Diet 2: The Cats

Next up on my pet food series is the cats. This post will be much shorter than the dogs' post.

The Foods: Taste of the Wild Mountain Feline dry food, Wellness canned cat food, Taste of the Wild canned food

Cats are obligate carnivores. For those who aren't into biology and animal science, this means that they absolutely must eat meat. If they do not eat meat, and do not eat enough of it, they will be very sick and, in all likelihood, will die. Because of this, I feed my cats as close to an all meat diet as possible.

Like the big dogs, the cats get Taste of the Wild. Just like the dog formulas, it is completely grain free. It also has the second highest amount of protein of all the cat food brands that I would feed (the one with the highest was Wellness Core, which is quite expensive).

TinTin gets fed almost exclusively Taste of the Wild (from here on referred to as TotW in this post). Sometimes he goes to our neighbor's house and eats the cat food they leave out for the strays and feral cats in our neighborhood. We have tried to give him canned food and he refuses to eat it; he also refuses Tuna. Shadow eats mostly TotW. She sometimes gets canned cat food as well, and occasionally gets canned tuna. She also supplements her diet with fresh mice. Delilah gets fed TotW and she gets canned cat food twice a day.

When I got Delilah, I did a lot of research on cat nutrition. I learned that their diet should be almost exclusively meat. I also learned they shouldn't be fed only dry food because it can lead to chronic kidney problems. They don't drink much water and need to get part of their water from the food they eat, hence the need for canned food or fresh meat.

Could it be improved? Yes, in the same way the dogs' diet could be improved. I would love to feed the cats a raw diet, but, like I mentioned in my dog diet post, it's just not a possibility at this time.

Things I refuse to feed: All grains. My cats do not get fed grains. I also limit the amount of non-meat foods they get. The only cat food fed here that has fruits and vegetables in it is the canned Wellness.

Helpful things: Again, I'll cite the Food Pets Die For book I mentioned in my dog food post. There are also a ton of websites, all of which I no longer have bookmarked. Simply Googling "cat diet" will heed lots of information. I also learned stuff in my zoology classes.