Unlike your dog that can eat anything (and most likely will), cats are obligate carnivores. What this means is that just like their bigger cousins they need a lot of protein in their diet and have little use for carbohydrates. In fact, they do not even have the capacity to taste sweet flavors like you get from corn or corn syrup.
From everything that I have read, the best food for our adult cats (of average weight) is one three or four ounce mouse each day; preferably just having ceased living (cats like their food warm). One mouse has everything a healthy cat needs: (1) taurine (an amino acid) in the brain and nervous tissue, (2) vitamins in the heart, liver and kidneys and (3) protein (other amino acids) in the muscles. I don't really know if they digest or have a use for all that fur, but I am sure the bones provide calcium and other minerals. I actually read on one website that the fruits, greens and grains that the mouse eats and has in its digestive tract are all the carbohydrates your cat requires.
If your cat stays indoors all day all the time, it's a little hard to get mice into their diet; short of buying live mice and turning them loose in your house. Not my idea of fun and there's the issue of blood in the carpeting. And even if your cat wanders around outside, you can't be sure they are catching mice, or birds for that matter, or that they are eating them and not just depositing them in your bed. I don't know how lizards figure into it. Birds will do almost as well as mice, but mice are still the best. So, what do you do? Simply put, you find the food with the highest percentage of protein hopefully from high quality sources. Considering everything that I have read, I don't know why cat food manufacturers don't make canned cat food from whole mice. But a good guideline in deciding what to feed your cat is to consider what a mouse has to offer. I'm sure it wouldn't be pretty and half of what they do to cat food is so it will appeal to humans. Consider that they add all kinds of artificial colors (not healthy for people and not healthy for our pets, either) so the food will look good. Cats are color blindmostly.
Then there is the whole issue of canned versus dry food. Which is best? Personally, we feed our cat, Winnie, a little of both. She seems to like them both equally. If you are like me, you have read that canned food mucks up a cat's teeth and that dry food will keep them cleaner. Apparently that is not so. It's the carbohydrates in the foods (either wet or dry) that dirty their teeth. It isn't really necessary for your cat to eat lots of abrasive food if you keep the carbohydrates to a minimum and their teeth don't get messy to begin with. Oh, do stay away from the semi-moist foods. You know the type that is not canned but is not hard and crunchy. These foods usually have a lot of corn syrup added to them to help keep them moist and corn syrup is decidedly not good for your cat. So, the conclusion is, feed your cat what it likes, either wet or dry or both, as long as it is low in carbohydrates. Not an easy feat to manage.
Generally speaking, a kitten should eat a food that is at least 30% protein and 20% fat and canned foods are generally higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates than dry foods. An adult cat should get at least 25% to 30% protein and 15% to 20% fat from its food. These are minimums for good health. Most manufacturers of quality cat foods try for these percentages. But realize that the average quality food's digestibility is about 70% to 80% and in a lesser quality food it can drop to 60% or less. What does this mean? It means that not all of what is put into a can of cat food or dry kibble will be digested by the cat and therefore will have no nutritional value.
Before you can figure out which food to buy, you have to have a method for figuring out the actual percentage of protein in the food and you have to be able to compare wet to dry. In order to do that you have to look at the Guaranteed Analysis part of the label.
To compare dry food to canned food or pouch food, look at the percentage moisture. If your canned food has a protein content of 11% and a moisture content of 84%, for example, you have to consider the part of the food that is not water. In this case, that would be 16%. So take the 11% protein and divide it by the 16% that is not water (.11 : .16 = .6875) and you get roughly 69% protein dry. If your dry food is, for example, 45% protein and 8% water, you would divide .45 by .92 (100% minus 8%) for a result of 48.9% protein. Canned foods generally offer more protein than dry foods.
Now that you have a better idea of how much protein your cat food actually offers to your cat, you need to address the digestibility factor. If the first ingredient listed is chicken, beef, lamb or fish, you can assume it is a high quality food. If the first ingredient is meat by-products of one type or another, the food is of lesser quality. The poorest quality foods will have meat and bone meals listed as the first ingredient. Be careful though, because even if the first ingredient is meat, if there are several sources of corn or other grains listed, then the manufacturer is trying to disguise the fact that grain is actually the main ingredient. Grains contribute to a high load of less digestible carbohydrates and can lead to all sorts of health problems for your cat; diabetes being one of them even if you cat is not overweight. I have found a dry cat food (it's a little more money than most) that has potato starch and sweet potato as the carbohydrates. It is made by The Blue Buffalo Company and is called Wilderness.
If you have to spend a little more money on your cat's food, do it. With a higher quality food, you generally have to feed your cat less of it because more of it is digestible. But also keep in mind, just because it's higher priced doesn't mean it's the best. Read your cat's food label as carefully as you do your own.
Feed your cat well; give it plenty of love and exercise and it will be a loving companion for a very long time.
Dianne Lehmann is a jewelry designer who has been in business since January of 2000. Her interest in designing and manufacturing jewelry goes back beyond that to 1994. It took her many years of trying various creative outlets to finally figure out that making jewelry is where she could really shine. Dianne began with simply stringing beads onto cable and has progressed from there. She is now an accomplished lapidary (cuts and polishes stones) and silversmith. Dianne and her husband, Bernd, live in northern Arizona and both love to hike. Dianne can not help but pick up rocks (they are her first love) and some of these find their way into her jewelry. Dianne makes one-of-a-kind pieces that she hopes give people as much joy to view as she gets from the making of them. If you like, you may view her work at http://www.syzygyjewelry.com
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Hi Danny. Yeah, I thought about that, but only for about a couple of seconds. There are a lot of people out there who think that mice are the best food for house cats. I was surprised to see how many folks touted them. But the practicalities of it are a bit daunting. I'm sticking to commercially prepared foods for our cat!
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