Thinking about a meat-free diet for your cat? Some guidance — and some warnings — before you switch.
A reader asks: I gave up meat for ethical and environmental reasons, and I’d rather not feed it to my cat either. Do cats actually have to be carnivores?
The short answer is that cats are different from dogs and other omnivores: they are “obligate” carnivores, meaning they are built to get their nutrition by eating other animals, and they need more protein than most mammals. Several nutrients they depend on — taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A and vitamin B12 — come from animal tissue and are hard or impossible to supply in adequate amounts from plants alone. Starve a cat of these over time and you risk heart and liver disease, along with skin problems and even hearing loss.
In nature, then, a cat’s diet is mostly protein and fat from small prey — rodents, birds, little reptiles and amphibians. You may see a cat nibble grass now and then, but most biologists treat that as a digestive aid rather than a real source of nutrition.
Of course, keeping a house cat supplied with live prey is neither practical nor humane, and outdoor cats left to hunt can do serious damage to local wildlife. So we feed them dry “kibble” — animal products bound together with plant-based starches — and canned “wet” food, often made from animal parts a cat would never hunt on its own. Most cats get by on this, but it is already a compromise nutritionally.
Push further toward a strictly vegetarian or vegan diet and the problems grow. Marla McGeorge, a feline specialist at Best Friends Veterinary Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, warns that plant-only diets tend to fall short on the amino acids cats need and pile on carbohydrates their bodies never evolved to handle. As for the powdered supplements meant to fill the gap, she cautions that a cat may not absorb them as readily as the nutrients in real meat.
Not everyone agrees. Evolution Diet, which has sold fully vegetarian food for cats, dogs and ferrets for some 15 years, insists its products are healthy and complete — and says they have lengthened the lives of many pets and even reversed chronic illness. The company argues that mainstream pet food is full of unhealthy animal fat, diseased tissue, growth hormones and antibiotics, and its site is stacked with testimonials from owners describing happy, long-lived animals.
Another maker, Harbingers of a New Age, sells “Vegecat” kibble and supplements designed to give cats the nutrients normally found only in meat, pitching the idea that owners can cook for their pets at home using recipes that suit their own lifestyle.
This is a genuinely contested topic among vegetarian pet owners and veterinarians, and it is not going away. A reasonable approach is to try one of the meat-free foods or supplements and watch closely. If your cat refuses it, or simply does not thrive — take her to a vet to check — you can always return to whatever you fed her before.
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