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- Someone went on a business trip, and left me in cherge of feeding their cat. While dong so, I noticed on the label that it contains a fair amount of fish. Also I note that most cat food contains fish, yet it would seem that most cats would rarely, if ever, eat fish. I already know that tuna is bad for cats (too much magnesium or something like that) but if they wouldn’t be eating it normally, why does cat food tend to have fish in it? - MC
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My neighbour took her cat to the vet not long ago for vaccination .
The conversation somehow got round to cat food and, according to the vet, the protein levels in many cat foods are too high and can cause damage to the animals kidneys.
I dunno, was he putting her on?
The fish is for us older folks. Don’t you know anything? SHEESH
I don’t know if the vet was putting you on or not. I’ve read that cats require more protein than dogs. So you should not feed dog food to your cats or cat food to your dogs.
Well, at least a cat catching a fish is a somewhat plausable scenerio. What about liver flavored cat food? Personally the thought of a cat burrowing through the insides of a cow ala Alien is a nightmarish image for me.
The solution is simple:
[ol]
[li]Raise the number of mice and grasshoppers needed to feed the cats[/li][li]Get the FDA to sign off on marketing a pet food that has that high a proportion of rodent hairs and insect parts in it[/li][/ol]
My vet, Richard Chaille, DVM says the only real problem is cat foods that are too yummy. Cats will overeat on “premium” cat foods and get chubby. Chubby cats don’t live very long. My cat gets all the Purina Cat Chow he cares to eat from a bulk feeder, and if he wants something more exotic he has to catch it himself.
A little off topic…but
As someone who inherited a cat along with his wife, I was always told I had to buy only certain brands of food because the generics tended to have “ash” or “pot-ash” or other filler that supposedly gives cats massive urinary infections. Now I’m no marketing genius, but it would seem to me that anyone producing a pet food that was harmful to pets in this way would disappear from the store shelves pretty quickly. I’m assuming my wife fell for some marketing scam and all the foods are really pretty much the same. Though I do notice the Purina One we buy has a prominent banner on it that says something to the effect of “…Formulated for proper urinary tract health of adult cats”. What’s the straight dope on that?
only some cats are highly prone to UTIs (notably neutered male cats) so only some people need to pay for the low-ash formulation.
I have had a cat who had this problem (note: it was yucky) and the vet did recommend changing the cat food. I don’t think its a scam, although I bet some cat owners are paying more needlessly.
Actually, the ash thing is fairly accurate. Between me and my sister, and the cats we’ve owned in our lifetimes, we’ve had several cats with recurrent urinary tract infections. It’s all due to cheap cat food. You have to buy low ash cat food. A large percentage of cats will have problems with the ash in the cat food. A lot of major food companies do make low ash varieties, and if your cat has major problems (like my sisters current cat), you will have to switch over to really expensive food, or watch them suffer through their tract infections until they die. My sisters cat was literally minutes away from dying a few months ago, because he was eating cat food with ash in it, instead of his expensive mix.