Essays and Insights on Cats
Chunky Value
Cats are mighty accommodating to humans who bring them into their homes. In exchange for shelter, food, affection, human love, and lifetime medical care, they are asked to give up a lot of stuff that comes naturally to them: hunting for live prey, reproducing, and...
Fantastic Frankie’s New Home, New Food
After unexpectedly losing both our wonderful boys, Wilson and Sidney-Beans, in a short time frame between late August and mid-October 2023, I gave away nearly all of my cat supplies. I had this notion that the smartest move was to feel out what possibilities might...
Long Overdue Website Refresh
You know how in spite of your best intentions to never let that closet or drawer you spent so much time cleaning and organizing get messy again, you open it one day to see it's in overwhelming disarray again? Packed with of stuff that's either no longer relevant to...
Sometimes Chicken Isn’t Exactly Chicken
It's useful to sharpen your translation skills in understanding what the NAME on the label of a cat food product actually means. You might be surprised to know that: AAFCO rules dictate that a product labeled "chicken food" must have at least 95 percent chicken on a...
Decrypting Food Labels 101: Understand Dry Matter Basis
Pet food labels are not required to meet the same standards as human food labels and lack a good deal of consumer-friendly, useful information. Even the ingredient lists on pet food labels is only moderately useful. One really vital thing to understand? Dry Matter...
Dry Food Accounts for Most Contamination Disasters
A direct quote from Dr. Lisa Pierson's fantastic website. She sums it up better than I ever could. I don't think that a single cat or dog caregiver in the US is not aware of the thousands of cats and dogs that suffered tremendously and died - or have been left with...
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Barriers to Better Food Discussions with Vets
Those of us who are committed to feeding cats better need veterinary allies. Diet, after all, is a big thing to get wrong. It's only natural we'd turn to the presumed experts on the subject to help us sort through the choices. The results of a survey published by the...
The Raw Feeding World and Continuous Learning
There are lots of smart, wonderful, and yes--sane--people out there feeding raw food to their cats. Some are vets. I learned from, and continue to learn from, many of them. Vets and lay people alike! I continue to benefit from feedback on raw feeding from website...
No Wonder You’re Confused!
More two decades of running this crazy little website has brought in thousands of questions and comments from many smart, concerned, and discerning site visitors. Since I began using social media as another way of getting the word out, however, the volume of questions...
Feline Disease
High Protein Diets and Diabetes
Feeding a high-protein/low-carbohydrate diet to diabetic cats can very quickly reduce their overall insulin requirement. So what? If you're changing your diabetic cat's diet to a lower carbohydrate diet (a good idea!), your cat can very quickly go into remission - and...
Feline IBD
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Litter Boxes
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Loving Cats
Rest in Light, Wilson
I learned recently that in the Polynesian langauge of Hawai'ian, a word for describing the relationship we have with our animals is not "owner," but kahu. The word doesn't imply ownership of property; it roughly translates as guardian or attendant. One who is...
Remembering Nettie
One year ago, tomorrow, I said a very difficult goodbye to Nettie. She's come to mind so much lately - though not so much with sadness about how very hard that day was a year ago, but with gratitude for what she taught me, and continues to teach me, about the...
One Cat’s Smooth Transition to Raw
Wilson has been in the house a little over 48 hours. It looks like the universe sent me one of those "easy" cats to transition to raw. The trick was that he was willing to eat canned food which suggested he was not averse to textures that are different from crunchy...
Making Cat Food
What it Really Costs to Make Cat Food – Not So Much!
Dr. Lisa Pierson of catinfo.org - who is much more of a numbers person than I am - has on her website an awesome, detailed breakout of what it costs to make homemade raw cat food. Many folks are understandably dubious about the price of doing it themselves and, to be...
Getting Back the Chunky Value
I love what feeding a balanced, raw diet does for cats. But everything we do that isn't exactly what Mother Nature intended has consequences. Like, for instance, the act of grinding the food. I don't see a way around that - in order to feed a nice balance of meat,...
Merci Beaucoup, Martine!
A huge shout-out and meow of sincere gratitude to an amazing and very generous website visitor, Martine Potier, who has kindly translated the "Foodmaking" page of catnutrition.org into French. Vous etes le melileur, Martine! A friendly reminder that because this...
Feline Periodontal Disease
Periodontal Disease Page Available in Korean
I think I must have the most generous website visitors on the planet. Eunyoung Lee and Eunsoo Lee, who have been translating so many pages of this website, just finished a full translation into Korean of the page on periodontal disease. A big heaping plate of thanks...
Carnivores Through and Through
Our cats are carnivores in all their parts. Honoring that truth helps keep them from getting obese and sick. Look at the beautiful TEETH of a cat! Those lovely, sharp, prominent canines are there for stabbing. The entire structure of a cat's mouth is designed to shear...
Getting Back the Chunky Value
I love what feeding a balanced, raw diet does for cats. But everything we do that isn't exactly what Mother Nature intended has consequences. Like, for instance, the act of grinding the food. I don't see a way around that - in order to feed a nice balance of meat,...
Pet Food
Ditching Blind Faith in ‘Prescription’ Diets
A few words from The Soapbox. By design or default, many vets permit the pet food industry to act as their proxy when it comes to nutritional decision-making for their clients. Because diet is a very big thing to get wrong, this can have a serious, negative impact on...
Pet Food Ingredient Labeling Sleight of Hand
Beware the (legal) sleight of hand with pet food ingredient labeling. As we noted recently, pet-food labeling rules dictate that ingredients be listed by decreasing weight, or predominance, in the food. But "ingredient splitting" is a way to include a lot of grain...
Sometimes Chicken Isn’t Exactly Chicken
It's useful to sharpen your translation skills in understanding what the NAME on the label of a cat food product actually means. You might be surprised to know that: AAFCO rules dictate that a product labeled "chicken food" must have at least 95 percent chicken on a...
Urinary Tract
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Veterinarians
How Do We Change the Veterinary Paradigm?
In many ways, veterinarians are on the front lines of this "lead the change on the collective bad habits in how we feed our cats" thing. They are the first line of defense against the dominant paradigm that implies, “Dry food is fine, it’s nutritionally complete, and...
Veterinarians and Nutrition: It’s Not What You Think
Are you confident that your vet is well-trained to give nutritional advice? That your vet has critically reviewed the science provided by pet food manufacturers? How much study of nutrition do vets get in vet school? "It doesn't feel like enough," said Amy Cheung, a...
Be Informed, Not Intimidated
The standard rejoinder I heard years ago and continue to hear from many vets goes like this: many homemade diets, including all meat diets (whether raw or cooked), are "highly unbalanced and are likely to be deficient in key nutrients unless properly supplemented."...