Found this one online while browsing for what cats shouldn’t eat. However I feel like this area is quite controversial and opinionated. Also feels like half the websites are written by AI and riddled with ads. So if anyone has a good source as to what cats should avoid then let me know.
Anyways, I found this nice illustration, but wanted to hear with you peeps whether you have any experience regarding these food items.
Also what’s your take on milk/sour milk for cats? My previous cat loved it so much, and she aged until she was 17 years old, and never seemed to have a problem with it. Also asked the vet at the time and she said it was OK. However every other website I visit tell to never give milk(dairy) to cats. So which is it? Does it just depend on the cat?
I used to feed my cat raw quails. He loved them. I don’t know how he is doing now as my ex got the cat and I kept the dog.
I give the community cat a slice of ham on occasion, if he’s good
He is good. Give him some ham. I am a human person writing this and not affiliated with the cat.
But my cat only eat raw meat. He just kicks all other ready to eat cat foods.
what do you mean by tuna is occasional, but rice and corn are sure? Cats can’t digest rice and corn, wtf?
Also raw chicken is never? Maybe in the USA only. We in other parts of the world vaccinate our chickens.
Lol, my cat eats a diet of chicken, prawns, some beef, and organs like liver, heart, kidney, and brain. He is extremely healthy and does not look his age (13). He started on kibble but we transitioned him to meat because of hairball and general health issues. His teeth are clean and strong, his coat is shiny, and his eyes are clear.
Honestly, cats are predators. They eat meat. Feed a cat mice and you are close to what mine eats. It would be really strange if they were ok eating rice, corn, and brocoli.
My cat never liked meat, fish or chicken. she would eat vegetables and kibble… sometimes watermelon or another juicy fruit.
I really dont know if this was a sign or not, but eventually we discovered she had a renal condition.
My cat is unable to tell the difference between a sparrow and a sparrow hawk and as such as being attacked by at least one sparrow hawk, and is now afraid of all birds.
What she really likes is frogs, although also they can be scary if they move unexpectedly.
My cat hunts mice and birds, occasionally snakes and lizards, and corn. She’ll murder a whole cob.
My cat absolutely loves popcorn. As soon as he hears the popping in the microwave, he’ll come running and start yelling to get some. Then if you’re sitting on the couch with the bowl/bag, he’ll sit on the arm and try to steal pieces from you.
I do want to add that a lot of predators also eat the stomach of their prey and there for everything they ate and since most of their prey are either herbivores or omnivores they do consume some plant matter.
Most of the better quality cat foods I see that have veggies in it has like 80% - 95% meat and the rest vegetables, which I think tries to simulate the natural consumption of plant matter.
A lot of cats also eat grass on their own since the fiber helps with digestion.
My cat only eats grass when he wants to vomit. He will clean himself, get too much hair in his stomach, then yowl to go outside. He then eats grass, vomits, and is chill. When I am more on top of brushing him this happens less, but if I neglect his brushies he needs to purge the hair.
Yeah, grass can help in both directions. My long haired cat likes to have constant access to grass, it actually makes her puke less. My guess would be that the fiber helps to break up the hair clumps and move them faster down the digestive tract. But I’ve also had cats who only ate grass to make themselves puke.
Probably depends on the individual cat.
I was under the impression that barfing requires adding taurine and minerals, or are those already part of certain organs you feed?
TIL that BARF stands for Bones And Raw Food or Biologically Appropriate Raw Food. Interesting. wiki on BARF
That list gets a few details right but is also full of nonsense. Grain is bad for cats, they can not digest it well because they have short colons, which is typical for carnivores. Fruit and anything else that contains sugar is not good because cats don’t brush their teeth. High quality cat food with at least 90 percent meat and no grain, no sugar is best. I sometimes serve fresh meat and fish too, like chicken hearts or cod. Just make sure there are no bones or bone fragments in the meat or fish and also that it has been frozen to make sure there is no risk of any infection.
I don’t think the picture is about proper cat nutrition. I think it’s about giving the cat a treat/letting it taste something you’re eating. You’re right that you should definitely feed your cat meat or proper meat-based cat food.
letting it taste something you’re eating.
Never never never never lol at least for me. Maybe I’m a scumbag pet parent, but I’ve never let any cat eat what I eat and thankfully ive never had to deal with begging for anything I’m eating. :P
Lucky. Yesterday my cat stole a slice of my toast and ran off. I got most of it back but she growled at me :(
I had a cat that had irritable bowel disease and was very limited in what he could eat, and he didn’t like his prescription food. He was very aggressive about getting our food. We had to be extremely careful around him, and forget eating a pizza while sitting on the couch. We had to lock him up when we had guests, because they would never believe how fast he was and would snag food from the table when no one was looking.
He’s been gone 10 years now, unfortunately. But one of the cats we have now stole some sausage and cheese the other night while we were prepping dinner. He usually doesn’t do that, so our guard wasn’t up.
I’m not sure the sugar argument holds, plenty of animals naturally eat foods with sugar, and do not brush their teeth. Of course they don’t eat nearly as much sugar as a typical human, but that doesn’t mean that sugar should always be avoided.
For cats specifically though I am not sure, maybe all sugar is bad, but I don’t think it’s because of teeth brushing.
Good point, fixed my comment.
It’s worth noting that cats are unlikely to be able to perceive sweet tastes. So while sugar is not toxic to cats, there’s not really any benefit to letting them have it, even as a treat.
