Curiosity. Cats. You know this is going to end badly, don’t you? For the record, I don’t like cats. While I wish the revolting Fluffy Vermin no ill, just work on the basis that you say cute kitty, I say Pasteurella meningitis. Disgusting, disloyal, scheming brutes. And they make me sneeze. Bastards.
This started off as a simple bit of research for my own interest but ended up somewhere I really didn’t expect. Like as a blog post. We use kitty kibble (the dry cat food that looks like rabbit turds) in the lab as a simple demo for enzymatic activity in stuff we manufacture to digest fats and greases out of drains and restaurant grease traps. This sort of dried pet food was partially a response to a shortage of tin in WW2 – the other response was a mass cull of the Fluffy Vermin.
Anyway, a friend who has been brainwashed by the Fluffy Vermin recently told me that cats tend to stick to one prey species; generally an individual Fluffy Vermin will bring in either half-eaten birds or half-eaten mice but seldom both. I have found plenty of anecdotes regarding that (but no decent data) – nevertheless it got me thinking. So I took a look into what goes into cat food and found some interesting and some quite horrifying information.
For a start, cats are natural carnivores. Their diet in the wild has zero plant matter in it. So the (often) 20% cereal and other carbs in cat food isn’t good for them for several reasons; they can’t taste ‘sweet’ and lack some of the enzymes we and other mammals have at our disposal to control sugars so carb-laden kibble is one factor leading to diabetic and obese cats.
The fact is flesh flavour in pet foods is more about marketing to the owner than the animal – which is fair enough; pet food companies understand the pets are consumers, not buyers (duh!) but also understand it’s the disodium pyrophosphate (MSG for cats) and other palatants that make the food attractive to the animal, not the trace of whatever other animal protein might be in there. But it gets better. Or worse.
Vegetarian Cat Food.
So, as a pet owner you decide that millions of years of evolution are wrong, that you know best and that your favourite Fluffy Vermin would really benefit from a vegetarian diet. Don’t worry about the diabetes or obesity risk, the taurine and arachidonic acid that cats can’t synthesise for themselves, you know best. Who needs taurine? Well, the Fluffy Vermin do – unless mangy, blind and bad cardiac health is the look you like in your moggy. This notion is supported – unsurprisingly – by the International Vegetarian Union, the Vegan Society and – this is what had my Woo Detector going off the scale – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Their strapline is “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way”.
This is where it all goes downhill for me.
Sounds worthy but how do they reconcile that with a suggestion on their website urging a ‘holistic’ approach to veterinary medicine: “Investigate chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathy, herbs, nutrition, and all the other alternatives to the standard drugs and surgery that conventional vets offer”. Plenty of μ2B there – but the one that sticks out for me on that list is acupuncture.
If you are misguided enough to choose useless Woo interventions proven not to work that’s fine – but using acupuncture on animals is just plain wrong. If someone is going to stick a needle into you, you can rationalise it. “This is going to scratch a bit but it means the filling won’t hurt”. Animals can’t do that. No matter how strong your delusion is that your pet understands every word you say, it doesn’t. Really. And if someone starts sticking needles in an animal, it’s likely to be confused and in pain for zero therapeutic benefit.
By all means share your home with the Fluffy Vermin. Let them cause you to wreck your car or give you horrible infections. Go nuts. Live the dream. And if you want to live on a restricted diet, have strangers with dirty hands stick needles in you and believe in μ2B that’s fine too.
But if you believe in animal rights, give them the right to a proper diet. And the right not to have you inflict pain on them by getting a quack to turn them into a pin cushion for zero therapeutic effect.
I’ve had a nice email from Oscar’s Pet Foods (http://www.oscars.co.uk) who clearly know their stuff:
“This does become a complicated area of nutrition, a cat is an obligate carnivore as unlike most animals a cat cannot synthesise taurine so has to eat meat. Cereals are used in commercial cat food and will certainly not harm a cat and have nutritional benefits as long as there is enough meat content . The cheapest the cereal the harder it is for any animal to digest and therefore a rice based food is far more digestible.
Cats also have a tendency to produce stones in their urinary tract and an acid urine will dissolve these. It is therefore important to ensure the diet does not contain too much of the wrong minerals that can change the urine PH , magnesium being the worst which is present in a lot of farmed chickens.”
I didn’t know about the urine pH issue but there are similarities in humans: urinary tract infections with urease-producing bugs like Proteus or Pseudomonas – the urease metabolises urea into ammonia and carbon dioxide. This is problematic as the NH3 raises pH which causes formation of struvite stones. These are composed of a combination of magnesium ammonium phosphate (struvite) and calcium carbonate-apatite. As pH rises the phosphate becomes less soluble.