1. I don’t like that vets and techs take my cats to the back where I can’t watch what they are doing. I wouldn’t leave my child alone with a doctor, and I don’t feel comfortable leaving my fur-babies either. I understand that animals react to their guardians’ stress levels, but if I can’t stay under control, you’re doing something wrong.

2. Feline nutrition expertise needs to be more prevalent

Besides the expense and extra visits to the office to pick up the food, it would be wise to see what ingredients in the foods are making the cat sick and select the foods ourselves by avoiding those said ingredients.

I am not sure exactly where I stand on the topic, but what I gather from reading most of the comments is that Vets need to give options when it comes to diet. Not just feed this special formula that you can only buy from me for the rest of your cat’s life or s/he will suffer the consequences. I think just being knowledgeable about options says a lot and for me that is all I am asking. Essentially that feeding dry food is not the end all be all of cat nutrition either. Everyone’s situation is different and I would rather a cat be eating Wal-Mart brand cat food than living out on the streets. But I want to give the my cats the best I can and I should be educated by my vet

I do find this interesting though - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.....tenger,_Jr.

Doesn’t this also coincide with the general switchover from feeding table scraps or whatever to commercial dry and canned food?

So one could easily jump to the conclusion that commercial food is REALLY GOOD for pets. (Of course we also know that vet care has improved in that time, too.)

But in the past few years, there seem to be increasing problems with that food. Why?

I suspect that the move to the factory farming of animals and the importation of ingredients of dubious quality could be factors.

I want to second Lis’s comment about the difference between “it worked for me” vs. it’s The Answer for Everyone. That’s a really important distinction and is really the core of the objections a lot of us on this thread have to some of the other comments.

Comment by Lis — May 20, 2009

I have wondered the same thing.

I would wonder if the diabetes uptick in cats roughly coincided with the time when pet food companies started importing ingredients from countries with non-existent quality control. That, coupled with the trends toward obesity caused by people who overfeed/underexercise indoor cats.

I dunno … just a thought. And roughly about as crazy as the idea that greedy bastards would use melamine to game the protein readings, killing thousands of pets.

I might have made different choices these days, but there’s no way the kibble killed her. Or - as I said earlier - if it did, it took 20 years to do so.

Fast forward to my current almost 14 year old dog - on kibble up until the 2007 recalls, then switched to a homemade diet from a veterinary nutritionist’s website called “BalanceIt”. Last year, when he was 12, he also began exhibiting some early signs of diminished kidney function. This was probably already underway when we switched him to homemade, and I think it’s perfectly logical to attribute this kind of organ degeneration to nothing more insidious than a dog who is in his senior years.

Once again my vet recommended a low-protein prescription diet but - GASP! - I opted to look into something else! I went to a website recommended by Christie Keith here at PetConnection ( http://www.dogaware.com/kidney.html#protein ) and learned that there are folks who think that lowering protein for a dog in early stage kidney failure might do more harm than good. That it was far more important to make sure that the protein fed was of a high quality and therefore easier for the kidneys to handle. And that it was also important to decrease the amount of phosphorus in the diet because that lightens the load on the kidneys.

The site also discusses the benefits of feeding - GASP! again - RAW meat to a dog with diminished kidney function. I don’t recall that there was exhaustive scientific support provided for this assertion, however, it sounded good to me - and certainly not dangerous in any way - so I decided to give it a shot. Yup - I decided to adopt a feeding regimen for my dog without checking to see if there was all sorts of science behind it! (Are we out of GASP!s yet?)

My vet would have preferred that I go along with his recommendations, but he’s a good guy and knows I think carefully about the choices I make for my pets and so he just said “Let’s re-check in six months and see how he looks”.

And guess what? My guy’s kidney values are coming back down! They’re not perfect, but like I said, he’s almost 14. What do you expect?

Second re-check a couple of weeks ago and values look stable. My vet is happy, I”m happy, and my dog is lovin’ his new raw diet!

So - do I tell everyone I know to quit feeding kibble and hop on the raw bandwagon or else their dogs will develop kidney disease? Heck no! If the dog is healthy and doing well, then the owner is doing a good job and it’s not my place to tell them otherwise.

But if someone’s pet has been diagnosed with early-stage renal disease and they post - worried and looking for ideas - then you bet I share my experience. And I share the address to the DogAware site, and that way they can go read about it and think about it and make their own decision based on the information at hand.

And that’s all we’re really after here. We want vets to be willing to discuss safe alternatives with us if it’s something we’re interested in trying, even if it might not have been the vet’s primary recommendation. And we want pet owners who share and seek information to be clear on the differences between “This is what worked for me” v.s. “This is what the science says”.

It’s really not that complicated.

The pushback isn’t against canned food. The pushback is against the idea that canned food, or raw, is The One True Way, and you’re killing your cat if you do anything else. Sweeping, dogmatic statements like that do require some objective scientific support.

“This is what worked for my cat in these circumstances” though, don’t require anything other than your personal experience as support, and can be a useful contribution to the discussion.

Take a look at 3FabulousFelines’ comment #53, and consider the point she made: if that same cat had grown up as an indoor cat, eating dry food, he would look like evidence for your theory. In reality, he grew up outside, eating the most natural diet possible for a cat, and still developed diabetes at a young age.

I don’t believe for one minute that corn is an appropriate food for cats. However, no one commenting here with sweeping statements about one feeding method or another being “right” and the others constitute “killing your cat” has offered any real evidence to support that. Yes, cats eat a lot of dry food, and yes, cats have a lot of diabetes and a lot of kidney and liver failure.

