Vegan Cat Food and Obligate Carnivores

In this photo, Benjamin has a certain look that reminds me of Fidget as a young cat. I've always loved cats, and always had them. Fidget was born when I was 5, in 1975. She lived twenty years.

Recently, I was looking online for non-GMO cat food (certainly wasn't an issue in Fidget's day!) and discovered, among other things...vegan cat food. Of course, being a vegetarian this piqued my interest. And I've heard that in India (a largely vegetarian country), people feed cats lentils and rice and milk--whatever they eat themselves, and the cats eat that and like it, and they hunt, and they are fine and healthy.

This may indeed be the case. I've also heard from many other sources--very popular right now I might add--that cats are "obligate carnivores" (I love the term obligate, it's quoted in every post about giving cats a raw food diet, and it sounds like someone just made it up once and then everyone else decided to quote them.) The meaning is understood though.

Being curious, I went ahead and ordered 2 small samples of Amicat, (made in Italy) vegan cat food. It's GMO Free, supposed to be "nutritionally complete," with all the bells and whistles and synthetic taurine, and cats supposedly love it. I didn't think I would necessarily force my beloved pet "obligate carnivores" to eat it if they didn't like it or didn't thrive, but, hey, why not give them a chance to prove everything wrong? Many times our own experience can lead us to "know" things deep within ourselves that conventional wisdom and all the scientific "evidence" would dispute. So began the experiment.

What they have been eating is Royal Canin Babycat. I love the name. "Babycat" used to be one of Bean's nicknames. (Bean came along in 1995, the same year Fidget died. More about her later.) Anyway, in 2009 (now that Bean is deceased ;) Babycat is a young-kitten-specific, pretty top of the line cat food. It supposedly contains no by-products, it has "chicken" as the first ingredient, but corn gluten meal is second. Corn gluten? I thought corn was supposed to be a gluten-free grain! I've also seen "potato gluten" on cat food labels and I wondered what this is? Potato flour is also theoretically (at least in human food?) gluten free. Aaaah, the mysteries and intricacies of food, so-called food, and labeling.

Anyway, they love the Babycat. They scarf it. It's supposed to entice young kittens to munch because of the tiny kibble size, so they'll eat cat food and not just pine for their mommy's milk. They also get canned cheap petsmart kitten food (supposed to have no by products) mixed with Diatomaceous Earth (more on that later) and a little probiotic supplement. I pour a little raw cow milk over everything and they really scarf the canned stuff too. Yum! (cat) Ick! (me).

Then all of a sudden, Benjamin developed a wiry-hair patch, then in its place a BALD spot on the back of his shoulders! Of all the things that could make a stunningly beautiful, seemingly well-fed cat unaesthetic...!

I wondered what could be the problem? Okay...in all fairness, he had been through stresses (two moves in a week), two food changes, (Babycat, then Science diet, then back to Babycat), too many different flea products--One month frontline, then next month Advantage, then an OTC Sentry product not too long later (don't get me started on this!)--because the Advantage had stopped working. To boot, he had been feral to begin with, so things that might stress a "normal" cat a little bit, might stress him to the hilt.

So I emailed Dr. Glen Dupree (I had found him on the Oregon Tilth website--while looking into organic certification for Prana Pancakes...), a veterinary homeopath. Homeopathy is supposed to be very effective in cats. Maybe the subtlety of both just goes together. I emailed him and asked about the problem. He emailed me back it would be hard to recommend a homeopathic treatment not knowing more, but sent a RAW MEAT diet that I should switch them to! Ugh!

Being a vegetarian myself, I have always been grateful for the convenient (though smelly) canned and dry cat foods available. So I don't have to cook anything for my cats! Ugh! I'd need an outdoor kitchen and hazmat gear! Ha ha! So Glen joked exactly that...I should get on a hazmat suit, get an outdoor fridge and separate utensils, and go and make them their fresh raw meat diet, because cats are...(da da da ta!)...obligate carnivores.

Well, first things first. After picking up Deva from school 2 days ago we stopped at Mud Bay Granary (a great pet store, by the way, they even give you free samples to let your pet try them!) and asked about raw foods. They carry them of course. I'd imagine them to be very expensive (and they are!), pre-ground with bone in (cats are supposed to eat bones and raw bones don't splinter), sized into proper daily kitty portions in a frozen packet. You just take one chunk out and leave it in the fridge overnight, then give it to kitty for yum yum at breakfast. ;) They had one interesting looking "duck and yam dinner" and that was the one the sales girl grabbed, so I figured it was meant to be. And it's organic and naturally raised. That's important. That started this whole quest. Well, and Benjamin's bald spot.

I also grabbed a bag of Ziwipeak jerky-like "kibbles" --sort of a "raw kibble" if you will, made of air-dried venison (naturally farmed in New Zealand) with blue and green-lipped mussels (for taurine) and some hoki fish (probably to make it smelly and entice the cats.) I figured I could use this as an introduction or a backup if my tenacity for natural feeding of my obligate carnivores somehow dissolved.

