Vegan Cat Food

As a familiar and easy to maintain animal physiology cats has been particularly well studied and is generally similar to that of other carnivorous mammals. However, several features of the physiology of cats are rare and are probably due to their descent of species living in the desert. For example, cats are able to tolerate quite high temperatures, with humans began to feel uncomfortable when their skin temperature rises to about 44.5 ° C (112 ° F), by contrast cats show no discomfort until their skin reaches about 52 ° C (126 ° F). Unusually, the body temperature of a cat does not vary throughout the day, which is part of the general lack of cats circadian rhythms and may reflect their tendency to be active in both day and night. In addition to being tolerant of high temperatures and faeces of cats are generally dry and their urine is very concentrated, both of which are adaptations that keep cats as much liquid as possible. Indeed, their kidneys are so efficient that cats can survive on a diet consisting only of meat, no extra water, and can even re-hydrate by drinking seawater. Cats are carnivores: their physiology has evolved to process meat efficiently, and they have trouble digesting plant matter. Unlike omnivores such as rats, which require only about 4% protein in their diet, about 20% of the diet of a cat should be protein. The cats are particularly dependent on a constant supply of the amino acid arginine, and a diet lacking arginine causes severe weight loss and can be rapidly fatal. Another characteristic is that the cat can not produce both the amino acid taurine, taurine deficiency causes macular degeneration, where the retina slowly degenerates the cat, causing irreversible blindness. Since cats tend to eat all their prey, they get minerals by digestion of animal bones and a diet consisting only of meat can cause a calcium deficiency. gut of a cat is also adapted to eat meat, is much shorter than that of omnivores and having low levels of several digestive enzymes that are needed to digest carbohydrates. These features severely limits the ability of the cat to digest and use nutrients of plant origin, as well as certain fatty acids. Despite the meat-oriented physiology of the cat, many cat food vegetarians or vegans were marketed as supplemented by the chemical synthesis of taurine and other nutrients, in attempts to produce a complete diet. However, some of these products still do not provide all the nutrients that cats require, and diets containing no animal products have the potential to cause serious nutritional deficiencies.