Cat Food: Quit "Kitty Crack"

Why All Dry Cat Food Is “Kitty Crack”

Get the Tracie approved list of canned cat food.

While I was researching THE CAT BIBLE I kept coming back to the overwhelming question:

Why is an obligate carnivore being fed highly processed carbohydrates?”

This question kept arising as I learned more about the various illnesses of modern cats and realized how many of them were due to a diet which was inappropriate for their species.

Cats have no dietary need for carbohydrates.  Not only do they not need it, they are unable to properly process carbs at all, even starting with their saliva which lacks the enzyme to start breaking down cellulose in the mouth, where we know digestion begins. Our cats should be eating a rodent, or the closest thing to it: canned chicken or turkey-based food with no more than 10% carbohydrates. The feline digestive system is very short and should be thought of this way: “Mouse in - mouse out.” In nature, the feline digestive system would rest after eating a mouse and stay empty until the next mouse came along. 

Once I had my show CAT CHAT®on the Martha Stewart Channel of SiirusXM satellite radio (now going into its third year!) I wasted no time telling people to get their cats off this harmful addictive food and get them onto any high quality canned food instead. It startled cat owners, but they got the reasoning behind my advice and jumped right on board. Their cats ALL lost weight, gained more energy, became more affectionate and playful, got shinier, shed less, stopped throwing up and even little box problems diminished (because there were no more urinary tract problems to irritate the poor cats). And cats that were borderline diabetic or recently diagnosed and using insulin, became normalized and healthy again if caught early enough.

I was approached by a nationally known cat-only vet (who also has a law degree) - Dr. Elizabeth Hodgkins, who at one time had worked for years at two major commercial pet food companies. She says she has since spent the rest of her life making up for those associations by telling everyone who would listen that dry food is terrible for cats – that it is the only cause of type II diabetes in cats. And there are many other vets trying to educate people about the terrible physical harm of feeding highly-processed carbohydrate foods to cats – sadly, most vets are still selling the “party line” with which they were indoctrinated in vet school by the very companies that make the dry food.

On the basis our shared concern about the damage being done to kitties with dry food, Dr. Hodgkins became the Official Vet of my radio show. Since then she has written a superb book, YOUR CAT, which details all the ill effects of feeding dry food to cats: kidney disease, obesity, urinary tract stones and crystals, skin problems, vomiting, etc. She breeds and shows Ocicats, all of which are on a diet of raw frozen food.

Think Outside the Bag

Dr. Elizabeth has become my partner in telling everybody that dry food is what I call Kitty Crack – it is an unnatural food for cats, who are being tricked into ingesting harmful, unnatural, indigestible plant fiber and highly processed corn which has been sprayed with a “secret sauce” known as “proprietary ingredients.”  This spray is what “hooks” the cats on the food they wouldn’t otherwise touch – each of the pet food manufacturers has their own food scientists who have concocted a spray of fat, acidifier (testing showed that cats apparently like an acidic feel in their mouths) and “animal digest” (a sort of fermented soup of beef intestines). In each case it attracts the cat and then gets them addicted to it – testimonials on the air to how hard the cats fought to get at this highly addictive food proved my theory.

Cats are “designed” to eat meat only – preferably a rodent, bird, lizard or other insects.  All they need or should eat is meat. Yet the pet food industry has convinced veterinary students – their professors- and then the consumer - that feeding little hard dry nuggets of mostly corn-based food is not only okay for cats but also should be their only source of food. This is a horrible untruth and has caused unnecessary suffering for the cats and their people, whose hearts have been broken as their cats have died from diabetes, obesity, urinary and kidney problems. As a direct result of feeding an obligate carnivore an inappropriate food, our cats are developing illnesses and living miserable lives and even dying. This is a travesty and a tragedy.

Cats are Not Chickens or Pigs

The pet food industry grew out of the farm animal industry and shared the same basis: corn-based foods that could utilize the sweepings of the human food chain would eliminate having to dispose of that waste and also fatten future human food quickly and cheaply. Because we are feeding food to our cats which was originally intended for farm animals that needed to be fattened in 6 to 8 weeks to land on our dinner tables.

We are feeding our cats as though they were chickens or hogs going to slaughter and we don’t even realize it. It is criminal that we have been bamboozled this way – shameful that we never used our common sense to stand up against the marketing ploys of pet food manufacturers trying to protect their high-profit products- and sorrowful that our cats have had to suffer the consequences.

There is Big Money in Dry Cat Food

Dry cat food throws off the biggest profit to the companies. Cheap ingredients, fancy packaging and expensive ad campaigns – and then enlist the veterinarians to tell people to feed nothing but what is basically chicken feed to their beloved feline family members – who we must remember are obligate carnivores (their bodies require and demand only meat to run properly).

All the money goes into the dazzling magazine ads and television ads – instead of going into the proper food for the species.

Canned cat food- which is the only thing a cat should eat (unless you feed raw) – is much more costly to make and with a much lower profit margin. It’s little wonder that the companies have spent so many millions to develop it, promote it, indoctrinate vets to insist upon it – because those millions invested can become \tens of millions in sales.

Why Do Vets Push Dry Food for Cats?

Why do vets insist that people feed their cats dry food only?  They took anatomy and physiology courses in vet school showing them that household cats are directly descended from their wild desert ancestors and have the exact same digestive system.

First of all, from the moment every young, impressionable student enters veterinary school she is bombarded with free bags of dog food for her own animals for her entire academic career. The same commercial pet food companies whose trucks back up to the vet colleges with pallets of free food also happen to fund the salary of the few professors teaching the few hours of nutrition education each student receives in the years of study (yes, a few hours). But taking it a step further, the food companies also write, publish and distribute the very textbooks the students read. (These are facts easily verified – I did so myself when I visited and lectured at vet schools across the country).

The “proof” on the side of each bag of why it is okay or even advisable to feed these bagged foods to our cats is based on testing done to prove the claims; it is not real science in any sense of the word. Small groups of dogs and cats are fed these bagged concoctions for a few months. Nobody oversees the process except the employees of the pet food companies, many of them with vet degrees. And by law, the food companies have great latitude to make whatever claims they wish about the food in those bags. There is no government oversight, no objective, disinterested party anywhere in the process.

Once your vet is practicing, she has already been schooled in this faith-based science – she believes what the pet food companies told her from Day One in school. She has never stopped to recognize that in business the goal is to make a product at the lowest possible cost – get away with the least they can – and therefore make the highest possible profit. Using the doctors themselves as the “priests” to bring more people into the fold was a brilliant idea – vets are practicing “faith-based” science (a contradiction in terms, of course) where pet food is concerned. There is no objectivity where vets and good nutritional practices with dogs and cats are concerned. Telling you what to feed your pet is based on their early indoctrination by purveyors of products about which the students accepted faulty reasoning since cats are obligate carnivores. Why not just give them meat-based food, period?  A precious few vets today question any of the claims made about the safety, actual nutritional value, nor logical place of dry food as the sole diet of obligate carnivores.

Do I need to add it is time for us to stand up and “take back the food bowl” - and fill it with our own conscious, purposeful choices?

Res Ipsa Loquitor – “the thing speaks for itself”

My father got a law degree before he became a best-selling author, and he shared this Latin legal phrase with me when I was telling him the truth about dog food and what is in the bags. It is not my feelings – or opinion – (although I do have both on the subject!) but the facts themselves about dry food for cats which “speak for themselves.”