Vegetarian cats, part I
If you’ve become a vegetarian you might feel uneasy about keeping a cat and feeding it on dead animals. Cats require essential amino acids, fatty acids, and vitamins that are hard, if not impossible, to obtain from a vegetarian diet. But there are now cat foods specially formulated with vegetarian ingredients, as this Scientific American article points out.
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.
Some would vehemently disagree. Evolution Diet, makers of completely vegetarian foods for cats, dogs and ferrets, says that its meatless offerings, on the market for 15 years, are healthy and nutritious, and, if anything, have extended the lives of many a feline and canine, even reversed chronic health problems. Claiming that most mainstream pet foods contain artery-clogging animal fat, diseased tissue, steroid growth hormones and antibiotics no less harmful to pets than to humans, its website posts testimonials from loyal customers who claim happy and long-lasting pets who look forward to their meals.
And Harbingers of a New Age, which makes “Vegecat” kibble and supplements that provide cats with nutrients otherwise only found in meat, says that its products allow owners to “prepare food in your own kitchen, choosing recipes that fit your lifestyle.”
The vegetarian pet debate is a contentious one among vegetarian pet owners and veterinarians and is one not likely to go away anytime soon. The best approach may well be to give some of the non-meat supplements and/or foods a try. If your cat won’t eat them, or does not do well on them—take kitty to a veterinarian for a check-up to see—you can always go back to what you were feeding her before.
CONTACTS: Best Friends Veterinary Medical Center, www.bestfriendsdvm.com; Evolution Diet, www.petfoodshop.com; Harbingers of a New Age, www.vegepet.com.
4 Responses to “Vegetarian cats, part I”
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You’re currently reading “Vegetarian cats, part I,” an entry on Bodhipaksa's blog, bodhi tree swaying
Published: Mar 26 2009
Tags and categories
Tags: cats, pets, Vegetarianism
Category: Meditation & practice, Religion & Society
I’m not a vegetarian, so you may not care what I say, but it seems funny to me that there’s any concern at all about letting a cat eat what it naturally is supposed to eat. I understand that humans can exist without eating meat, and I do respect that, but a cat is different.
If the idea is to do things naturally, then a cat should eat meat. If you want to treat the cat with respect, then it should get the requirements that it needs. I’m not sure I understand the justification for not feeding a cat meat. It’s what they eat. It’s what they need. What is the purpose of not feeding them meat?
I love my cat.
I’m interested in hearing from anyone with a well thought-out point or a good question. I think yours is a good question.
I don’t have a cat myself, and I almost certainly wouldn’t get one for the very reason that they do want to eat meat. As you say it’s what they do naturally, so knowing that I wouldn’t want to create more of a demand for meat. I also don’t want to encourage people to keep cats as pets for that and other reasons, like the effect they have on local bird populations, etc, and I think keeping a cat encourages other people to do likewise.
But if I’d only recently decided to be vegetarian and already had a cat, I might want my cat to be vegetarian for the same reason. Bearing in mind that I’ve made a decision in the past to get a cat — a decision that I can’t undo and that I have to live with, but one that has ethical consequences I’m not happy with — if I’ve decided to reduce the amount of harm caused by my household diet and if my cat was willing to eat vegetarian food and if it was healthy for the cat to do that, then why not? Weighing up the balance of a cat’s desire for meat against the harm caused to other animals (farm animals, wild fish) to me the equation comes out against giving the cat what it wants just because it wants it. Assuming, as I said, that it’s healthy and the cat is prepared to put up with it. I don’t want to starve a cat to death.
There can also be esthetic considerations, in that the smell of meat can be extremely unpleasant when you’ve been vegetarian for a long time, and the smell of pet food even worse.
We have two cats. Former farm cats gifted to us because they looked tamer than the others. If we hadn’t taken them on they would probably have either produced a lot more cats by now or be dead or both.
I have tried reasoning with them about meat eating and the suffering they are causing but they just look at me like I am dumb. They do this on most subjects. Sometimes I think they have a point.
We feed them dried meat cat food. The order of preference when purchasing is lamb, beef, chicken, fish. Basically trying to buy stuff that is more likely to a bye-product of a process in which the animal didn’t suffer too much. (I know there are no such things as bye-products in this sense and that almost all commercial production causes suffering but this is a compromise). We try to avoid fish for the reasons outlined in the other blog posting on vegetarian cats. Personally I don’t believe any fishery is sustainable. Even unrepentant carnivores should avoid fish they haven’t caught themselves if they have an environmental conscience.
One day we will try them on veggie or vegan food. I suspect we would have to starve them first! They certainly look like they would eat me before they ate vegan.
Before I owned cats I didn’t appreciate what a carnivore really was. These things kill for a living and if we didn’t molly coddle them they would be pros. Until we moved to a flat I didn’t realize how nocturnal they were!
Generally I think animals are very good for the children. I wouldn’t like to raise children in an environment that isn’t shared non-humans.
Yes, cats can be rather set in their ways!