Everything we know or think we know about commercial cat food could be wrong.

 

Today, the small cats we keep as pets are commonly fed a diet radically different from their diet in the wild, a diet unlike that of every other species of cat.¹ It is based largely upon grains — a foodstuff carnivores rarely eat except by accident when consuming the contents of their prey.

 

The nutritional requirements of cats, all species of cat, including felis silvestris catus, are well understood.² ³ ⁴ ⁵ What sometimes is misunderstood is that cats not only are carnivores, but also obligate carnivores. When specializing as predators, nature limited the ability of all cats to metabolize carbohydrates,⁶ focusing instead upon the protein, bone and organs of their prey to thrive.⁷

 

What has not been established is whether cats can do anything more than survive, in poor or deteriorating health, on a dry, grain-based, biologically-inappropriate diet.¹

 

How, then, did we come to this practice that seems to make so little sense?

 

We probably never really thought about it. Nor did the people before us who first accepted kibble and grain-based canned foods as a replacement for the cat meats and scraps they previously fed their cats.⁸ We "received knowledge," rather than relying upon our own critical thinking skills to decide.⁹

 

We lead busy lives. We take necessary short cuts. We have opinion leaders and tend to follow conventional wisdom in order to keep our lives from coming to a standstill. In an era of unprecedented information available at our fingertips, we never looked or thought. We relied upon others to think, decide or warn us of error.

 

Did we choose the wrong opinion leaders: our veterinarians, government regulators, pet food suppliers? Sadly, most of these opinion leaders have let us and the animals we value down while we ignored the one group of opinion leaders certain not to lead us astray: cats.

 

Given the opportunity, our cats will prey on mice, birds, rabbits and lots of bugs. It's what they did in our parent's and grandparent's day when they spent a lot of time outdoors. They are carnivores, predators that must eat meat. Their biology allows nothing else.⁵ Given a natural diet, their nutrition is well balanced and complete: they thrive. But it's not a pretty sight.

 

When we began spaying and neutering our cats and bringing them indoors, we cut off their last connection to a natural food supply. The commercial dog food industry stepped in with a modern, scientific way to feed cats that was bagged, canned, easily categorized and available at your grocery store. Its definable, scientific and modern nature made it appealing to governments to regulate and for vets to embrace and sell in their own offices.

 

How quickly and easily it all happened!

 

Now, with the mounting evidence of a causal relationship between these common feeding practices and serious health problems, a perceived disconnect between the nutritional requirements of our cats and all other species of cats, an industry with a vested interest in grain as the basis for its products, a veterinary education system with little nutritional teaching, subsidized by commercial pet food industries, a questionable government concept approval and oversight process, the economic inertia of maintaining the status quo, and the rejection of science-based belief systems on the extremes of both sides of the issue — we must examine from first principles our received knowledge, do our own scientific research, apply critical thinking skills and reach new conclusions.

 

The animals we value as our friends and companions have only us to turn to.

 

Welcome to the Feline Nutrition Education Society.

 

The raw feeding movement is hardly new.¹⁰ Feline Nutrition is not about "preaching to the converted." Our purpose is to provide reliable, documented and scientifically sound information as we reach out via established and new media to help consumers make a new, fully informed decision.

  

Our pragmatic goal at Feline Nutrition is to help to create a large, informed consumer base, which in turn will bring about dramatically greater consumer demand for economical, user-friendly, nutritionally sound prey-based diets. When the consumer demands it, you can be certain that business will respond with a product to meet that demand. And these products already exist in the marketplace.

 

It can be as easy as choosing one product over another. Take a look at "Easy Raw Feeding For The Busy Person" to see just how easy. And for many other options, take a good, long, hard look at the messages of the many voices of Feline Nutrition.

 

 

¹ Justine S. Patrick, "Deconstructing the Regulatory Façade: Why Confused Consumers Feed their Pets Ring Dings and Krispy Kremes," LEDA at Harvard Law School, April, 2006

² Debra L. Zoran, DVM, PhD, DACVIM, "The Carnivore Connection to Nutrition in Cats," Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Vol. 221, No. 11, December 1, 2002

³ Board on Agriculture (BOA), Nutrient Requirements of Cats, Revised Edition, The National Academies Press, 1986, pp. 3-28

⁴ John W. S. Bradshaw, "The Evolutionary Basis for the Feeding Behavior of Domestic Dogs and Cats," The Journal of Nutrition, September 2005