The particulars of a cat’s diet
The aim of this article is to break down a few of the settled ideas current among cat owners — ideas which, sad to say, often end very badly indeed for the animals. The domestic cat is an animal that differs in practically nothing from its wild relatives. All the time and effort that went into taming and breeding it told on the cat’s appearance only, and left its physiology untouched. So when you come to settle the question of what to feed a domestic cat, the sensible thing is to study the question as it stands in nature, and then to reproduce that at home as far as it can be done.
The “style” of a cat’s feeding is shaped by the following circumstances.
The cat is a predator. There is a firm belief among cat lovers that a predator lives on meat and has no need of plant food. The belief is mistaken. Every predator, the cat included, needs carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and the other components of plant food. What distinguishes a predator from a herbivore is the way it obtains them. A predator’s digestion is fairly primitive: its limited set of enzymes will not break down cellulose and the coarse-fibred carbohydrates that plant food largely consists of. Anyone who has ever given a cat finely chopped carrot and then looked at what came out the other end will have seen that the carrot passes through the stomach and the intestine entirely unchanged — even the colour stays as it was.
Simple carbohydrates — sugar, starch — a predator’s intestine can absorb, but the body has trouble doing anything further with them, since sugar and starch do not occur in a pure state in nature. In nature, predators are a kind of parasite. Having killed a herbivore, the cat eats the contents of the victim’s stomach and intestine first of all — that is, the very plant food the victim has obligingly digested for its “killer”. That is where the cat gets everything it needs, in a form ideally prepared for absorption. Muscle meat, which many people take to be the chief component of a cat’s food, is nothing of the kind. A good cut of meat is to your pet what a sweet is to a child: tasty and tempting, but not especially good for it.
Another important peculiarity of the cat’s body is its ability to concentrate its urine to a very high degree. In the wild, and particularly in hot countries, this is a great advantage, because it saves water. At home the same property is dangerous, and leads to the disease known as “feline urological syndrome”, or urolithiasis. The reason is that at home a cat is often given food it would very seldom come across in nature — fish and dairy products. Both are very rich in mineral salts, and those salts, combined with the unique concentrating power of the cat’s kidneys, turn the urine into a saturated solution from which they readily settle out as crystals. So it comes to this: porridge is bad for the cat, vegetables are useless, plain meat is not enough, fish and milk are dangerous, and the contents of a mouse’s or a bird’s stomach are nowhere to be had. What is the poor creature to do?
The answer is simple: having moved a wild animal out of its natural surroundings and into artificial ones, feed it artificial food.
Do not let the word frighten you. The special foods are made from natural ingredients and match a cat’s needs exactly — provided, of course, that they come from a reputable firm and have been chosen correctly.
One last question in closing: the feeding regime. Let us turn to the wild again. By their manner of hunting, all predators fall into two categories: those that hunt in a pack, and “individualist” hunters. A pack of wolves or dogs, for instance, catches one prey for the lot of them, and there the rule is that the bold one eats. So it is natural for a dog to eat fast and to eat its fill whenever it can.
The cat, though, kills its prey for itself alone, stands guard over it, and eats unhurriedly and for a long time. That is why a cat kept at home should be fed 10–20 times a day. In practice this means that food and water should be at its disposal at all times. A dog would grow fat on such an arrangement; a cat will not. A cat’s brakes on eating work perfectly well. If it is putting on fat, it is ill. As for the feeding of sick animals, that is a subject that deserves a conversation of its own.