Cat Lovers Newsletter

07.08.2007

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Feeding those nine lives.

The domesticated cat has been traced back 9500 years and Egyptians used the cat’s natural hunting abilities to eradicate vermin and rodent infestations and protect their grain stores. It is us humans that have bought them into our world and domesticated them to become our companions. Through domestication, we have modified their social behaviour, not their physiological makeup.

Your pet cat is an obligate carnivore. By definition, it cannot survive unless it consumes meat. Through hunting and eating meat their highly developed digestive system extracts essential vitamins, minerals and amino acids to survive, effectively ‘borrowing’ its required nutrients from the captured prey. Protein and fat is converted to glucose by the liver, which directly meets the body's energy requirements. If you look at the nutritional make up of a rabbit, you’ll find that they are made up of water, protein, fat and very little carbohydrate.

So how does commercially available cat biscuits compare to natural prey – such as a rabbit?

Basically it doesn’t.

Compare the following information and Table 1 to the list of ingredients and nutritional data on your favourite brand of cat biscuits.

For one, the main ingredients you’ll see often include corn, wheat or soy (or their derivatives). Grains are cheap - think about what you pay for wheat and corn, and when they are refined and the wheat germ and maize flour and other parts used for human consumption is removed, it is the left over waste by products of low nutritional value put in to the cat biscuits. Grains and cereals have no place in a cats diet (they’re carnivores remember!) and are often high in carbohydrate and fibre. There is no carbohydrate or fibre in rabbit meat (Table 1). As you’ll recall, the Egyptians cat’s were domesticated to hunt the rodents that ate the grain – not eat the grain themselves!

Another common ingredient is beef, sheep, chicken, or meat 'by-products'. These ingredients are certainly not the prime cuts of scotch fillet, rack of lamb and t-bone steaks that your feline deserves. ‘By-products’ are the animal waste that is left over at a slaughter house that is not fit for human consumption. It is the left over heads, feet, intestines, hooves and bones, and not the quality muscle meat and protein you’d hope to be feeding.

Have you ever wondered why there is a list of added vitamins and minerals in the list of cat biscuit ingredients? These are added because the main bulk of the product has little or no nutritional value and is essentially junk food with a vitamin pill. Remember that the best ingredients have already been removed for human consumption. If you look at table 1 and the essential nutrients found in rabbit meat, the nutrients are already there - naturally. With Commercial cat biscuits vitamins and nutrients have to be added back into the food as they have been destroyed when the meat by-products were rendered. Many amino acids and beneficial enzymes have also been destroyed by extreme heat through rendering and cannot be replaced, leading to a deficiency in your cat’s diet.

You’ll often note on the packaging the term ‘crude protein’. Crude protein is an estimate from measuring the total nitrogen within the product. Nitrogen is multiplied by 6.38 to express the results on a protein equivalent basis. True protein reflects only the nitrogen associated with protein and does not include the nitrogen from non-protein sources. To give you an example: rabbit meat has 21.79 grams of true protein per 100gms (table 1). Don’t be fooled by packaging that states a higher level, because they are not listing ‘true protein levels’.

Notice too in Table 1 that rabbit meat has a very high percentage of water. Cats in the wild gain a large percentage of their water requirements out of the prey they capture. Biscuits on the other hand are approximately 12% moisture. Many cats suffer severe dehydration as a consequence as they aren’t naturally great consumers of water. To get the equivalent amount of water as rabbit meat for example, cats would have to drink at least a ¼ cup of water WITH every 100gms biscuits they ate.

It doesn’t matter how good we are in a science lab making synthetic diets for our pets, we just can’t do it properly and match what nature, through evolution, has perfected. However, Maranui Petfood is a real meat petfood using farm fresh meat (not ‘by-products’) blended to offer a diet as close as possible to that of nature. If we were allowed to make cat food out of rats, mice and birds – we would!

Nature knows best.

Table 1
Game meat, rabbit, wild, raw.

Nutrient	Units	Value per
Nutrient	Units	100 grams
Water	g	74.51
Energy	kcal	114
Energy	kj	477
Protein	g	21.79
Total lipid (fat)	g	2.32
Ash	g	1.12
Carbohydrate, by difference	g	0
Fiber, total dietary	g	0
Minerals
Calcium, Ca	mg	12
Iron, Fe	mg	3.2
Magnesium, Mg	mg	29
Phosphorus, P	mg	226
Potassium, K	mg	378
Sodium, Na	mg	50
Selenium, Se	mcg	9.4
Vitamins
Vitamin C, total ascorbic acid	mg	0
Thiamin	mg	0.03
Riboflavin	mg	0.06
Niacin	mg	6.5
Vitamin A, IU	IU	0
Vitamin A, RAE	mcg_RAE	0
Retinol	mcg	0
Lipids
Fatty acids, total saturated	g	0.69
Fatty acids, total monounsaturated	g	0.63
Fatty acids, total polyunsaturated	g	0.45
Cholesterol	mg	81
Amino acids
Tryptophan	g	0.288
Threonine	g	0.975
Isoleucine	g	1.034
Leucine	g	1.698
Lysine	g	1.908
Methionine	g	0.545
Cystine	g	0.274
Phenylalanine	g	0.895
Tyrosine	g	0.776
Valine	g	1.108
Arginine	g	1.346
Histidine	g	0.611
Alanine	g	1.315
Aspartic acid	g	2.129
Glutamic acid	g	3.496
Glycine	g	1.183
Proline	g	1.065
Serine	g	0.966

(Nutrient values and weights are for edible portion)
Data Source: USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 19 (2006)

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