Humans: Eat Fresh Food -- Cats: Eat Dried Pellets!

We are for ever being told by nutrition experts to eat fresh whole foods.  We have to eat five vegetable or fruit portions a day.  We need to eat high quality fresh food and avoid processed foods. It is driven into us for the sake of our health and well-being.

As for the domestic cat, give them dried pellets! Veterinarians are nearly always totally against giving them fresh food. They are dead against us giving our domestic cat companion fresh raw meat. The experts will even be sceptical if we tell them it will be stored properly and we will prepare it to to a high standard together with a single comprehensive vitamin/mineral/amino acid supplement to ensure it is balanced. Veterinarians don't trust us to prepare a raw meat diet for our cat.

Photo by aj victorio (modified by Michael)

But the same veterinarians would trust us to prepare our dinner (for us) from raw meat or any other raw product. They would trust us to store raw meat properly. Peculiar isn't it? Veterinarians want us to buy dried pellets.  Why? Cynically, I might say because (a) they get a cut of profits sometimes and (b) it makes cats less healthy.

Our veterinarians will tell us that commercially prepared dry cat food is a fully balanced cat diet.  It contains all the nutrients that a domestic cat requires.  They don't tell you that it contains ingredients that a domestic cat does not require and which harms them!  I'm talking about high levels of carbohydrates.

They say that, in America the AAFCO ensures that commercially prepared cat food is of a good quality but the fact of the matter is the trials that they do are highly limited.  Their trials of cat food have on occasions failed to disclose serious, even fatal nutritional inadequacies.

The veterinarian will say that it is too complicated for cat owners to provide a raw cat food diet but they are wrong because all you need is raw meat and a single high quality supplement.  Together you have a well-balanced cat food that closely mirrors what is ideal for the domestic cat namely the mouse.

Veterinarians usually treat gastrointestinal health problems on the basis that it is a undiagnosed form of food poisoning without realising that it is commercial food that might be providing the poison.

It is incorrect to automatically assume that dry cat food pellets (it's called kibble in the USA) is free from contamination.  It is full of processed carbohydrates and sugar coated with fat and fermented liquids from animal entrails.  It is stored on shelves of veterinary clinics for months and more.  It is unreasonable to believe that this cat food is always automatically entirely free of contamination.

Yet the veterinarians promote it (Hills dry cat food is one example) and argue that we would contaminate raw meat.

I'd like to refer to irritable bowel syndrome which is also referred to as irritable bowel disease. Veterinarians are unsure what causes this but it may be in excess of bad bacteria in the gut or it may be an allergic reaction to the ingredients of some commercially prepared cat foods.  The allergic reaction causes a chronic inflammatory process in the gastrointestinal tract.

One veterinarian who is well-known, Elizabeth Hodgkins, the author of Your Cat, states that:

“I have found that cats with even the most intractable and long-standing IDD will respond extremely well to ground rabbit meat as a starting diet."

She often sees clients who are at the end of their tether with their cat's IBD. I suppose this is because the conventional veterinarian's response is to simply treat the symptoms of inflammation and keep it under control and no more.

A regular visitor to my website makes his own raw cat food diet by mixing raw meat with dry cat food. I have a page on raw cat food. If you have time and if you're careful enough and if your cat has IBD, I would certainly consider what I have written on this page.