Q: I am a vegan, and I want to feed my cats a vegan or vegetarian diet. What’s your advice?
A: Veterinarians who specialize in nutrition recommend against feeding vegan or vegetarian diets to cats because research has shown that these diets are not nutritionally adequate and therefore not safe over the long term.
Moreover, vegan and vegetarian diets don’t make sense biologically for cats:
1. Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they require meat. They have evolved to eat small rodents, so their teeth and jaws are designed to grasp and tear prey, not chew and grind plant material.
Cats have much higher protein needs than dogs or humans, and they must consume many amino acids, the building blocks of protein, because they either can’t produce them at all or can’t produce them in the quantities their bodies require. For example, taurine, found only in meat and other animal products, is essential to prevent heart failure and blindness in cats….