whether you read the bible or you read other texts or you don't believe anything
i think we can all agree that the mass production and all of the bad things that go into pet food is
barbaric a multi-billion dollar pet food industry is essentially a garbage can and recycling bin
for the human waste industry but i'm not here to scare you i have a solution that's ethical
sustainable and what's best for your cat and it follows scripture hey friends it's jess and
jericho and this video is in response to a comment from christine she says i wish my cats could be
vegan like our father intended for all creation so since they have evolved to be carnivores i want to
make sure it's humanely and ethically sourced i understand where you're coming from i'm not a
bible expert i do read scripture every day and i agree that our cat's food should be humanely
and ethically sourced and made i'm glad that you mentioned that cats are carnivores but for anyone
else watching that's curious about feeding a vegan diet to their cat let's talk about that first so
the first reason that cats can't be vegan is that they use protein amino acids and animal
fat as a source of energy they can't utilize carbohydrates animal-based protein delivers a full
complete protein profile whereas plants do not feline nutrition foundation states a shortage of
taurine induces cardiomyopathy a serious form of heart disease central retinal degeneration
and blindness cats can't synthesize taurine on their own it must be provided in their diet
and meat is the only thing that provides taurian naturally even eggs don't provide taurine plants
don't provide taurine taurine is found in hard working muscle meats like the thigh the heart and
the secreting organ liver is also a good source of taurine back in the 80s there were tens of
thousands of cats that were dying and it was all linked to dry pet food the two most popular
veterinary recommended brands did not add enough taurine to the product and since it's dry food
it's cooked and pressurized multiple times taurine is water soluble so the more you keep cooking the
ingredients the less taurine there's going to be in the finished product additionally dry food is
extremely high in carbohydrates which brings me to my next point of why cats can't be vegan is that
carbohydrates are bad for cats it's detrimental to their health carbohydrates fuel hunger and obesity
and obesity alone puts your cat at much higher risk for very serious health issues including
heart issues arthritis because there's a lot of there's a lot of weight on the joints and
it's hard for them to walk around it's painful for them to walk around this can also lead to grooming
issues because it's difficult for them to to groom in certain places when they're very large this can
also lead to diabetes when you have carbs breaking down into sugar this wreaks havoc on the pancreas
and it negatively affects insulin production that's why a lot of overweight and obese cats
typically develop diabetes in fact there's a veterinarian dr elizabeth hodgkin's where she
tested it with her own cats and in her practice all the cats that had diabetes they were eating a
dry food diet she transitioned them over to a high protein high moisture low carbohydrate diet and in
many cases the diabetes completely disappeared they stopped relying on insulin completely and
in two different cases when the cats returned to a dry food diet aka low moisture low meat based
protein and high carbohydrate diet diabetes returned so she had to transition them back
to the high moisture high meat low carb diet and then remission happened again another reason that
cats can't be vegan is that their teeth aren't designed to grind down plant materials and dry
food in general all of their teeth are sharp and serrated and their jaws also only move up and down
they don't grind side to side like ours do and herbivore teeth do so their teeth are designed to
chop up and down and basically scissor through raw meaty bones and flesh and skin and feathers and
all of these things that are in their whole prey so they chop it up into smaller pieces swallow
those pieces whole and then their acidic stomach takes care of the rest now some of you might
think well what if my vegan pet food just adds taurine what if they add the synthetic supplements
that meat would provide and just supplement the diet that way well synthetic nutrients are very
different than natural nutrients like i mentioned before animal-based protein provides a complete
protein profile and they all work very very well together and you get all the benefits you know
other than just the nutrients and there was a study with cats specifically with phosphorus
and they wanted to see if the synthetic version in excess caused problems versus the natural form of
phosphorus which comes from meat and they found that the synthetic version of phosphorus when
given in excess over long periods of time did cause problems which is important considering
that a lot of cats today have kidney disease a lot of us say that the enemy is phosphorous but
i would say that the enemy is a low moisture diet because the kidneys need moisture to flow through
urine and another issue is the synthetic version of phosphorus that's being added
instead of relying on the cat's natural source of phosphorus which is meat so now let's take a
look at an example of a vegan cat food i think this is one of the first brands that came about
and it's called benivo so first of all right off the bat this cat food is dry so right there it's
inappropriate regardless of the ingredients dry food is way too low in moisture for cats whole
prey aka their natural food is about 70 percent moisture whereas dry food is only 10 moisture
that's a very very significant decrease especially considering that the cats evolved from desert cats
so it's not like they had cat water fountains and like large lakes to drink from they relied solely
