If cats are obligate carnivores, why do we feed them rice and peas(among other non-meat things)?
To my knowledge, while dogs can have some carbohydrates, a cats liver and pancreas will be overly stressed dealing with carbs. They need to eat meat and exclusively meat to survive and be healthy. So why do I find so many different cat foods with things *other* than meat or fish? Is it filler?
In: Biology
I think you’re just misunderstanding the term. Obligate carnivore = must eat at least some meat and cannot eat zero meat.
It does NOT mean they have to or should eat *only* meat.
The “obligate” part means they can’t get all required nutrition without at least some meat as a part of their diet. That’s it. It doesn’t mean “meat only” it means “not veggie only”. So including non meat items like peas is fine, and much less expensive.
Who tf is feeding their cat vegetables? What?
“Obligate carnivore” means that in the wild, cats have to eat meat in order to survive. With modern food science, we can process non-meat ingredients in a way that makes them nutritious for cats.
Just because they’re carnivores doesn’t mean they can only eat meat. While yes they do need meat and feeding them exclusively meat is better, they aren’t going to die from a bit of vegetables.
Even wild cats do occassionally ingest plant matter. Mostly from the guts of their prey, but they would also nibble on grass or other plants.
Obligatory Carnivore does not equal Exclusively Carnivore. Many, perhaps even most, obligate carnivores are not exclusively carnivores.
Obligatory Carnivore means they have to eat meat or they will die. There are certain things their body needs that they cannot digest and extract out of non-meat sources. They can still eat other things, and some even like eating others things, cats love eating a bit of grass for example, but meat is the main component and they must get enough of it or they will die. Exactly how much of their diet has to be meat varies by animal.
But that classification is based on behavior in the wild. In the realm of human processing, it is theoretically possible to extract the things an obligate carnivore needs out of plants and give that to them in a way they can process it, essentially using a factory as a giant industrial pseudo-stomach to do some of the digesting they can’t. So you could theoretically feed even a cat a “vegan” diet, but it would be expensive and probably not work very well.
Because obligate does not mean exclusive. They can and do eat plants but other than humans they also need a substantial amount of meat.
Obligate carnivore means required to eat meat, ie. you can’t put your cat on a vegetarian diet.
However, there are actually important nutrients that cats get from vegetables and some grains that they can’t get from meat. I recently looked up if grain free cat food is better for them, and it turns out that it isn’t any better. Just a marketing ploy.
I think the other responses have done a good job covering the question but as a veterinarian I’ll add a side note. While there’s a fair discussion to have about the role pet foods play in animal health, we really don’t have to deal much with nutritional *deficiencies* or toxicity (overdosing nutrients) from daily feeding. Any well-balanced, reputable pet food matched for your cat’s life stage is at least getting your cat what it needs.
Obligate and exclusive are actually different words that mean different things. Just because you have to do something doesn’t mean it’s the only thing you can do.
Humans are obligated defecators, so why do humans still pee sometimes?
They can eat non-meat foods. But they can’t get all their required nutrients from only vegetables.
The tl;dr is that there are 20 amino acids. Many animals can convert some of them into others in their body (i.e., use an excess of ABC to create XYZ). But no animal can just synthesize them all, and some amount needs to come from food.
Plants do not necessarily synthesize all the amino acids in the same amounts that mammals do (they are a different species entirely, after all). So we can only get some baseline amino acids from plants, and others must be synthesized from those plant amino acids. If you can’t synthesize a certain amino acid, and plants don’t have it in sufficient quantity, then you’re an obligate carnivore.
With cats, Taurine is the big one. Plants don’t make it in any significant quantity. Cats have evolved with a dependence on other animals eating plants and synthesizing it. This is what makes cats an obligate carnivore.
So cats can still eat non-meat dishes, but they are required to have a significant amount of meat in their diet to provide those nutrients.
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