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On Oct. 30, the American Association of Feline Practitioners released the consensus statement “Feline Feeding Programs: Addressing Behavioral Needs to Improve Feline Health and Wellbeing” and an accompanying client brochure.

AAFP releases consensus statement on how to feed a cat

It turned out to be about changing human feeding behavior.

hunting instincts

It turns out to be strategies designed to mimic a cat’s feeding behavior in the wild.

Feeding programs can include offering frequent small meals using appropriate puzzle feeders, forage feeding by putting food in different locations, and multiple food and water stations—and may include automatic feeders in some instances.

Not that this is a bad thing. But what about also duplicating a cat’s diet in the wild? The actual macronutrients? As explained in this one page guide to feeding cats a biologically appropriate diet, Cats are Cats!, cats have a limited ability to digest carbohydrate. Yet many dry foods have up to 55% carbohydrate. This overloads the cat’s pancreas and supplies no nutritional value.

Cats have no dietary requirement for carbohydrates. Period. They evolved to get almost all of their fluid intake from the food they eat. A mouse, a typical prey food, is about 70% water. Dry kibble food contains far too much carbohydrates and far too little moisture to be an appropriate food for cats.

FelineNutrition.org

fat cats

As long as veterinarians keep addressing the fat cat problem by telling people to “feed less and make them move more,” what we are actually feeding the cats remains an unacknowledged problem.

For over a decade now, I have been feeding mostly canned, grain-free diet, nicknamed “Catkins,” supplemented with actual human-grade meat, along with nutritional supplements. I have been very pleased by the results.

Back in the day, like most rescuers, I was used to spending my own money on giant bags of dry food as I routinely fed double digit numbers of cats. This made the food go further, but I also offered giant bowls of canned food and was free with nutritional additions like Brewer’s Yeast, butter, and bacon drippings to help cats pull back from the brink of starvation.

I changed gears on my cat feeding practices around 2003, when I was able to concentrate on only my own pets, including Reverend Jim, who had serious digestive issues. Researching turned up the cat’s status as an obligate carnivore, and I started reading labels and buying food with the goal of matching a cat’s natural diet.

I have big cats, but my own vets agree that none of them are overweight.

about health

One of my readers used this link between dietary carbohydrates and diabetes to get his cat into normal blood glucose levels, as described in Teddy, the diabetic cat. Another reader found a Catkins diet helped with their cat’s seizures. I used nutrition to help James Bond’s brain when he developed a form of dementia.

So proper diet has great power.

Whatever we can do to upgrade our cat’s diet is going to bring benefits to our cat’s health and our own peace of mind. A gradual changeover to whatever the new foods we want to add will help our cats adjust to withdrawing a food they are used to.

Like humans, cats can like foods that aren’t good for them, so it can be a time of adjustment for all of us. But I find such a challenge will pay off in happier cats and fewer needs for medical intervention.

Good food is a cat investment.

The biggest challenge might be convincing a fussy cat.

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There’s more ways to care for our cat with The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See all of my posts on CAT CARE.