A Cat Needs a Balanced Diet

I just read a story about a kitten that was fed a raw food diet (beef meat) plus supposedly dry food as well. The dry food was intended to provide the supplements that are added by the pet food manufacturers as meat by itself is not balanced. Commonsense I know, but we need sometimes to be vigilant because a cat needs a balanced diet and we can think this is happening when in fact it is not. I am talking about calcium deficiency on this occasion.

What happened was the kitten wasn't eating the dry cat food that was put down. It was being eaten by other cats. Perhaps also the kitten preferred the meat and stopped at that. Perhaps not enough supervision was carried out by the "owner". The unbalanced diet resulted in the kitten suffering from calcium deficiency. An X ray showed calcium depletion. The kitten ended up hardly being able to walk. I presume that this is what brought the problem to the person's attention.

This kind of problem might occur when we try and make our own homemade cat food. It is sadly quite tricky and daunting to make homemade cat food for this very reason and it shouldn't be. We should be able to buy natural cat food but I can't seem to find a supplier. This pulls us back to the same pet food manufacturers and a lot of what they produce is poor although the top end stuff is good (but expensive).

The kitten with calcium depletion could and probably would recover on returning to a balanced diet with, intially more calcium in the food mix. A cat needs a balanced diet and this needs to be supervised sometimes.



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