'Vegan' kitten nearly dies

[Javaman]

120. Veggie Cat Food? Why Not All Cats Need Meat

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggie-cat-food/

Dear EarthTalk: I don’t eat meat, for a variety of ethical and environmental reasons, and I’d rather not feed it to my cat, either. Do cats have to be carnivores?
-- John McManus, Needham, MA

Unlike dogs and other omnivores, cats are true (so-called “obligate”) carnivores: They meet their nutritional needs by consuming other animals and have a higher protein requirement than many other mammals. Cats get certain key nutrients from meat—including taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A and vitamin B12—that can’t be sufficiently obtained from plant-based foods. Without a steady supply of these nutrients, cats can suffer from liver and heart problems, not to mention skin irritation and hearing loss.

As such, a cat’s ideal diet is made up mainly of protein and fats derived from small prey such as rodents, birds and small reptiles and amphibians. Some cats munch on grass or other plants, but most biologists agree that such roughage serves only as a digestive aid and provides limited if any nutritional value.

Of course, providing your domestic cat with a steady stream of its preferred prey is hardly convenient or humane—and cats can wreak havoc on local wildlife populations if left to forage on their own. So we fill them up on dry “kibble,” which combines animal products with vegetable-based starches, and meat-based canned “wet” foods, many containing parts of animals cats would likely never encounter, much less hunt and kill, in a purely natural situation. Most cats adapt to such diets, but it is far from ideal nutritionally.

Veterinarian Marla McGeorge, a cat specialist at Portland, Oregon’s Best Friends Veterinary Medical Center, argues that the problem with forcing your cat to be vegetarian or vegan is that such diets fail to provide the amino acids needed for proper feline health and are too high in carbohydrates that felines have not evolved to be able to process. As to those powder-based supplements intended to bridge the nutritional gap, McGeorge says that such formulations may not be as easily absorbed by cats’ bodies as the real thing.


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