All cats, small or large, are true carnivores; this means they must eat meat to survive.  Cats cannot be vegetarians.  This is as true for the tiger at the zoo as it is for the cat sitting on your lap.

Cats are predators.  They evolved eating a prey based diet, and more importantly, eating that diet raw.  Cats in the wild eat the bones of their prey, as raw bone is highly digestible and is their primary source of calcium.  Cooking bone not only reduces the nutrients available but also makes the bone brittle and dangerous to ingest.  Cooking degrades nutrients in meat, causing losses of vitamins, minerals and amino acids.  Meats used in processed pet food are cooked at high temperatures (up to 260 degrees.)  Commercial pet food companies then need to try to add back the essential nutrients that are destroyed.  This supplementation is not exact, and there are nutrient losses which aren't always replaced.  For example the taurine disaster.  Taurine is an amino acid that pet-food manufacturers didn't consider essential until cats began to suffer and die from eating processed products deficient in it.  Now it's an isolated chemical added to most cat foods.

A Cat's Diet in the Wild

Question:  Why do we need to consider what a cat would eat in the wild?  

Answer:  Because although humans have ‘tried’ to domesticate the cat, we haven't changed cats much at all.  We haven't messed with their basic form and value their wild hunting abilities.  Only recently (1965) we have tried to feed cats a processed, carbohydrate filled diet, and it is no coincidence that this same period also exhibited a dramatic increase in disease and obesity in cats.

 
In the wild, cats eat whole, raw prey.  Their diet includes mice, rats, any other small rodents available, rabbits, insects, birds, etc.  They usually eat the whole animal, meat, bones, brains, organs and fur. Their systems are uniquely set up to metabolize this diet which is high in moisture, high in protein and very low in carbohydrates.  Because this is the diet they have relied upon for tens of thousands of years, they do not have the ability to process carbohydrates very well.  Cats get most of their energy requirements from glucose their livers process from protein, not carbohydrates.  Not only are carbohydrates hard for your cat's system to handle, but they are also detrimental to your cat's health.  Could be something for you to think about the next time you see pretty pictures of grains on the front of a bag of commercial cat food.

Providing your cats with a diet that is modeled on what they would eat in the wild has many benefits:

• Improved digestion
• Greatly reduced stool odor and volume
• Healthy coat, less shedding, fewer hairballs
• Increased energy
• Weight loss, if overweight
• Better dental health
• Better urinary health

POTTENGER’S CAT STUDY

                                                                           

Like many great discoveries, Dr Francis M Pottenger accidentally came upon the finding that his laboratory cats were noticeably healthier when fed on a diet of raw meats rather than cooked meats.

Dr Pottenger, a human doctor, was involved in using cats to assess the potency of adrenal extracts for use in human medicine.  His job was to adrenalectomise laboratory cats, and then maintain the animals on adrenal extracts to determine the “potency” of the compounds.

Pottenger’s cats were fed on table scraps from the local restaurant.  When the restaurant closed during the off season, he was forced to source his meat scraps directly from the local abattoir (which came raw).  During the time he was feeding the raw meat scraps to his laboratory cats, he noticed a dramatic improvement in their overall health, and also a significant reduction in surgical mortality rates.

Between 1932 and 1942, Dr Pottenger conducted a clinical trial, involving over 900 cats and over 9 generations, into the nutritional effects of cooked versus raw food diets.  This study is still, to date, the single largest trial conducted on the effects of feeding cooked food versus raw food to domestic cats (or dogs).

Group one was fed raw meat scraps including organ meats and bone, and raw milk.

Group two was fed the same scraps but cooked, and were given pasteurised (heat treated) milk.

The cats on raw food were healthy, averaged 5 kittens per litter with few birthing problems, and most died of old age.  After 9 generations there was no change in their health status.

The cats in group two however began developing problems from the first generation, with increased deaths in the litters, smaller litter sizes, poorer mothering, and noticeable dull rough coats.

From the second generation onwards there were vision problems (probably taurine deficiency), common infections, dermatitis (miliary dermatitis), arthritis, heart disease (possibly taurine again), allergies, gingivitis and periodontal disease, inflamed joints and nervous tissue, skeletal malformation (Calcium bone density fell from 17 % at the start, to 4% by the fourth generation).  Fertility declined rapidly, as did litter size and perinatal mortality increased.

Behaviourally the group on cooked food became progressively more aggressive to handlers and each other.

Interestingly gastrointestinal parasitism was a major problem in the cooked food group, not the raw food group.  The most common cause of death in adults in the cooked food group was from pneumonia and lung abscess, and in kittens was from diarrhea and infection.

By the ninth generation on cooked food the cats were completely sterile and had stopped reproducing, so the trial had to be ceased.

Pottenger found that by changing the diet from cooked back to raw he could reverse most of the symptoms, but only until early in the third generation.  From the fourth generation onwards much of the damage was irreversible.  This suggests that damage from a cooked food diet has a generationally compounding effect.

He also found that the soil he fertilised with the faeces of the cats on the cooked food diet did not grow beans or grass, whereas the soil fertilised from the raw food group grew beans and grass vigorously.

There are arguably other factors involved besides just cooking that are causing the results of this experiment, dietary balance being an obvious one, but can we assume that even with all the added vitamins, minerals etc that are now in the most premium brand commercial pet foods, that the very act of cooking the food is not still contributing to the poor health of our present day dogs and cats (we still see many of these above problems in practice today).