Cat Food and Nutrition: Raw Meat and Live Prey

Most pet cats today are fed commercial cat food, either as dry pellets or in canned form, or a diet of mostly canned tuna and other fish. While commercially available cat foods are often touted as being specifically enhanced for your cat's health, this is a misleading claim. Enhancing cat food is akin to enhancing junk foods for humans.

Dry cat food is often composed primarily of grains and cereals and other sources of refined carbohydrates. Even a cursory look at the natural diet of the domestic cat's wild ancestors will show that grains and plant matter played a minor role. Wild cats are carnivores, hunting mostly small rodents and eating them raw and whole. Most animals contain a large percentage of water in their bodies, so it is through a wild cat's prey that it meets its water needs. Commercial dry cat food is just that, dry, and often contains much less than 10% water.

In addition, dry cat food contains too many carbohydrates for a cat. Again, wild cats sustain themselves on live prey, and these prey animals do not contain a lot of carbohydrates. What this amounts to is that the cat body is not used to having as easy an energy source as carbohydrates, and converts much of this energy into body fat. Feeding dry cat food to cats can in fact lead to obesity.

Canned fish, on the other hand, while not quite as bad as dry cat foods, also has its problems as a cat's exclusive diet. Fish meat is a poor source of vitamin E, and canned tuna packed in vegetable oils contains polyunsaturated fatty acids that can further deplete vitamin E. Vitamin E deficiencies in cats can cause Yellow Fat Disease, where the body's fatty tissues become inflamed. Tuna and fish, while high in protein, do not contain certain amino acids found in other animal meat which are essential for cat health.

Indeed, the best diet for a cat is the one closest to its natural diet. Raw meat and live prey are the mainstays of a wild cat's diet, and would provide domestic cats with far better nutrition than currently popular pet diets. Cats consume their small prey whole and raw. It is important to note that cooking, particularly heat processing, can destroy or alter vital nutrients such as amino acids and enzymes found in the raw meat.

This diet might seem lacking, but usually it is because we insist on looking at things from the perspective of what is good for a human. Cats are carnivores and not omnivores like us humans, and as such they are not made to digest some foods that are good for humans, like vegetables and fruits. Cats can and will survive, even flourish, on a diet of raw meat. This diet will provide them with the food that their bodies are most adapted to digesting and acquiring nutrients from.

A diet of live prey can be too time-consuming for the casual cat owner to implement, and a carefully implemented diet of raw meat can be the next best alternative. While this comes with its own precautions and considerations, your cat will be sure to grow healthy and strong if you feed it what is natural for a carnivore.

Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1512437/cat_food_and_nutrition_raw_meat_and.html