DIETS AND FEEDING

In most cases a commercial canned or dry food is adequate for your cat. Even with medical problems a commercial prepared diet is available. These diets make it easy to feed and care for your cat, however there are certain times when these may not be acceptable or adequate for your pet and than you have the choice of feeding an individually formulate diet that may be a home made or a raw food diet. When doing this, care must be taken to provide for the special dietary requirements of the cat. There are some diets formulated on the web that are dangerous for your pets health. For example diets  with raw egg white may result in a vitamin B deficiency, diets low in the amino acid taurine may result in heart failure, and high meat diets without balanced calcium result in bone resorption. Thus, we recommend you either use a raw food diet from a commercial source or have the diet formulated by a veterinary nutritionist. So talk to us or use the suggestion in the following links to safely feed your cat. An alternative to a raw food diet is to feed a cooked version of these all meat diets such as Enova Evo which is available in pet stores.

Two Things You should Keep In Mind

First, despite what rumor on the web states, research has shown no nutritional advantage to feeding raw food over cooked food. Second, if you chose to use the raw foods because of their unique formulas, you can cook the product to eliminate any worry about parasitic or bacterial contamination.
From the chart below you can see that a balanced diet is not easy to formulate.

You can get homemade recipes that are individualized to your cat
by contacting the following:


On Line Sources

 
University Sources
 
 University of California Davis
 telephone consults (530) 752-1393 (clients)

 University of Tennessee Veterinary Nutrition Service
(email utvns@utk.edu)

 Angell Memorial telephone consults
(617) 588-7282
 
University of Missouri
(email datzc@missouri.edu)