Today, most cat owners believe there is only one way to nourish their pets. That one way is an exclusive diet of commercially processed canned and dry cat foods. Unfortunately, many of these diets are actually poor alternatives to fresh, carnivore-friendly diets that the cat naturally requires. The fallacy that only commercial foods will support health in our cats is, in fact, little more than a remarkably successful marketing ploy by the companies who make the foods that owners believe are the best and only way to care for our cats properly.
As recently as 25 years ago, there were few commercial cat food products and most pet cats still lived almost entirely on prey they captured on their own supplemented by human table foods, usually some type of meat. Only once cats began to be pets underfoot in the homes of their owners did commercially prepared, highly processed foods become a staple of the housecat’s diet. Today, unfortunately, these packaged foods are in most cases the exclusive diet of our cats.
Even though they are popular because of their convenience, these foods are really little more than the equivalent of convenience foods we humans eat. Like our own boxed, bagged, or fast-food type foods, commercial cat foods lack the freshness and nutrient quality of the cat’s natural meat-based wild diet and, in the case of all dry foods, are full of highly processed cereals and sugary vegetables (like potatoes) which are extremely poor quality ingredients for the obligatory carnivore. When we feed these foods as our cats’ exclusive diets, we subject them to health-robbing malnutrition.
All About Cats is excited to announce we are still one of the first one hundred Gold Practices!
