Is Vegetarian Cat Food Healthy for your Cat?

Most of us want to reduce our impact on the planet as much as possible, and part of the shift toward "Going Green" includes raising greener pets. Not surprisingly, many cat owners consider giving their pets a vegan or vegetarian diet to help reduce the cat's ecological paw-print and minimize the amount of cruelty involved in feeding their pet. While this transition is healthy for the planet, it probably is not healthy for your cat.

In the wild, cats are obligate carnivores, meaning that they will starve without meat in their diets and do not require plant matter to remain healthy. Unlike other members of the Carnivora order-- such as dogs and bears-- cats do not eat plant matter for nutrition and are unable to derive nutritional value from unprocessed plant foods. While house cats may occasionally eat plant matter to aid in digestion or induce vomiting, they lack the biological adaptations necessary to derive nutrition from a natural vegetarian diet.

Fortunately for cats whose owners are very determined to feed them an earth-friendly diet, science has enabled some cat food manufacturers, like Vegecat and Evolution, to create vegan and vegetarian cat foods that contain most of the essential vitamins, minerals, and nutriients necessary for survival. These soy-, egg-, or yeast-based cat foods are created using extensive processing and synthetic nutrients. According to anecdotal reports, some cats are able to live for several years on a diet composed entirely of these processed alternative cat foods.

After such extensive processing-- which, necessarily, requires extensive amounts of energy for manufacturing and transport-- vegetarian cat foods may not be as earth-friendly as cat owners would like to hope. Additionally, even with massive amounts of processing and fortification, cats fed a vegan or vegetarian diet can easily become deficient in key essential nutrients like vitamin B-12 and taurine, leading to blindness, weight problems, and even death. The ASPCA, though recommending a balanced vegetarian diet for dogs, strongly cautions against vegan cat food for this very reason, citing multiple case reports of deficiencies in vegetarian-fed cats.

Cats fed only vegan or vegetarian cat food can also develop urinary problems, owing to differences between the pH of plant matter and animal tissue after they have been digested. While a vegetarian cat food might adequately address many of a cat's nutritional needs, it can not be buffered to exactly mimic the chemical composition of natural meat. Some advocates of a vegetarian diet for cats argue that all processed cat food-- not just earth-friendly varieties-- are also very different from natural meat, and no more appropriate for a cat than any vegan variety.

Like practicing a vegan lifestyle, the choice to raise a vegan cat-- or not-- is deeply personal, and is likely to be met with criticism regardless of which route you choose. While cruelty and unsustainable practices are almost mandatory in creating conventional cat foods, most cat owners view them as a "necessary evil" in raising a healthy cat. While some cats can survive several years on vegetarian cat food alone, his life may be shorter and less healthy. Just as infant formula can never exactly replicate a mothers' milk, vegan cat food can not perfectly fill the role that meat plays in a cat's diet.