Is my cat addicted to pet treats?

David Barnett’s cats are fiends for Dreamies pet treats. And they are not alone. But what’s in them? Where did they come from? And are they doing your furry friend any good?

Poppy and her Dreamies (David Barnett)

Poppy can be a rather stand-offish cat. She doesn’t sit on laps, she hates to be picked up to the point of anxiety. She will sometimes fix me with a curious, pensive gaze, as though trying to work out what I’m actually for. And then she remembers, and insinuates herself lithely between my ankles, and finds her voice, the high-pitched, insistent miaow she only ever deploys when she wants one thing: Dreamies.

For the benefit of non-cat people, Dreamies are packets of biscuity treats. Poppy is an absolute fiend for them. When anyone in the house relents and places a small clutch of them near the cats’ food bowls in the kitchen, she will – on first glance, rather sweetly – look round and wait until our other cat Maurice comes running in. But I suspect it isn’t just feline comradeship; she’s merely seeing which of the two piles could possibly be slightly bigger so she can elbow Maurice out of the way for it.

You may have seen the TV ads for Dreamies, in which a cat owner shakes the bag of treats and the pets come running. This is not an exaggeration. A Dreamie-addicted cat can not only hear the rustling of a Dreamie pack from three streets away, they can distinguish between that and the – to the untutored human ear – identical crinkling of, say, a packet of microwave rice or a bag of Maltesers.