Cat food for sensitive stomachs & stress IBS

Digestive sensitivity in cats is often driven by food intolerance rather than a true allergy, and when you add a stress component on top — which Bengals are particularly prone to — you're dealing with two triggers that can look almost identical from the outside. Limited-ingredient or novel-protein diets tend to work best because they reduce the dietary variables while keeping the gut calm. To point you in the right direction: what symptoms are you seeing — vomiting, loose stools, something else — how long has it been going on, and what are you currently feeding?

Your vet is right, and the combination is genuinely tricky. Bengals are high-activity, high-stimulus cats and stress-IBS episodes in them can be set off by anything from a change in routine to next door's cat sitting on the fence. But the dietary side is worth addressing separately and first, because if there's an intolerance layered under the stress response, every flare will be worse than it needs to be. What's in the Felix pouches — is it mixed flavours, or does he consistently get certain proteins like chicken or tuna?

That's useful — lifelong chicken exposure is one of the more common routes to developing a chicken intolerance, because repeated exposure over years can tip the immune response. I'd want to move Arlo onto something that has no chicken at all, and ideally a very short ingredient list so you can be sure what he's reacting to if anything. For a Bengal at eight you also want something with decent protein density — they don't do well on diluted, cereal-heavy formulas. Does he eat dry well, or would you prefer to shift him to wet entirely?

Given everything — the need to eliminate chicken, the benefit of a limited ingredient list, and Arlo's stress-IBS on top — I'd go with Applaws Natural Dry Cat Food in the Tuna flavour. It has a genuinely short ingredient list: tuna as the primary protein, no chicken, no artificial additives, and around 75% meat content, which keeps it high-protein and easy on the gut. The lack of bulking grains and fillers matters here because those can compound loose stools in sensitive cats independently of any protein intolerance. It won't directly address the stress component, but by removing the dietary trigger you'll be able to see much more clearly whether the remaining episodes are stress-driven — and your vet can take it from there with options like environmental enrichment or, if needed, short-term medication. Switch over ten to fourteen days if he'll tolerate it, or faster if the current food is actively causing flares.

I'd ditch the Felix entirely for now — even a small amount of chicken protein from the pouches will undermine the elimination process and make it hard to know what's working. Once he's been stable on the Applaws Tuna dry for six to eight weeks, you can introduce a single-protein wet food as a complement if you want to add moisture to his diet. Applaws actually do tuna pouches in the same range with the same short ingredient list, so that's a natural addition when the time comes. Keep a simple symptom diary during the transition — frequency of loose stools and vomiting — so you have something concrete to show the vet if the stress-IBS episodes continue after the diet is clean.