Customer Reviews

Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs & What it Really Means to be Vegan 2nd Edition

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If you have a cat (or cats) you must read this book! Skip the first 84 pages if you'd like, and get to the good stuff. Lots of information about why you should feed your cat vegan.

Note that BOTH vegan cat food and "normal" cat food have SYNTHETIC taurine. Cats were dying of enlarged hearts in the 80's from eating typical cat food. They found the taurine was not intact after the high heat of the rendering plants. After this they added synthetic taurine to all cat food.

Cats would not eat cows and fish in the wild (unless your cat enjoys swimming?) and since they do not sell ground up mouse kibble, vegan cat food has been fortified to meet all of your cats nutritional needs instead.

Store bought cat food contains food not allowed for human consumption. It also contains plastic tags, flea collars, cats, dogs, euthanasia injections, tumors, downers, etc.

Therefore since there is nothing "natural" about typical cat food, you should make they smart choice and buy the vegan food. 80-90% of cats do very well on vegan food, the other percent have health problems on BOTH types of foods.

I personally know people with vegan cats, and they are doing very well. You see cats with all kinds of health problems at the vet, are any of them vegan? Doubtful. Cats and dogs may have health problems no matter what they eat, but it makes more sense to feed them a food that does not contain poisons and tumors to give them a better chance of living healthy.

Even in the vegan world, there is so little discussion of vegan pets that I'm highly appreciative this book exists.

I bought it expecting to find scientific studies and nutritional analyses showing that a vegan diet is acceptable for cats. Instead, I found a book using simple logic to make its case. For example, people say it's "natural" for cats to eat meat -- but how is it "natural" to feed an 8 pound creature that's generally afraid of water tuna, which weighs hundreds of pounds and lives deep in the ocean? Also, people are suspicious of the synthetic taurine that is added to vegan cat food -- but the same stuff is also added to meat food, because the natural taurine is lost during processing. And while scientific studies would have been nice, the author does speak from years of experience working with hundreds of clients while running an online vegan pet food store, as well as raising his own pets, and he writes honestly about a couple potential problems that might come up and how to address them if they do.

The first half of the book actually just lays out some arguments for veganism in general, without getting into the pet question, and that's nice as well -- what vegan hasn't had to have that conversation a hundred times? Oh, and I should also mention the book is quite funny. I thought the jokes were cheesy at first, but within 15 pages I was completely won over. Bottom line: very informative and a great read.

I am vegan and try to reduce the suffering of farm animals. I also rescued my cats, and had a hard time justifying slaughtering one animal (or many) to save another, but I did it anyway for the selfish reason that I loved my cats. I was skeptical that they could be vegan. I figured it wasn't "natural". This book opened my eyes to the fact that the kibble we feed our cats isn't anything close to what they would actually eat in the wild, and may even be far more harmful than a plant-based diet for them. It put my doubts entirely to rest, and even provides medical advice for ailing kitties. I can now rest easy knowing that not only am I not contributing to the 40 million animals or so a year slaughtered for pet food alone, but I am feeding my kitties the best "un-natural" diet possible. It also led to my discovery and meeting of a vegan veterinary doctor, Dr. Eric Weisman, creator of Evolution Pet Food, who can be contacted for medical advice and treatment regarding vegan pets, he runs a vegan shelter in Minneapolis.

Skip the first 140 pages. They are poorly organized, badly written, disjointed and just not all that interesting or helpful. They rant and ramble - like a collection of badly written blog and twitter updates thrown together.

Starting at page 143 (of 169 in the copy I rec'd) - the section about Cat Urine - and ending with the next chapter about making the transition, the author finally provides some interesting and helpful descriptions of first hand experience.

The rest of the book is just a bunch of moralizing. Honestly - I don't feed my cats crappy cat food. I let them eat as much vegetables as they want (two of them fight over raw broccoli stalk!) but two of them have urine crystal problems. I found the author's description of his cat Jude's health problems to be very helpful and the book supports the conclusion that I have already drawn: feeding my cats veggies and part vegan kibble with nutritional yeast and some standard prescription or non-evil (usually salmon based) food mixed in works best. I'm going to look into methionine supplements for George but other than that - I can't say that I'm happy I spent the money on this book.

I'd like to know who invented the term "Obligate Carnivore?" I don't believe it has any basis in reality. There's an animal with the digestive tract of a carnivore that survives off of almost entirely bamboo - though it will eat meat if it runs across it, it rarely does, and lives off of a plant based diet - it's a long lived animal - the Panda Bear. I believe we could feed any animal some nutritious plant based diet and it would be fine. It would be preferable and definitely kinder to all creatures were we to invent alternative diets for them. Learning to create food that cats love would be a huge victory. Inventing an alternative diet for cats not only would be easy, it would lessen the suffering greatly of animals in factories and farms. I think eventually we could end predation entirely and stop using the deaths of animals for taste sensations, entertainment, filming them etc.... There's a lot of grief seeing creatures who are unloved, unwanted, abused and die horrible frightened deaths in any part of the world.