Insects are part of the animal kingdom too. So when people started asking about Lovebug and whether it was a safe diet for cats, we COMPLETELY understood people's worries! After all, insects and meat are two different things, right? It means that when we are developing diets for cats, we must be extra careful to make sure there are exactly the right amounts of certain amino acids and vitamins, to make sure we don’t harm our beloved pets! That’s why in the pet food world the ‘obligate carnivore’ definition is so important. This finding revolutionised pet food production and with the introduction of routine supplementation, DCM became a much, much rarer condition. Eventually, the tragic disease was actually found to be strongly linked to the taurine levels in cat food. This is essentially where the heart muscle dilates, leading to thinned walls, weak muscle contraction and essentially, death. Over 40 years ago, cats were believed to be commonly afflicted with a condition called “Dilated Cardiomyopathy”(or DCM). A lot of ‘conventional’ foods, even those with meat in them, supplement these in cat foods to make extra sure that they are getting everything they need. These are vitamins and amino acids that cats cannot produce themselves, so we have to make sure they get them from their diet instead. There is a list of these elements but the ones you may have heard of are: It is accepted that our feline friends, over many years, have lost the ability to form certain vitamins and amino acids due to getting high quantities through their diet. This is due to an ancestral diet in cats containing high quantities of meat. Simply put, carnivores eat meat, and ‘obligate carnivores’ are those animals for whom it is 100% necessary to eat meat in their diet. For example, those organisms that can only survive in the presence of oxygen.” Less familiar may be the term ‘obligate’, which from a biological perspective means: “Restricted to a particular condition of life. Those meat eating animals who, by definition, “derive their food and energy requirements solely from animal products.” Most of us will be familiar with carnivores. Okay.big words, but what exactly do they mean? What we really mean when we say cats ‘need meat’ is that cats are defined as ‘Obligate Carnivores’. There are even those out there that go as far to feed 100% meat diets to their cats. It is absolutely right to say that cats need to eat meat to survive, as a general statement. This seems to be the question on everyone’s lips, and don’t get me wrong, it’s a good one! A blog post, by Dr Rory Cowlan.
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