I love reprising this gem - and making sure folks know about it.  

It's an article in the premier veterinary journal, JAVMA, about cats as carnivores. Having this on hand can really help bridge the gap that often happens in conversations with veterinarians about why you don't want to buy any bags of kibble for your cat. 

Put simply, it's harder for a vet to argue with the science that's been published by their own professional association - sometimes sharing this article with your vet, and explaining that it's hard to reconcile the findings in this work with the ingredient list on a bag of kibble can open the lines of communication in a friendly way.  

Until dry food stops being an acceptable choice to endorse in a vet clinic, the people who look to the veterinary community won’t start getting the message and making healthier choices.

I think that caring vets really want to do what’s best. I also think the odds are stacked against them right now. So my “job,” as I see it, is to join the chorus of voices that can give their clients as much information as possible so that they can ask the hard questions and press the outer edges of the envelope.

Until vets disentangle the knot between financial health of their practice from dependence on the sale of dry food, this problem will remain with us.

If you're a vet?  Thank you being here - you can't possibly know how happy I am that you're here.  I'd be honored if you would read my open letter and have a look at the sample client handout I've prepared. 

And I'd be happy to hear from you too.  


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Vets are a powerful potential ally in the David versus Goliath-esque effort to shift the status quo on how we feed our cats. 

But for that shift to happen means vets must start asking some hard, potentially game-changing questions about their own profession's relationship with the pet food industry. And seek out informed and unbiased information on nutrition. 

The information vets need to become savvy guides for their clients is not conspicuous in veterinary education, near as I can conclude. If it were, then there would be many fewer bags of dry food in vet clinics. The shift also requires demand from the ground up — from the consumers of information those paying for cat food who can encourage, if not demand, sane choices.


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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 it’s a perfectly fine diet for cats.”  While, it may be a lot of work and very overwhelming to make education on nutrition a part of a short veterinary appointment, being overwhelmed doesn’t justify practicing substandard medicine.

Diet is a very big thing to get wrong, after all.

Vets are who people turn to first when they’re looking for guidance on how to feed their animals. It's often exasperating to see that despite the overwhelming data to the contrary about dry food, most vet clinics are still selling and therefore implicitly endorsing dry food. That’s an awfully strong message that’s being sent. And it harms cats.

What can we be doing to persuade veterinarians to shift the paradigm? 

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. Since diet is a VERY big thing to get wrong, this can have a serious, negative impact on the health and well being of your cat - and downstream consequences for your peace of mind and your pocketbook.

Many of us are wired to accept with (blind) faith the advice of vets, since they are the trained professionals who spent years in school learning how to save animal lives and have so much more accumulated knowledge than us "lay folk." 

Add to this the fact that in many or most vet clinics, foods with "prescription" labels line the shelves and walls, creating the impression that these diets are closely scrutinized and tested the way human prescription medications are. Unfortunately, however, this is simply not true. While Hill's obtained trademark status for the phrase "prescription diet" over 20 years ago, in the words of an FDA official, " ' Prescription diet’ is an industry-coined term and holds no legal meaning.” Yes - Prescription Diet® is a registered trademark of Hills® Pet Nutrition, Inc.®. 

This shifts responsibility to all of us cat caregivers to screw up our courage - and roll up our sleeves at least a little - to become as educated and informed as we can about what's truly healthy for our carnivore friends, especially (but not only) when they're facing a health challenge or crisis for which a vet is recommending a "prescription" diet.

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 fourth-year Canadian vet student interviewed in 2007. Over four years of veterinary training, she said 45-50 hours of course time on pet nutrition. Listen to the podcast if you'd like. 
  

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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." 

You'll get no argument from me on that. I am also told that many veterinary nutritionists strongly discourage the use of raw diets for some very good reasons. Again, no disagreement there. No one in their right mind would feed an all meat diet to a cat. That would be horribly unbalanced. I can only applaud and encourage anyone, vet or lay person, who loudly and vehemently discourages anyone from feeding something so patently unsafe to a cat.

But there is so very much more to the story. The customary response from vets, and certainly the pet food industry, about the possibility for raw diets to be dangerously unbalanced is a red herring. It distracts from the fundamental issue of advocating a balanced diet that is true to the carnivorous heritage of small cats. If the goal is to give a cat the best diet possible, then vague admonishments about the potential for homemade diets to be unbalanced are not enough. 

If your vet is hassling you about feeding raw? Make sure you're doing it well - but don't be afraid to hold your ground. 


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