Cats, Food and History

For thousands of years cats roamed the ancient world. They made their homes on the savannahs of Africa, the plains of India and the forests of Eurasia and the Americas. Cats, big and small swirled through every type of terrain in every climate. They hunted in every different niche, surviving on mainly fresh herbivores; rats and rabbits; deer and buffalo in the case of the big cats.

A cat will eat the whole of its prey – except the gall bladder. That is the squidgy green-red thing that the cat leaves for you in the morning if it has been eating a rabbit in the kitchen as you slept soundly upstairs. Unlike dogs they are eaters of fresh meat, not older scavenged meat. Similar to dogs, however, is that they will eat the entire carcase – whole rabbits included. In this way they gain complete nutrition; the prey contains all the protein building blocks in muscle and connective tissue, but also fatty acids are absorbed from adipose tissue from fat deposits, nerves and central nervous tissue.

So where do cats get their carbohydrates from? Answer: the gut contents of their herbivore prey! Yes, their rabbit dinner is full of partially-digested grass, cereal and vegetable matter all ready to give the cat the vitamins and minerals unavailable to it from other sources.

There you have it – the complete meal, ready packaged and keeping fresh out in the neighbouring fields or nearby mouse nest. All ready for a nutritious snack containing all the vitamins and minerals the cat needs – all in exactly the right proportions. Isn’t nature clever?

Commercial Diets

Food producers in the USA at the turn of the century, with lots of poor quality meat, gristle, viscera and cereal by-products that they could not hide in sausages, came up with a novel idea to sell it – put it in tins and call it ‘cat food’. For the first time in history, people could buy food specifically for their cat. The idea caught on. Soon people forgot that they just used to feed their cats raw meat and all the scraps – a broad range of foods, minimally processed to maintain the food’s value

We find ourselves today bombarded by pet food advertisements for this tinned brand or that dry brand or this sausage preparation. There is so much processed food to choose from we don't know where to turn! When I was at College, one of my old lecturers said ‘If there is more than one answer to a problem, then they're probably all wrong’. Is this true with pet food? I think we’ve forgotten about the basics as a consequence of our drive for convenience. Admittedly, we all try to buy the best for our wonderful cats, but have you ever asked yourself these questions:

• If this processed food is as wonderful as they say it is, why don’t they use it in people – for astronauts or prisoners, for example? And
• Would I eat this stuff?

The answers to these questions, as we all know, are (a) No, they do not and would not use such food for people, in any extreme, and (b) No, I wouldn't eat it if you paid me!

Convenient Disease

So why do we feed processed food to our dogs? In a word, convenience! But how convenient is it if your animal develops a persistent itch or eczema, dental problems or smelly breath, flea allergic dermatitis, colitis, food hypersensitivitaminy, lethargy, dull and scurfy coat, arthritis or kidney disease?

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