Today is cat food day.

I have had dogs in my life from the time I could crawl, but for the last 5 years, it has been cats.

They are Great cats. I love them both to death. And occasionally I think about the ingredients in their food.

The selection of cat food at the pet store includes: chicken with pumpkin, lamb burger, beef, turkey, and a large assortment of fish mixtures.

Interesting.

Until the Egyptians started keeping cats around, which was only a few thousand years ago (versus their few million year feral status), what were they eating? Certainly not pumpkins. What did their stomachs evolve to digest? (After all, it is the same stomach they still have now).

Birds, bird eggs, other fowl, mice, rats, other rodents, insects, lizards… a host of small things that attracted their attention when they scurried past in the underbrush. If you have an outdoor cat, look at what it brings home.

I’m trying to imagine a pack of cats trying to bring down a lamb, or maybe a zebra. I can imagine an intermittent rabbit, and possibly a rare minnow from a creek, but certainly not vegetables. Cats are definitely carnivorous. Ours will eat grass sometimes, but it seems to be a function of helping the hair-balls through. And since I am the one who cleans the cat-box, I can assure you that most of the grass comes through intact.

Dogs can digest some greenery. My ex-wife feeds her dog green beans, and even squash when it’s in season – the dog does not give the impression that she has been coerced – and she appears healthier from it. But in the wild, the dog is the one who was chasing down lambs, and beef – not my cats.

Neither of them (the dogs or the cats) ate fish in any quantity in their feral past. Fish and mammals don’t normally occupy the same hunting grounds. The exceptions being bears, dolphins, seals, otters, and a few others, but the list remains pretty short. However, fish appears to be good for everybody – they just happened to be safe from us longer than other food sources. At least they were until the last few hundred years of industrial fishing.

Neither of them ate wheat, or any grains, for that matter. Wheat is a filler, and binding agent, that usually holds dry food together. I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that wheat is mainly sugar (with just a little protein, and not much else), and very few carnivorous mammals (including us) need any sugar at all. Our pets, just like our own Human bodies, produce all the sugar we need from normal water, protein, and fat intake. There are none that are essential to you, your, cats, or your dogs.

Your pets have been weaned. None of them, in their natural state, would ever touch milk again. And since they, like most of us, have lost the ability to break down the sugars in milk, drinking it, or many of its by-products, will probably give them gas and stomach cramps. Milk provides no benefits for you pets.

So when you feed your pets dry pet-food (added wheat), they are trying to digest sugar, and since their bodies have even less of a clue to do with it than yours (except to issue a little insulin into the bloodstream), they might have a propensity to gain weight. Just like dry food and sugar does to you.

I guess I will have to patiently wait for rodent-burger to hit the shelves, or maybe a little diced rabbit for the dog? You would think it would be easy to raise billions of mice, rats, insects, and etc., it has to be easier than lambs – there is opportunity, in the pet food industry, to be had here.

Just a little food for thought.