We also know that pet food companies have been cheating for years, using “wheat gluten” sources so cheap they should have asked questions about what they were getting, and their suppliers were cheating, using melamine to boost the apparent levels of protein. Two years ago, they got very greedy and tipped things over to levels that caused people to notice.

We don’t know that they’ve been doing the same thing on a more modest scale for decades—but we don’t know they haven’t, either. And nothing has been done to make our pets’ food (or our own!) safe from this kind of poisoning.

I don’t have proof, by any means, but I strongly suspect that the problems we have with our cats’ health are not “dry food” or “processed food”, but poisoned food, poisoned not by people whose goal is to kill them, but rather simply to make that fast buck, with no concern about the consequences.

Fresh, whole foods? Absolutely the way to go if you can manage it. But dry food, which actually contains only what it is supposed to and not contaminants like melamine, “killing your cat” ? Sorry, the evidence is not there.

Please refer to my comment 63 and a response by Susan Fox in comment 65. Other comments similar to Susan’s are found throughout this thread on canned vs dry food.

At the risk of making statements that aren’t viewed as “fact” or “science” —-

Envision your cat having out of control diabetes that you can’t regulate even though you’ve followed your vet’s directions.

Do you sit on your hands waiting for the veterinary gods to publish the long awaited scientific study to justify any further action? Do you continue to work with a vet who went to school 30 years ago and only believes the science he learned then and insists that his way is the only way? Or do you research for yourself, talk to vets who are more enlightened and open to new ways of doing things, and actually find other cat owners who have improved their kitties’ situations?

I don’t understand such extreme pushback and attempts to squash and dismiss the comments and experiences concerning canned food by some on this blog who have probably not experienced the total frustration and concern of dealing with diabetic cats. Of course it would be great to have a definitive “here’s precisely what to do to fix the problem.” But at this time the data concerning this matter is not current and is often entwined with the financial motives of those publishing the data. That includes vets AND pet food companies.

In speaking with some relatively new vets (graduated 2001 and later) I’ve been told that feline diabetes was presented at vet school in much the same way it’s been presented for many years. We’ve found there’s a vast difference from one vet to the next in terms of knowledge and applying one patients’ experience to the next situation, ie, there are a lot of incompetent “scientists” out there.

Our diabetic cat Sam (had diabetes 11 years) went through numerous treatments and procedures that were totally botched since many vets don’t know how diabetes interacts with drugs, etc. Unfortunately, as in many professions, some of the trained people you’d like to depend on for the answers are of little help.

For my husband and me, we’ve learned that common sense and being proactive are very important to ensuring the best care for our pets and for ourselves. Our sweet Foxy is totally regulated and back to her playful self. This improvement began only after the dry food was removed from her diet. There are a couple of the Fancy Feast foods that she will eat and we get the same blood sugar readings (prefers tender liver and chicken feast but will eat another one of the “chicken feasts”).

In addition, two months ago she had liver damage and keotones in her urine. These problems are gone. What we’re doing is working!

I’m writing this only to pass along to other diabetic cat owners what has worked very well for us. Extensive research I’ve done indicates that this approach is working for many other diabetic cat owners as well.

If trying something so simple as changing to canned food helps regulate your cat and potentially helps him go into remission, do you really care whether or not a scientific paper or journal has endorsed this?

PS. For anyone with a diabetic cat who’s reading this: if you try switching to canned food, defintely back off your insulin dosage since the blood sugar may quickly drop and you don’t want to overdose. Work with your vet on this. He/she may even suggest that you not give insulin at all for a day or so. My experience has been to change only one thing at a time and watch carefully for any changes. I try to make changes only when I’m going to be at home all day and have a chance to observe.

I’d also like to see vets become more knowledgeable about FIV. My cats are all products of a feral colony, and one of the three is FIV+. Things have improved immensely in our area in recent years, but there still seems to be a great deal of confusion and misinformation out there regarding things like prognosis and ease of transmissibility… as well as a tendency to automatically attribute any problems a positive cat might be experiencing to the virus. (Is he really losing weight and engaging in urinary indiscretions because of the FIV, or has he developed diabetes? Was her uveitis really caused by the FIV, or is she also positive for Bartonella?) Such assumptions pose a great (and potentially dangerous) disservice to these cats.

Fortunately, we’ve been blessed with a phenomenal clinic where the staff is very knowledgeable and cat-savvy. The only real gripe I have is the waiting area. It’s quite small for such a busy practice, and doesn’t allow for much of an escape if there happens to be an unruly dog in the vicinity. My cats are pretty laid back when it comes to dogs, so it’s not much of an issue for us… but I can see how it might be a deal-breaker for somebody else.

But … I see it as part of my larger efforts (not always successful, but getting more so all the time) to eat and feed to my pets regional, sustainable and humanely raised (in the case of animals) food.

Knowing where my and my pets’ food comes from also allows me to take back control — I know it’s not coming from factory farms, or from hideously filthy and dishonest suppliers in, say, China.

We KNOW that industrial agriculture is environmentally devastating, contributes to climate change and maintains our addiction to fossil fuel. Add in industrial animal agriculture, and you’re talking cruelty. I don’t want any part of that, and so I’m increasingly seeking out local options.

That means … most meals prepared in the kitchen I formerly used not at all, from ingredients sourced from known suppliers.