I got home and put the duck and yam dinner (gingerly) in the freezer. Wrapped in another plastic bag of course. And I put it with the batteries (on the bottom, closest to being OUT of the freezer), as far from the people food as it could get. ;) At nightfall I (gingerly) opened the bag (ugh! I had to use the kitchen scissors! Then I sterilized them) and placed one chunk (again, gingerly, not even touching it with my fingers) into a separate ziploc. Being that it was pretty late when I remembered, I just left it out at room temperature in the cat room. It wasn't going to putrefy overnight and maybe their chances of adapting to it will be better if it's not too cold?

Meanwhile, in the middle of the afternoon, the Amicat vegan kibbles had arrived via UPS. I thought, "oh, how fun, now we can let them experiment and try the whole spectrum...vegan kibbles and fresh raw meat."

I had opened one sample-sized bag and sprinked a few of these new Amicat kibblies on top of the Babycat. At first they just sniffed them, but I came back a little later and all the Amicat was gone, and the Babycat remained! Uh oh! What if they like the vegan cat food better? Now that I had the full spectrum at my fingertips I was going to let them make their own choice.

I had also sprinkled a few of the Ziwipeak "jerky kibbles" into a separate bowl, then set aside the bag and resealed it. Nice, it comes with a portion-sized scoop in it, and a resealable ziploc-type bag. Don't we love convenience. Anyway the cats seemed to like it. They sort of grabbed them in their teeth and tore into them like they were fresh prey. That's always fun to watch--a cat eating its food like it's alive.

Now comes the fun part. In the morning after sending Deva off with his school lunch it was time to turn to non-vegetarian, obligate-carnivore food preparations.

I took out the ziploc from the top of the table where I had left it in the cat room overnight and plopped it (dividing with a plastic fork) into two portions (we have two cats) into the bowls.

They came over looking very curious. They were already waiting as are very friendly in the morning when they want to eat. They sniffed it and immediately began to scarf--for a couple of seconds--probably the look and keenness in their eyes that would cause someone to call them obligate carnivores despite their better angels telling them to leave a small environmental footprint...etc. (ha ha...) Then, suprisingly, they turned away, and started to sniff around in their babycat bowl, and look up at the table where the smelly smelly cans are kept.

One good thing about raw cat food from a vegetarian's perspective--it hardly has any smell at all. The smell it does have is more, ahem, "primal" and in a delicate way creepy--but it surely doesn't reach into the next room like the very undelicate stench of canned cat food.

So, they don't like it so well after all. Huh. I thought I'd give them a few more days or try mixing in other things they were used to. While cats thrive on variety, sudden complete changes often aren't welcome. Who knows, maybe their best option would be raw duck mixed with the vegan Amicat? ;) ha ha! At least it would be GMO free!

I had called Royal Canin, and asked about the corn in their cat food. They said they request their suppliers to use only Non-GMO ingredients but it also depends on availability and supply... That's a good intention at least. I asked if they test for it? They don't, of course. But they 'request' it. Okay. It's not a guarantee. If it's GMO (most likely there IS GMO corn in it to some degree if it's not regulated--and Royal Canin at least has a quality standard better than most pet food manufacturers) this COULD be causing the bald problem. Meanwhile I asked if the chickens are naturally raised and fed GMO-free food (gee, I was dreaming they might even be free range?)...as expected, no such luck.

Anyway, the cats suddenly abandoned it, sniffed around, and walked off. One possibility that had occurred to me is that they don't need to eat as much because the food is more nutritious for them. Maybe they scarf the Babycat because they like the "sweetness" of the corn (cats love sugary milk) even if it isn't really good for them. And maybe they know instinctively that they need to eat more of it because half of it is useless bulk. Or maybe they're just used to the smell. The raw duck hardly has any smell.

***
I remembered Fidget, my oldest cat, gnawing on and purring through a whole piece of raw beef liver, when I was growing up. I didn't grow up vegetarian. Sometimes when buying meat, my parents would ask the butcher not to throw off the giblets (stomachs) or hearts of the chicken, they would ask him to include it, and they'd bring it home and feed it raw to the cats.

Fidget would get this incredible look on her face, when offered something like that. Her eyes would light up, her coat would glisten, her whisker pads would get a special perkiness, her face would shine and plump, and she'd literally look like the cat about to eat the canary.

Fidget was the matron of our whole cat clan. She was the mother, the matriarch, the queen. She would hunt sometimes and give the mice to her babies. (All the other grown cats, around five of them, had been her babies.) So when that particular piece of so-memorable-in-my-mind liver came, she hunkered in front of it, with a look of satisfaction and a big gleam in her eyes, and confidence that none of the other cats were going to horn in.

Sure enough, they left her to it. She hunkered over it and first pricked it with her teeth, and made a nice "incision" from which to take bite-sized chunks of the rest. She gnawed at it and managed to work through it, sometimes it dangled from her mouth all in one piece. While she ate, she made a "hhrrraaaah, hrrrraaaah, hhhrraaaah," sort of almost purring sound, rhythmic with each bite. She chewed it sideways. She chewed it from the other side. She chewed it allllll up.

That liver looked so big in its plastic container--as big as half of her middle body. But she ate it all. And with a look of immense satisfaction (possible only in a cat) she "smiled" and began to clean and groom herself.
***

So, back to the cat room. Wake up from daydream. I took up the remaining raw duck bits (as directed with raw feeding) after Tigger and Benjamin left the room and put it in its ziploc bag (wrapped in a second bag) back (ugh!) in the fridge.