on their prey for their moisture content and again that high moisture is essential because water
is essential for life but it's also essential for proper body functions including digestion
and urination again that's why a lot of cats that eat dry food only typically develop some form of
kidney disease because their kidneys are just they're so weak and starving for moisture it's
difficult for them to process everything so let's take a look at the ingredients we have soy wheat
corn which is maize gluten meal maize rice sunflower oil beet pulp and then vitamins and
minerals bruise yeast yeast-based palatine linseed seaweed and then we have some probiotics spirulina
yucca extract so basically you know obviously this is a vegan foods all of these are plant-based
ingredients but soy is not natural more than 90 of the soy in the us is genetically modified same
with corn even the cat's prey wouldn't eat soy in the wild typically grasses and and herbs and
veggies so some of you might say well the cat eats the whole animal and you know they eat herbivores
yes they do eat the stomach contents so they get a tiny bit of veggie material but it's pre-digested
veggie material and the stomach itself is probably like two percent of the entire animal so two
percent and it's already pre-digested for the cat isn't enough of a valid excuse to say that
cats are omnivores or vegetarian etc and we have wheat and corn and all of these other ingredients
really the only like the closest appropriate ingredient for cats would probably be spirulina
or seaweed because maybe when they're in the wild drinking from a lake they might get some algae in
their diet but again this is a very very small percent of the diet additionally when we use the
guaranteed analysis to come up with an approximate carb amount we get 47 carbs on a dry matter basis
now going back to whole prey it's typically less than 10 carbs so 47 is a very very significant
increase i mean that's half the diet right there is carbohydrates benivo also has a wet
food vegan cat foods so let's take a look at those ingredients we have water sufficient for
processing potatoes carrots oat groats vegetable oil peas brown rice tomato blueberries cranberries
dried brewers yeast now this one does have high moisture but again potatoes peas carrots these are
not things that the cat would eat nor things that the cat's natural prey would eat and even though
this is wet food the carbohydrate approximate carbohydrate amount is still 29 which is
a little bit more than double almost triple what the cat would eat in his natural habitat and i'd
also like to mention that neither of these foods list taurine on the label they don't add back any
any of these amino acids they add they say vitamins and minerals but amino acids are
different there's no taurine carnitine methionine you know they don't add these things back
and again both of these both of these products are cooked pressurized so you have to wonder and worry
about these water-soluble nutrients you know where is it coming from if plants don't produce taurine
so please comment below cats are not vegans that way more people that are curious about this topic
can find this video and learn the truth now christine mentions a brand called caster and
pollocks and i wanted to review this food because you mentioned you want it to be humane ethical and
it has the usda organic seal on the label now you also mentioned that this company got bought out
by another company that's always something that you want to be mindful of because this happens
all the time so cast iron pollux is owned by merrick and merrick is owned by nestle purina
and as you probably know nestle purina produces multiple different cat food brands and multiple
different human food brands and if you take a look at these brands they're not the best quality
and they're not very healthy for us so if they don't produce healthy human food how can
we trust that they are going to produce healthy cat food but let's take a look at the label and
we'll review what it means so it says usd organic afco doesn't really have regulation for this they
rely on the usda that's why there's the usda organic seal so they rely on the human food
regulation service instead of regulating it themselves so that usda organic seal means that
at least 95 of the ingredients are certified usda organic i looked at castor and pollock's
website and i could only find a dry food product that had the product name chicken and brown rice
so i just have to assume that you're feeding this one and we'll take a look at that one
if you are feeding the wet food version let me know and i can let you know in the comments
you know what i think about the food so since recipe is in this product's name we have between
25 and 94.9 chicken and brown rice combined so right there it's kind of a pro because you have
the most amount of those named ingredients whereas if it said with chicken and brown rice or chicken
and brown rice flavor you would have fewer it would be less than 25 of those named ingredients
but the issue here is that there's a combination of ingredients instead of saying chicken recipe
which that composition would be all chicken it says chicken and brown rice so chicken is
listed first that means there's more than brown rice but we don't know how much more it could be
split you know 51 of that composition could be chicken the rest could be brown rice we really
don't know i already talked about how dry food is inappropriate for cats so i won't go over
that again but the approximate carb amount of this product is about 41 so that's really not not good
for cats and we'll take a look at the ingredients next a lot of these ingredients are organic i'm
i'm not gonna say it because that would be redundant so we have chicken chicken meal now
that word meal means that it is a rendered product which means that it's high heat and high pressure
multiple times and sometimes these rendered ingredients can include 4d meats which is dead
