And is their an advantage to feeding a dog a vegetarian diet?
I hear a few people actually do feed them on vegetarian dog food.
This question has come up here before a few times. The consensus is that you can keep a dog healthy on a vegetarian diet if you know what you are going but forget about it with a cat.
What Shagnasty said, yes a dog can survive/thrive on a vegetarian diet providing you feed a well-balanced diet. There are some on the market, so if someone wants to do this they should go with a good quality brand of food, it really isn’t a good idea to try and make your own vegetarian food. In other words, if you are a vegetarian you can just feed your dog the same things you would eat. Vegetarian dog foods aren’t just for the PETA minded dogs either, some dogs are put on vegetarian diets due to protein food allergies.
But don’t try to feed a cat a vegetarian diet. Even if you can find a vegetarian cat food on the market, it’s really not a good idea.
Why can a dog do it and a cat can’t?
Dogs are omnivores but cats are carnivores.
It’s late and I’m too tired to think or double-check my facts - since this is the Straight Dope I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong - there are certain nutrients that cats can only get from meat products. I believe one is taurine and a lack of this can lead to blindness, among other things. A cat might survive for a while on a vegetarian diet but they won’t thrive.
It’s easier to feed a dog healthfully if you feed it a balanced diet that contains some meat. Achieving an adequate nutritional balance without meat requires more knowledge and attention. If it’s extremely important to you, and you’re willing to put in the effort–or at least to buy a high-quality prepared food (Nature’s Recipe makes a meat-free food, I believe)–then by all means. Personally, I don’t recommend it, but that’s mostly because when I was working in the pet industry I saw too many dilettantes with itchy dogs. The exceptions were the ones who did their homework and made a personal commitment to keeping their dog’s diet balanced.
In India the vast majority of dog food is veg.
It’s the taurine. There’s no synthetic source of it, and without it cats will go blind. (It shouldn’t surprise you that in San Francisco, many vets have met some moron who wanted to have a vegitarian cat). Cats are obligate carnivores, and will eventually get very sick if not fed meat.
Once of my old bosses had a vegitarian dog (they were hindu vegitarians, so they took it fairly seriously). Healthy as any other dog, but I do know they had to be fairly anal about his diet.
Our mini-dachshund has been a vegetarian his whole life. The Vet. recommended it for him so he would stay thin.
We do throw him some food from time to time from the table and he gets meat here, but this is rare and wouldn’t count against his “vegetarianism”.
He’s now 13 and in really good health.
There are a number of nutrients cats simply cannot get from a vegetarian diet besides Taurine. Even if the nutrient is present in a vegetable cats simply cannot process it and need to obtain certain nutrients from meat. This is not to say cats cannot eat vegetables…just not exclusively. There are additives people can put in a vegetarian cat diet that provides the required nutrients but the owners are just fooling themselves as the additives were derived from animal products…just no getting around it for cats. They are carnivores pure and simple.
Here is a good list of things cats miss in a veggie diet: http://www.vegsoc.org/info/catfood.html