What do you feed your cat with?

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In my last update about my partially adopted cat, which I named Proxy, I wrote about how he loves to be fed meals containing an excess of palm oil. That particular act looked a bit strange for a cat. As if that was not enough, a few days after making the said post, I caught Proxy predating on a flying insect right there in the mosque where we usually meet. Yesterday, he ran after a grasshopper, caught it, and feasted on it to compound my surprise. This led me into thinking, what kind of animals are cats when it comes to nutrition?


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Generally, living organisms are divided into producers, consumers, or decomposers depending on their feeding habits. Producers are green plants that are capable of harnessing the solar energy from the sun in addition to inorganic materials such as carbon dioxide and water to make their foods; a process known as photosynthesis. Consumers have no natural ability to make their own foods unlike producers, hence, they depend on external sources (including feeding on producers) for their own foods. Decomposers get their own nutrition by externally digesting dead producers and or consumers and then feeding on the digested materials.

From the above analysis, one can see that cats fall into the consumer category. Animal consumers can be plant eaters, flesh-eaters, or a combination of the two otherwise known as herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores respectively. Scientific classification also sees that cats belong to the carnivorous animal category that feeds largely on flesh. If cats are meant to be flesh-eater, how come many cat owners feed them with foods that are not flesh-based? Maybe not everyone, but growing up, what I am used to is seeing cat owners feeding their cats with foods that have nothing to do with their cats being carnivorous.

Even carnivores have categories. Some are obligate flesh-eaters that will only survive on meat because they have got no digestive system to digest plant-based diets properly. Obligate carnivores are also known to be hypercanivores. They are so named so because more than 70 percent of their diets have to be meat-based in order for them to function optimally. Other carnivores are either mesocarnivores or hypocarnivores with each group depending 50 percent and less than 30 percent on meat diets for their overall health.

If cats are carnivores, so why does Proxy hunt insects?

So many phenomena exist that just cannot be explained by science. I remember vividly while growing up, of a goat eating away furiously at the shell of a snail and dogs eating nylons. Even though cats are known to be natural flesh-eaters, preying on insects is not totally out of place because arthropods are still considered to be animals. One thing that I have noticed, however, is that Proxy does not just prey on all insects, a but selected few.

So, what do you feed your cat with?

Domesticated cats belong to the hypercarnivore category. In other words, they are obligately carnivorous and would need, at least, 70 percent of their diets to be animal-based. If you are the type that feeds your cat with commercial cat foods, chances are that your cat is getting the required amount of each nutrient in the right quantity because tons of efforts go into researching about the animals before the foods are produced - I would like to believe. However, if you are the type that just feeds your cat with scraps of food that you prepared at home, chances are that your cat is not getting adequate nutrients.


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In the case of Proxy, even though I feed him with plant-based diets mostly, he is a free-roaming cat that has the capability to hunt for himself - cats are natural hunters/predators. Those that are not deliberate about feeding their cats with the right amount of animal-based nutrients and still do not allow them to roam freely are running a risk of malnourishing their cats.

I hope you all have learned a few things.

Thank you all for reading.

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10 comments
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Hi @gentleshaid,
This is a great article regarding feline diet.
I adopted a cat about 1 year ago who is mostly an outdoor cat. I named him Covid since his arrival in my back yard was right around the time of the pandemic starting, and I really just thought Covid sounds like a perfect cat name , and many people seem to agree :P

The entire time he's been my home companion I have struggled to get his diet correct. He vomits terribly off of all dry cat food, he can stomach the wet cat food but vomits off of that as well.
It's bothersome because I know it is a sign that his body is rejecting the food because it's simply not proper for his body.

The only thing that I have found that he can eat without vomiting is cooked chicken, and he inhales it like he's starving and never vomits from it.

He recently broke a tooth fighting with other cats, so now he needs soft food anyway and all he will eat now is chicken. It's a bit concerning to me, I hope I can find a better solution, but I do believe the chicken is better for his body than the processed dry cat food that he violently vomits up almost every time.

I just won't feed him that stuff anymore.

Do you think a pure chicken diet is bad for him? What kind of plants do you feed Proxy? I'm open to some suggestions here.

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Pure chicken should not be bad for him, what I fear is the diet becoming monotonous. You should probably try other meats. So far, Proxy eats bread, noodles, corn meals as long as adequate palm oil is added to it. However, he is a free-roaming cat that goes hunting to augment whatever he is fed with.

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I will try this with Covid too, thank you for the recommendation, he's also a free-roaming outdoor cat who hunts and spends at least 50% of his time outdoors.
He just comes in for chicken and sleep :P

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What a cute creature! Let me know how it goes with the recommendations.

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Great article! We only feed our cats cat food. Snacks are never carbohydrates. And, no dog food for the cats, because dog food has a certain amount of carbohydrates. Actually, the cat we have now has kidney issues, so that requires a special diet, with special cat food ($). When I was growing up, the cats got their own food, mostly. We lived in the country and they caught mice. That was considered the cat's job.

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I guess the lifestyle of cats got upgraded with technology. To be honest, I think they are better off allowed to hunt and fend for their own food. They can be fed other diets secondarily. What caused the kidney issue with your cat? I am curious to know

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Hi @gentleshaid: The cat had been rescued from a car engine as a kitten. It seemed to be healthy but then suffered a urinary blockage when it was one or two years old. After that we were told it had kidney issues and needed a special diet. This seems to be pretty common with cats. I guess if the cat lived outdoors, on its own, it would probably just die.

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