Cats May Be Obligate Carnivores But So What?
By PETA Representative Michael O’Killallhumans
I know cats are naturally carnivores but the question is: should they eat meat? Just because something is natural, doesn’t mean it should be the case. Coal can burn naturally but should we burn it?
Look my friends are always telling me that I should be giving my cats some kind of meat. I just tell them that they’re simply using some kind of naturalistic fallacy. Just because x is natural doesn’t mean it should be the case. They tell me that this is an exception. But I tell them “fuck off.”
Look, I think I have a pretty good track record when I say that 3 out of my 5 cats have lived past the age of 1 year. I think the two died of strange unrelated natural causes. Must’ve been their genes or something.
My Cat Trying To Catch Meat Right Before I Punished It And Made It Watch 24 Hours Of Non-Stop PETA Videos
Again! My Cat Trying To Eat Something Made Of Meat. 24 More Hours Of PETA Truth For It!
My cats have been meowing and pestering me a lot since I’ve been feeding them broccoli but that’s because they still need to get over their obsession with meat. The meat industry has really done a good job at influencing my cats.
If you want to know a good solution to a cat’s appetite for meat, then you just need to have it raised by a herbivore.
Here’s a good herbivore raising this cat:
You may disagree with me and think that turning your cat into a herbivore is impossible but just look at the pure joy on my cat’s face as it bites into this asparagus!
My Cat In Love With Its Asparagus! Not A Bit Of Painful Expression On That Face!
September 1, 2009 at 8:14 am
My 3rd grade teacher was kinda good looking. I sure would like to play with her “pussy” cat. Purrrrr!!!!
September 1, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Abbi Tatton is pretty hot.
September 2, 2009 at 9:03 pm
A “normal” cat life span is about 8 to 10 years. They can live up to 18 to 20 years under ideal conditions. Having a cat die at 1 year of age means something was hideously wrong.
Cats have specific nutritional needs that can not be met by plant products. In particular, they must have “Taurine”. We can make it in our bodies, but they can not; having lost the enzymes to make it. Taurine is concentrated in the “organ meats” of animals. You will not find it in plant products. Though you can find it in supplements for cats and in “energy drinks” where it gives us a surge of “energy”.
This has nothing to do with “natural” or with any particular “world view”. It is only a statement of fact about the metabolic system of cats. If not fed animal products, they will suffer serious dietary related diseases and can die; as your cats died.
Please, take just a little time to read about cat nutritional requirements before deciding that your cat can live on veggies and tofu; it can’t.
It may be possible to concoct a cat food made from plant materials and added supplements that would meet a cats dietary needs, but it would be difficult and require a fair degree of research.
Particularly problematic would be getting the proper amount of Taurine and related amino acids and getting the proper fatty-acids. Animal products are high in saturated fats and omega-3 from fish. Corn, Soy, etc. oils tend to be high in omega-6 and that makes for more inflammatory disease; the omega-3 / omega-6 ratio modulates your degree of inflammatory response via changing the ratios of some hormones your body makes from the omega-3 essential fatty acids.
Yes, this matters for people too. Flax oil MIGHT substitute for fish oils in a cat diet (it works for people), but it is also possible that they do not have the needed metabolic pathways to turn the particular omega-3 oils in Flax into the ones they need (not all animals have the same needs, nor the same enzymes to change things around. Just because a person has them, does not mean a cat does.) So that would take some research to find out (start with Google…).
A cat on a diet deficient in omega-3 (i.e. fish oils) will be more prone to arthritis and related “problems” and will tend to not heal well.
Cats are also sensitive to some minerals in the diet. The wrong level of Magnesium, for example, can cause kidney / urinary problems (that can lead to death). Quantities of magnesium in plant products are often dramatically different from animal products. You will need to assure that the magnesium level in the mixture is appropriate for cats, or you WILL have genito-urinary medical “issues”.
And finally, the length of the intestines is directly related to the herbivore / carnivore nature. A long intestine is needed to break down plant parts to get the nutrition out, but meat will form substances that cause cancer if left to ferment too long in a long colon. A short intestine works best for meat. Your cat has a short intestine.
So you might feed him plants that YOU can live on just fine, but he will not be able to break them down and get the nutrition out. He can starve on a full stomach of plant material. The cat just does not have a long enough intestine to break down plant cellulosic cell walls. Cooking the plants MIGHT help here. (Ruminants go so far as to have reserved spaced in the intestines where the “cud” can sit and ferment. Extras stomachs for “foregut” fermenters, the Cecum for hind gut fermenters. We have no such added stomach or cecum, so we can not digest hay. We are “omnivores”; but only to a degree. We can’t break down most of the plant material on the planet – tough leaves, wood, and hay. Ruminants can. (My bunnies love a snack of fruit wood…)
I suggest an experiment. Spend a week eating nothing but grass, hay, and fruit tree leaves. See how you feel.
That is basically what you are doing to your cats. Moving them “one category too far” from their evolutionary slot. They don’t have the digestive equipment for it (just as you do not have the equipment to move from cabbage to hay.)
What you need to do is similar to what we would need to do to eat hay. Pre-process it as a ruminant would do to turn it into something we can use. I have no really good ideas how to do that, but I can make some suggestions:
Cook the plants and maybe run them trough a blender.
Add omega-3 oils and a cat vitamin supplement with Taurine.
September 2, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Oh, and you might want to add some cooked, blender processed seeds and nuts to the food mix. Why?
Seeds and nuts are higher in protein and fats (closer to animal ratios).
They need to be run through a blender since cats to not have the grinding teeth needed to process plant products into meal or paste (look at herbivore teeth – flat grinders). And cooked to soften the cellulosic cell walls and denature plant toxins. The pre-processing might let them be digested in the short intestine of the cat. You hope.
For example, red kidney beans have a toxic material in them that will make you sick if not cooked at the boil or above. Every year some people learn this anew putting their favorite chili recipe into a new slow cooker… and making everyone ill if they use raw red kidney beans; the slow cooker only gets to about 160 F. So cook the beans and seeds. Herbivores have developed a lot of defenses against plant toxins that the cat just will not have.
Example? Onions and tomatoes.
We can eat onions. So can my bunnies (they seem to find them a nice light snack ’seasoning’ and munch the tops in the garden after a meal of rabbit pellets). In cats, dogs, and I think, even horses and some others, onions are a hemolytic agent and will destroy their red blood cells leading to death. Never feed onions to any cat or dog. It is literally poison to them.
At the same time, my bunnies like a snack of tomato leaves. These have “solanine” in them and are toxic to people. We can’t handle it, bunnies can. We’re “omnivores”, but again, only to a limited extent.
So as you feed veggies to your cat, realize that you are conducting an experiment on your cat. You are testing what plant toxins it can handle, like we can, and which ones it can not (like we can not handle low temperature cooked kidney beans and tomato leaves). There may be some literature on this, but I doubt it. I think you will be doing original research on your cat.
BTW, goats can eat all sorts of things that would kill us. There are a variety of “legume trees” that have leaves toxic to us, but goats can eat them. Yet every so often a herd would die on what was thought to be “OK” leaves. Turns out that the bacteria in the ruminant stomach needs to change for different leaves. The goat depends on the bacteria to detoxify the leaves. So the present practice (for specific types of leaf) is to blend a tiny bit more each week to give their fermenting stomachs time to adjust their bacteria. You can even buy inoculants of the needed bacteria if they are not present in your herd (sometimes discovered by having animals die when first fed the particular leaves…)
Changing the diet of even the most hardy species can be problematic…
September 3, 2009 at 7:33 am
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