So..I suspect there's a thread similar to this but I can't find it.

I don't even know if it's possible to do this .. but I've always fed cats canned food in the past and considering I make so many meals and cook so much stuff up for every body else, I thought I'd do that for our new family member too.

The thing is.. i'm not exactly sure what's a no go for cats ( as chocolate is for dogs. do cats eat grains? just meats? vegetables?) and what's imperative for them to be getting.



Feel free to enlighten me..

I would suggest purchasing a book with cat food recipes to ensure you are providing your cat with all the nutrients it needs. You can do a search on amazon, there are several such books.

I agree with rabid_child, best bet is to buy a book. That being said, I've heard that garlic and onions are a big no-no for cats.

oh great info! thanks!! i'll look into it all but for tonight (his first night) he's got premium organic food from the vet

Grapes and raisins are also bad for both cats and dogs. I saw a list somewhere recently of foods to avoid. I wish I could locate it easily. I say, stick with a recipe that is designed to be balanced, and to be on the safe side, don't give your cats any table scraps etc that you don't know for sure are safe. Personally, my cat never gets people food. I leave her nutrition to the experts.

you have to make sure she's getting enough taurine too so if you plan to make your own food you might want to look into supplements that can be added to food or water to make sure she's not missing anything. taurine is the major one to be careful of though

You also have to make sure she gets enough liquid into her diet. A person I know on another website just had her cat in with crystals forming in her cat's bladder and blocking the urethera. She had to have her cat on a catherater, and he was at the vet's for a week and a half. Her (the woman on the other website) vet said to use wet (canned) food, along with drinking a lot of water, to prevent this from happening to her cat again.

Home cooking for cats is a complicated process; a number of different, specialized, supplements are required. Rabid_child is right; you will need to get a good reference book if you're going to try it. Feeding raw requires fewer supplements, I think, but you still have to be sure there are enough of the internal organs, and the right kinds, included in what you're feeding.



Get a book, and before you go to the expense of buying all the supplements, try a recipe without them to see whether your cat will even eat what you're preparing. I did it the other way around, and after spending a lot of money on supplements, found out that most of my cats (I have quite a few) wouldn't eat either home cooked or raw. (I tried chicken for the raw; my results might have been different with rabbit, which is probably the best flesh to use for cats, but I couldn't bring myself to buy and handle dead rabbit.)



ETA: If you're new to cats, do some reading, online or in books, about what's harmful to cats. Things that are safe for dogs aren't necessarily safe for cats - for example, aspirin is very poisonous to cats, but is safe to give to dogs and birds. (I have cats, dogs and birds, and the hazard list is different for each.)

Try this link: http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=1&aid=1029



Also, avocados are supposed to be bad for both cats and dogs.



I also support the idea of getting a quality recipe book so you know that you are feeding your pet an optimum diet.



Good luck!



Julie

Avocados are indeed bad for cats and dogs (and the pits are very poisonous to them), and extremely poisonous to birds

I think they're being a little too overbearing in their prohibition of tuna for cats. Certainly, a cat should never be fed just tuna, because it's not nutritionally complete. But I don't see the problem with occasional supplemental feeding of "human-grade" fish, my cats do quite well with it.

The issue with even occasional tuna is that tuna contains higher concentrations of pollutants than other fish. It's why pregnant women aren't supposed to eat tuna. Since cats are so small and have such a low(no) tolerance for certain substances, as compared to humans, it's recommended that cats not be fed tuna.



That being said, when my cats reach a certain age/stage of illness, I don't hesitate to feed human grade tuna - anything to stimulate their appetites.

That's a good point...but so much cat food contains tuna (even the premium brands). It would seem that it would be quite difficult to avoid all tuna in a cat's diet.

Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they must eat other animals to survive and thrive. Grains are absolutely nothing but a filler in cat foods, and the stuff that actually uses TVP now to save money might seem tempting to us but it isn't good for your cat. While canned catfood isn't the healthiest thing because of all the filler and byproduct in it, please don't try to cook your cat any sort of fancy grain meals. It just isn't safe.

Agreed 100% about the obligate carnivore and grains being bad for cats. However, I don't think the OP was proposing to cook a grain diet; I think she was saying she doesn't know what cats eat/should eat.

Here's a link:

http://www.vegepet.com/forcats.html

We need a super thread on this so that we don't have to re-post every week why a vegetarian (much less vegan) diet is NOT suitable for cats. It's not a matter of adding supplements to make it suitable; the fact is that carbs are extremely harmful to cats in the long run, causing both chronic and immediately life threatening conditions ranging from diabetes to UTIs.



Don't make your cat your own personal lab rat by feeding it a diet not suitable for obligate carnivores. If you can't feed a cat what it needs, get a bunny instead of a cat.

so wrt the grains stuff.... i spotted a brand of catfood called Wellness yesterday, which didn't have a load of grains in it, but which did have sweet potato and blueberries and odd stuff like that which cats wouldn't i assume naturally eat. is that ok?



and that said.... my cat eats the grains on the bottom of his catgrass shoots sometimes, is that gonna kill him?

