Carnivores eat meat, herbivores eat greens, and omnivores eat everything. Animals labeled carnivores eat primarily meat. True carnivores (obligate carnivores) eat nothing else. Herbivores, grazing animals like antelopes, deer, and cattle, are obligate herbivores. Most bear species are omnivores, eating primarily meat, but also berries, roots, and grubs. Polar bears, on the other hand, are true carnivores, eating nothing but meat; the bulk of their diet consisting of fish, seals, and the flesh of anything they can catch.
There are certain basic nutritional rules that cannot be broken without serious adverse consequences. One is that true carnivores should not and cannot eat a vegetable diet any more than true herbivores can eat meat. If tricked into it (as a pet cat eating a meat-flavored vegetable diet), the disease that results from breaking this rule is not the fault of the consumer. And the consequences can be severe, as proven by Mad Cow Disease.
Mad Cow or Mad Cat
The epidemic of fat cats (outside of government and business) has mushroomed. A little detective work indicates a common thread between Mad Cow and the plight of this nation’s felines. Mad Cow was traced to opportunists in the animal feed industry disposing of meat scraps for profit by grinding it up and adding it to cattle feed labeled as ‘protein’.
Many overlooked the sudden appearance of Mad Cow when offal began being fed to cattle, merely assuming it was spread by their eating infected tissue of other cattle. This can explain the ultimate rampant spread, but back up the truck – where did the first twenty or thirty thousand cases come from? It started somewhere with some cattle independently getting ill. The theory is that even the smallest amount of meat is simply something no self-respecting herbivore would knowingly ingest, and should never have been in their feed to begin with.
From Meat to Transfat-Soaked Corn Flakes
The history of cat food tells a similar story of how domestic cats have suffered from major non-species-specific dietary changes over the years, as a result of new rules advocated for cat care. It was just part of a plan to deal with the millions of strays swamping shelters.
Humane societies advertised spay/neuter programs, keeping cats indoors, and leaving food and water available. The pet food industry looked to capitalize on these changes, developing new canned foods and cheaper convenience foods that wouldn’t spoil as quickly. Bags of grease-permeated, grain-based dry food flew off the shelves. So-called "nutrition truth" changes hourly in this country, depending upon who wants to sell what to whom.
Today, our cat friends are the ‘biggest losers’, and may soon justify their own TV show – overweight, undernourished, and just as depressed as their human counterparts. The sad thing is, they did nothing wrong. They ate what they were given, tricked by addictive chemical flavorings to consume substances they would never eat in the wild, trapped indoors without sunshine, unable to eat normal diets of mice and insect proteins, getting sicker and sicker, and dying at two-thirds of their normal life spans (and sometimes twice or three times their normal weight).
Veterinarians Keep the Secret
Add to that over-vaccination causing skin allergies, and the “cure” for the itching is a cortisone shot which increases both appetite and girth. Suddenly that supposed-to-be-10-pound kitty is 15 pounds and growing. When are pet owners going to wake up and realize what this system of pet care is doing to their cats? How ironic that the new rules intended to protect them are condemning them to a life of obesity, ill health, and early demise. It's little wonder that since the profit-centered corruption of the human U.S. food industry has been allowed, it now extends to that of our pets.
The only thing worse is the ethics of "should-be-smarter-than-that" veterinarians who continue to call vaccine side-effect-itching a flea allergy to capitalize on it financially. Anyone who has ever been given cortisone (or prednisone) shots knows that doctors usually tell their human patients it can be dangerous to receive more than three such shots. Rarely mentioned is the other side effect of severe weight gain. Cortisone and cortisone derivatives equal a 1-2 punch for the health of recipients - solve the itching and double the weight. This is a reason neither doctors nor vets mention that very often.
Cat owners should never allow over-vaccination, and should be aware if they adopt an overweight cat from a shelter, this unethical treatment (both over-vaccination and the later need for prednisone shots) is so common, the previous owners may have gotten rid of the cat thinking there was something wrong with it. Few recognize that their kind attempts - on the trusted advice of their vet - to help relieve its constant scratching, actually caused this very difficult to treat problem.
Most overweight cats are victims of both over-vaccination and the "cure" - sometimes repeated annually for several years. Putting an overweight cat with a drug-motivated appetite on a restrictive diet is torture for the animal. Cats also have a naturally high fat requirement for optimal health, so it only adds insult to injury to feed either a 'vegetarian diet' to a carnivore, or limit their normal fat intake just because humans are foolish enough to do that to themselves (and it doesn't work with humans either).
Responsible Cat Owners Should Get Wise
In his February 2009 Real Health e-letter, Dr. William Campbell Douglass exposes the latest on America’s obesity problem – a research theory that blames a virus. He summarized the study's real finding that the virus “can make people who are already fat gain weight because they have more fat cells for the virus to replicate… not that fat people are fat because they have caught this virus! As if more proof was needed that personal accountability was all but dead in our culture.”
With the many possibly causes of human obesity, compared to the few options of their hefty pets, it should be much easier to isolate the causes of feline obesity. Perhaps it's time to look closer at these two issues; poor cat/carnivore nutrition and too-frequent vaccination schedules intended to generate more drug income.
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Marie Thomas - Marie Thomas (RieT) is an author in multiple genres, with 18 years in technical writing, and freelance work in science, biographical, and ...