On a related note, there’s a hypothesis that the mutation that caused them to lose the ability to taste sweet things in cat ancestors is what led to them becoming obligate carnivores, which is kind of interesting.
Then why the hell did one of my cats LOVE cantaloupe?
Heh, I knew a cat that would go through a pan of unseasoned cauliflower if you weren’t careful. Maybe every cat is born knowing something they have no clear way of understanding, like how tasteless things are food or how to move in four dimensions or what electronics are.
More seriously, the article I linked to suggests cats can taste things we can’t, so that’s a possibility.
It could also be she was just a different sort of cat. She had 7 toe beans per foot and was a blue eyed tortois shell. So her liking cantaloupe was probably the least weird thing about her
I heard and read several times now that cats can not taste sweetness and that sugar is bad for cats. At the same time most low to medium priced cat foods have added sugar. I find it confusing and wonder why manufacturers do that.
It’s filler. They can’t taste it, and it’s nutritionally void for them, but it’s still calories, and sugar is cheap.
Edit:spelling
Because manufacturers only care about making something that’s just not poisonous enough to kill your pets.
Hell some of them don’t even care about that when it comes to flea meds
My cat loves cheese
Dog food should be fine, it just lacks taurine so you shouldn’t feed your cat exclusively with it (as with anything else on there), but if turkey is in the sure category then dog food should be there too.
THE SAND
ALL THE SAND.
(it is definitely too sand)
Now that gave me a good chuckle 😁
#FeelTheBernCats
Salami is not healthy for cats.
Sure, but they can still have a little, as a treat
Exactly!
But salami contains garlic, doesn’t it?
There are different kinds of salami.
Ah, I didn’t know that. Where I live, they kind of always do (or did, when I was a child and still ate meat) but Wikipedia days the Italian salami typically doesn’t have it.
That man has been on the right side of every issue forever.
He really has been! I know the comment is based on a joke, but when I learned who Bernie Sanders was when he was running for president I had a “oh shit it’s that guy!” moment.
Pretty much any documentary I had watched about any random topic where there was a segment about US government involvement he was always on the right side of whatever was being discussed.
Just imagine what the world would be like if he had won the primary instead of Hillary.
Nope, wait, don’t do it. I just tried and it makes the real world even MORE depressing.
It’s when I gave up on US politics. If only it was such that Hillary won… and not that DNC actively conspired to make that happen.
As messed up and anti-democratic so many things are in the US leading to “pick one of two things”. The whole system is fundamentally broken when the selection of those two things is corrupt.
But… when a person I wouldn’t trust to be mentally suited to pack a bag of groceries* or park a car*, is elected president, and gets to pick several supreme court justices… The world isn’t laughing at the US. They were laughing at the thought of Trump being in he primaries. They’re deeply concern that a complete fuckwit ended up in charge, and what that might lead to.
Democracy (i.e. the system of governance) requires informed voters. GOP (the political party) requires uninformed voters.
The only way you can vote Republican or think that the orange baboon can be entrusted with anything more important than throw feces, is one of two thing (or both): 1) you are an idiot / uninformed 2) you are morally corrupt
*: this isn’t a put down directed at people who do these things, but that it requires some mental function in order to not crash the car, or steal some groceries… and I would be equally comfortable with Trump in that regard, as with a 6 year old. Which is to say: not at all. Which puts in perspective what I think of him being president.
Fuck the DNC.
Glad to see blueberries on the Sure! list.
Those are my cat’s favorite. I was as surprised as you!
A vet once told us, no fish bones for cats, but chicken and anything bigger was OK. No chicken or fish bones for dogs, bigger than a chicken was OK. It’s about the size of the bones, and whether they can swallow them and get them stuck in their throats.
I trust the vet’s advice over some random internet image.
Dog food? Dogs like cat food. Are they not interchangeable? I haven’t ever seen a cat eat dog food now that I think about it.
Cat food is enriched with the amino acid taurine, which they can’t produce themselves. Dog food is not. Feeding cats exclusively on dog food will kill them eventually, via blindness and heart disease.
Not a disaster if they steal it from the dog once or twice, but it cannot be their long-term diet.
Yeah, it doesn’t really belong in the ‘no’ column. It’s not an appropriate cat food because it’s not nutritionally complete.
So it’s rather like how just eating bread or cornmeal that don’t have added vitamins will give you scurvy or pellagra. But obviously they’re not poisonous or anything and most of the world eats them without a problem.
It appears to be missing the major food groups of random house plants, spiders, and fluff
My cat goes nuts for spider plant leaves. He must eat them every time he sees them.
I have never once not seen him throw up after eating them. But he must always eat them.
I grow a “snackrificial” spider plant (well, 2 of them actually) so that my other plants are left alone. I swap them in/out of cat reach depending on when one needs a break from the chomping.
snackrificial
LOL
A few other posts have pointed out cats are obligate carnivores so they need to consume meat to survive, as well as the general lactose intolerance.
One addendum to this is cat saliva lacks enzymes that break down carbohydrates. Cats consuming carbs consistently without proper teeth cleaning tend to have dental issues. Often regular eating and chewing scrapes carb build up, but it is something to keep an eye out for.
Thanks, this is what I came to the comments for, as my cat tries to steal any lemon pastry while I am eating it. Usually a little cat treat snack keeps her away.