Cats, and other obligate carnivores, would normally get a small amount of grains and vegetable matter by eating the digestive organs of animals they kill. And, of course, they nibble on greens occasionally, but there's some controversy whether the reason for this is nutritional or simply to aid digestion or help trigger vomiting to get hairballs up. The vast bulk of their food needs to be protein, though, and the problem with a veg*n diet, no matter how well supplmented, is that it is predominantly carbs, and those cause all kinds of health problems in obligate carivores.

i didn't say anything about a veg*n diet, i was wondering if the fruit and veg in this catfood was required, served any real purpose, or just made it look all healthy and pretty and used 'superfoods' to suck in the unwitting consumer.

Oh dear, here we go again.

Cats do NOT have to eat other animals to survive and be healthy.






This is getting very boring.

Which vegan food did you feed your cat(s) and how did they become ill/die?

My sister fed her cats foods high in carbs and lost half a dozen young males to UTIs in the space of a couple of years. I have fed my cats primarily protein for decades, after strugglingwith diabetes and UTIs in several cats and educating myself about the nutritional needs of cats. Since I switched to priarily protein, no diabetes ad no UTIs.



But, personal experiece aside, the science is against you, Stanie. I know you don't like to believe that obligate carnivores exist, but they do.

That's the brand I feed, but only the grain-free varieties.

[QUOTE=vegbunny83]Try this link: http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=1&aid=1029



Also, avocados are supposed to be bad for both cats and dogs.



Does anyone know about Avoderm cat food? It contains avocado oil, and avocado meal. I never bought it, nor know anyone who does, but I find it perculiar that a cat food would picture something bad right on it's cover.



I would support that lab grown "meat" for animal food. Has anyone heard of it's use for animals?

That is interesting... every article that I have read about cat/dog nutrition has stated that avocados are poisonous to both cats and dogs, and I have seen more than one veterinarian say the same. Avocados contain a chemical called Persin that is found in all parts of the plant, which is the chemical that is thought to be toxic.



However, I just Googled it and read about people giving avocado to their cats as a treat and the cat having no ill effects! These people claim the avocado is actually beneficial to the cat's health, and that their vets know that they feed avocado to their cats and have no objection.



The site for the pet food you mention actually has a page addressing the exact issue: http://www.breeders-choice.com/dog_p...ado-safety.htm They seem to think that only the avocado pits and leaves are toxic, and even then only in the Guatemalan variety. I suppose if they had mass complaints about pets dying from eating their food they wouldn't be making it anymore.



It could be that maybe certain cats and dogs have no sensitivity to Persin, or maybe only the pits/leaves/peels of the avocado are poisonous. I'd rather just not feed my cat avocados (or any people food) and not have to find out first hand! I feed my cat Evo Turkey and Chicken Formula dry cat food, which is a high quality, grain-free food that is completely nutritionally balanced. I also supplement her diet with Tiki Cat wet food, which is made with wild caught fish. I've done a lot of research about cat food and would rather have her eating something I know is formulated to be nutritionally sound instead of experimenting with her food.



~Julie

From personal experience, I would never trust these people.



My cat eats Wellness Core. It's grain free.

You struggled with diabetes and uti's in cats that werent vegan?



Which vegan brand was your sister feeding them? was it evolution?




Maybe, but cats arent one of them.

I would actually argue that most indoor, well cared for cats become ill and die as a result of the vegan ingredients in the foods they consume. Because they have to eat more of the food to make up for the fillers and gain weight, and because their digestive track becomes complicated with attempting to digest both at once, I think it has a negative impact on them. Cats require no vegetables at all, ever, to live. If it kills them, it might be a slow process, just as if we were eating something that just didn't quite have what we needed to be healthy. It isn't a quick death, and it might not even be too uncomfortable until the true illness that is fatal kicks in. I suppose a good question is it worth taking a few years off the life of your cat due to nutrient defficiency to not have them consume animals? That is actually a tough question for vegans. In the long run you're contributing to far less deaths, but the one that you love is dying sooner. That's definitiely a test of where your morality lies.



Cats and people just aren't comparable in the regard of consuming a vegan diet, though. We are omnivores and as long as we meet our nutritional needs we can get by, and perhaps even live longer. The way an obligate carnivores (cats and ferrets are the most common pets in this category) digest is very different, and vegetable products are too complex for them to fully digest in their short digestion tract, thus even if these vegetables have been infused with the necessary ingredients, you can't be fully sure that they're getting the nutrition they need. And frankly, they aren't, or else they would not have evolved in such a specific way. The very fact that an animal doesn't eat a specific thing in the wild means that they are not meant to eat it, and their species hasn't taken the evolutionary steps to handle it.



I understand the moral problems with having cats that are fed animals as a vegan. I am a vegan, and I have cats, and it does bother me. I do not think I will continue to have them after these die, in fact, because I would feel more comfortable with adopting some of the many animals that can thrive on a vegan diet that are in need of someone to care for them.



It can really be argued that it might not be completely irresponsible to take an obligate carnivore into your home if you really can give them a well manufactured vegan diet that is infused with synthetic taurine (if you're not doing this you are causing them serious health problems!!!!!), because while you may be shortening their life, you are still giving them a longer life than they would have in an animal shelter, most likely.