or garlic)
• Sprinklings of catnip

Ingredients and practices to avoid

It’s safest to avoid feeding your cat any raw or non-sterilised, freeze-dried foods or treats of animal origin, due to the significant health risks that harmful bacteria contaminants can pose to both feline and human family members (particularly pregnant or other immunocompromised individuals).

You should also avoid toxic ingredients such as:

• Onions and garlic
• Chocolate
• Grapes and sultanas
• The artificial sweetener xylitol
• Caffeine

Lastly, cooked bones are not recommended for pets due to the risk of them splintering, which can lead to mouth injuries or potentially life-threatening internal damage if swallowed.

Tips on preparing and storing treats safely

It’s always recommended to follow standard food safety guidelines when handling, storing or preparing raw meat for your cat.

Any meat should be cooked to reach an internal temperature of at least 75°C, as this destroys harmful bacteria (such as E. coli and salmonella), bacterial toxins, and parasites that can be present in raw meat. Freezing meat at a sub-zero temperature for at least 10 days prior to feeding it to your cat can kill certain parasites, but does not kill bacteria, yeast and moulds (only puts them into a hibernation state).

Using various combinations of the healthy ingredients listed above, you can whip up feline culinary delights by forming them into adorable tiny cookies for baking. You can also make lickable kitty smoothies out of pre-cooked, liquidised and chilled ingredients for hot days or winter-warmer stews with slightly chunkier slow-cooked components.

Following standard food safety practices, cooked meat-based snacks can be stored in the fridge for up to three days, or in the freezer for a maximum of three months. However, crisp baked goods such as biscuits can last up to two weeks in an airtight container.

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11 Aug 2026