Dr. Cliff Redford

Cats have staff.

Dogs are actually omnivores and dogs can thrive on a meat-free diet, whether it's commercial or let's say homemade, but it's very hard to balance the diet when it's homemade.

But cats...

Cats are true carnivores or are called obligatory carnivores.

They cannot produce the life requiring amino acid taurine.

Proteins are made up of amino acids.

All the different sort of chemical building blocks put together make these large molecules called proteins.

And most mammals, humans, dogs can take proteins.

different amino acids and create taurine out of it.

But cats can't do that.

And the only place to get taurine in nature is meat, is animal flesh, especially like the liver and the heart and then certain muscle parts have high taurine.

This all came out due to this kind of interesting article in this very easy reading book called Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

I guess so, because I had some trouble reading it.

It was talking about nitrogen isotopes found within our hair and within the whiskers and fur of cats and other animals and how they were utilizing these nitrogen isotopes.

So how the nitrogen molecule changes after metabolism in the body.

And they used these in the past to determine what animals ate.

Because what they had recognized is if you're a meat eater and I'm a vegetarian, and that's probably a pretty accurate description, the isotopes in our hair are going to be different because of the nitrogen that's in protein and we metabolize it different, etc., etc.,

And then knowing that cats are true and obligate carnivores and not eating a vegan diet, what they ended up finding is the nitrogen isotopes in cats mimic the nitrogen isotopes in human vegans.

So does that mean that they are actually vegans?

No.