You cat has an allergy to some proteins. Most certainly chicken.
Chicken is one of the most common food allergens in cats. When a cat develops an immune response to it, symptoms primarily manifest as severe, year-round skin irritation and digestive upset.
Severe Itching & Skin Lesions: Constant scratching and over-grooming, especially around the head, neck, face, and ears, which often leads to hair loss, scabs, and sores.
Check the ingredients list for chicken, and avoid any food that contains any of it, or poulty.
Yeah, this is likely.
Our cat only likes fish/fish based foods. We do cook him some fresh fish (well, cooked fresh. Its frozen fish from the store but the stuff without anything added) about once a week and put it over his regular wet food. It makes him happy and he seems to do better in general when he has it.
Maybe I will pick up some non-frozen fish that he likes and see if he likes it more than the frozen stuff.
Try tins of sardines in water. You need to break it up a bit for him but it's better than tuna or other predator fish. I have one cat that won't touch anything fish at all. I've had a lot of cats over the years and never seen a cat refuse canned tuna or fresh fish.
I assume there is a lot of salt in that? He can't handle that with some medical conditions he has. We have offered a very small amount to him before just to see if he would eat it and he wasn't interested. For a shelter cat he is "picky" but deserves it. He had a hard life, he's allowed to be picky now.
Allergy to chicken? That’s a thing?
Causes of Chicken Allergy in Cats
A chicken allergy in cats can develop for a number of different reasons. When your cat has a healthy response to the ingredients in their food their body is able to break down the food into amino acids and the nutrients are then properly absorbed into the body. The gastrointestinal tract is vital to keeping out indigestible things that cats eat as well as nutrients that are only partially digested, or not properly broken down into single amino acids.
If the gastrointestinal tract fails to filter the partially digested foods and those particles enter the body, your cat’s immune system will detect these nutrients as foreign invaders to the body and begin attacking them. This triggers an allergic reaction. The more chicken or chicken products your cat eats the more intense the allergic reaction.