Cats Aren't Vegans
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Smart, sharp, and slightly unhinged. Late Night's Fresh Perspective. The Last Show with David Cooper. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, come get your vegan, gluten-free dinner is not what you should be saying to your cat according to science. It is vet talk, or as I should say, cat talk, here with Dr. Cliff Redford. It's everything you wanted to know about your furry friends and probably some things that you didn't. Cliff, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. This is going to be fun. We normally focus a lot on dogs.
I know, boring. Boring.
Why aren't cats vegans despite isotopic signatures?
Who wants an animal that just always loves you? Don't you want an animal that hates you sometimes?
It's probably a little bit more realistic to our regular relationships.
Thank you. I guess. I guess. Dogs teach people about unconditional love and cats teach people about boundaries, Cliff.
What's more important to you? People, yes. What do they say? Dogs are family members. Dogs have family members. Cats have staff.
I would say friends. Friends with high expectations from those friends. Look, when I hear of a pet owner who's like, my dog's, my cat's vegan, I'm like, you're an idiot. But I have no like evidence for that other than like these animals evolved eating meat. Not like us. They're not omnivores. So it's not like one or the other. They eat meat. They need that protein. They need a lot of it. They need more of it than us by weight. But am I right about this is the question. You are half right.
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.
Oh, God. Is this like a scientific journal that no mere mortal can read?
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. No. What it actually means is the test doesn't work. What it actually means is the nitrogen changes in the fur of animals, let's say, or the hair of people, because of how we're able to metabolize proteins. So this article basically said this testing that we've been using for decades, generations maybe, in the science community to determine what species eat is incorrect. But then it opened up the floodgates of talking about these vegan cats. I recommend everybody check out hashtag vegan cat and just go down this sort of vegan rabbit. I guess rabbits are vegans. Actually, not all of them are. Go down this rabbit hole, finding out the diseases that cats get.
when they are fed a vegan diet, because it does happen, especially from human vegans. They don't want their little indoor cat to be eating a can of murder.
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