disease dying and disabled now if it says organic it might not be that but that's just something
to be mindful of when you're reading labels like what these terms actually mean it would be better
if it said you know chicken necks chicken backs rather than just chicken meal because that word
meal is like an umbrella term it could mean meat and bone so you kind of have to question well
if they didn't really know the specific parts of the chicken that were used to say these are
the parts that we're using they instead they just say chicken meal so like let's just use
the umbrella term because we don't really know the fine details of the ingredients that's very that's
very troubling to me next we have pea protein oatmeal peas brown rice barley sunflower seed
meal coconut oil chicken fat natural flavor flax seed chicken liver dried alfalfa meal
salt and then it looks like after salt it's mostly supplements um some synthetic supplements rosemary
extract they typically use as a preservative and then the last is a is a probiotic and so
this is basically already a vegan food with a little bit of chicken you know a lot of dry
foods are basically meat flavored granola that's the easiest way to explain it but so i would say
that this isn't even that great for your cat you can definitely do better give me a polydactyl
thumbs up if this is helpful so far so more cat parents that want to feed their cat properly can
find this video thanks so much so now since you mentioned our father in creation i want to say
what does scripture say about what we should and shouldn't eat and there are some verses where
he talks about what is clean aka what we can eat and what is unclean aka what we cannot eat
now this is for us humans not for cats but if you want to find a nice compromise i think this is a
really good solution for ethical sustainable and what follows scripture and what your cat needs
so in deuteronomy most of these verses you'll find that he declares which beasts are clean
and basically it includes antelope bison buffalo caribou cattle which would be beef and veal
deer which would be venison elk gazelle sheep which is lamb and also called mutton so there are
a lot of variety of land animals they're basically all grass grazing animals they're all herbivores
strictly herbivores then when it comes to birds he lists out the birds that we should not eat and
a lot of these are basically birds of prey meaning that they eat everything they're omnivores so they
they could potentially even eat dead carcasses and of the clean birds that we should eat it says
all clean fowls ye may eat so that would include chicken turkey quail pheasant goose birds like
that and if we go back a few verses he tells us that hair as in rabbit and swine as in pigs are
unclean and we shall not eat them or touch their dead carcass so i would suggest not feeding these
to your cat since you don't want to touch them there's also information about fish what to
eat and what not to eat what's clean and what's unclean but technically cats aren't fishermen they
wouldn't really eat fish in the wild so yeah i personally don't feed any type of fish to jericho
additionally fish causes picky eating because cats form an addiction to that fish flavor so
i would say it's best just to avoid fish for your cat anyway additionally our father also
clarifies that mice and rats are unclean which is very interesting to me because
mice and rats are what cats eat in the wild and even rabbit which are also technically unclean
there are resources in the description that go further into these subjects again i'm not an
expert on on scripture but you know these are just the verses that i found the most helpful and i
think that are the most helpful to you and i would love to know your comments so you know let me know
what what else you find with regard to diet and you know how you eat and you know what you feed
your cat i would love to know more resources and more more compromises and solutions so the
compromise and the solution that i personally do with jericho where it's sustainable it's humane
it's ethical it follows scripture it's clean what i do is i feed jericho a raw diet prey model raw
and whole prey which means that he's eating chunks of meat and chunks of bone i get the whole prey
from a pet food company that sources from local farms nothing's ever enhanced nothing's ever gmo
everything that they eat is clean and that's the only option that i have right now i can't find a
local person that has whole prey that i can buy so that's my solution for the whole prey i don't
feed mice anymore and this was actually a sign that our father gave me through jericho so he was
eating mice and then i bumped it up from large to extra large and i was also thinking well it's from
a breeding facility that's not very it's not it's not natural you know they should be living outside
and so jericho would actually stop eating the second half of the mouse and if he did eat it he
would vomit so i was like all right this is a sign that i should just stop feeding them because i was
thinking that i don't want to feed them anymore anyway so now the only whole prey that he gets is
quail which is a clean foul the rest of his food i get from my local farmer's market and i buy beef
chicken and turkey and i might throw in some lamb in the mix there and i go to the farmer's market
because i'm supporting local businesses i can talk to them about their practices like everything's
pasture raised they eat what's on the land they eat you know natural food there's no sprays no
chemicals no gmos so i know that they care about the animals that they're raising and i know that
the animals have a good life and i eat the meat too so i basically like cut out a little bit of
portion for jericho and then the rest is what i eat that week and you can check out how i portion
everything out and feed jericho in this video right over meow thank you so much for watching