Open your cat’s mouth. See those sharp, pointy things? They’re very much like the sharp, pointy things your cat uses to shred the sofa. Nature endowed your cat with them because she is a hunter, a predator, a carnivore, not to use as extremely sharp tools for the gathering and milling of wheat.
I say this because all too often I hear from people who decide to share the glories of their vegan lifestyle with their cats. Like this guy, who seems to believe that because so much cat food is bad and full of nasty contaminants and fillers that we should make it even worse by, you know, taking out the part that’s of the greatest nutritional benefit to the cat in the first place, the meat:
Any pet food containing meat based meals, digests, or by-products are literally poisons. The rendering process, from which these products are formulated, contains a mixture of dead, dying, diseased, and disabled animals from the slaughter industry, along with road kill, spoiled supermarket meats (including the styrofoam packaging), euthanized animals (including flea collars), insecticides, toxins, cross- species hormones, antibiotics and other disgusting debris that gets swept up in the processing operations.
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Considering that the vast majority of the commercial pet foods are filled with poisons that come from the rendering industry as well as the latest risk of contaminated vegetable products like gluten, the advantages of a properly formulated vegan cat food are enormous. Vegan cats can be extremely healthy because they are no longer being fed poisonous materials that build up over time to create unique diseases that we have never seen before in cats.
He has, of course, the solution. And no, it has nothing to do with choosing only wholesome, nutritious foods and feeding them to your cats, the choice I’ve made and never regretted after nearly 23 years of homefeeding my pets. Nope, his solution is Vegan Feline Roast, a product he will soon be making available:
This semi-moist product has what we consider an ideal blend of ingredients that equate to about 50% protein, 30% fat, and 20% carbohydrates along with a moisture content of about 40%-60%. Natural cat food like a mouse, lizard, bird, mole or other such prey would have approximately the same nutritional values. We are in the process of marketing this product in a ready to make dry form that can be shipped easily to anywhere in the world.
A ready to eat frozen product may become available in the future. We would warn people against trying to formulate their own vegan cat food. The nutritional require-ments for cats are quite precise and without the proper formulation, the feline parent risks doing great harm to the health of their feline companions. Cardiac, kidney, urinary, and hepatic diseases are common from people who have attempted to feed cats vegan without the proper nutritional study and background.
Yeah, no kidding, considering cats are (as he himself admits) obligate carnivores. And doesn’t it just sound like the same old, same old we’ve been hearing — and he’s so irate about — from the pet food industry all these years? Don’t try this at home. Your cat will die.
I was puzzled in particular by his claim that his about-to-be-marketed recipe had the nutrient ratio of a cat’s prey diet in the wild. Twenty percent carbohydrate? Really?
So I dug out my copy of “Nutrient Composition of Whole Vertebrate Prey” (PDF) and checked on the usual diet of wild cats: rodents. This paper doesn’t even list carbohydrate content (probably because cats big and small — along with dogs and pretty much all the carnivores — have no dietary requirement for carbohydrate at all, so it doesn’t actually matter), but you can calculate it by adding up the other components of the prey and seeing what’s left over.
On a dry matter basis (meaning water is excluded), the mouse has just 9.3 percent left over for everything other than protein, fat, and minerals. The rat has nothing… no carbohydrate at all. Rabbit has 0.8 percent left after protein, fat, and minerals are added up. So no clue where he got that 20 percent carb value.
But that’s someone you’d trust to figure out what your cat needs to eat, right? The cat, who has one of the most specific set of nutritional needs of any domesticated animal.
I have some advice for vegans: if you want a vegan pet, get a rabbit. They’re fluffy and sweet and can be litterbox trained, and Mother Nature made them veggie-eaters. There are lots of them in shelters, too, or adopt one from a rescue group — check out the House Rabbit Society for more info. If you already have a cat, suck it up and feed her what she needs for optimum health, and when she goes to the Big Scratching Post in the Sky, get a rabbit as your next pet.
But please stop trying to take your carnivorous cats and turn them into vegans. Nature already made her what she is, and it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.
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