This issue has been talked about a large amount but ill copy and paste some interesting points from last time:
I found out an interesting fact, that commercial pet food companies use synthetic taurine because the meat is so processed only a very small amount remains. So this means health wise vegan pet food is no less healthy then commercial pet food. It also shows just how bad commerical pet food is, if the animal acids are lost because of processing.
I also found a study that showed vegan/vegetarian pets had adequate taurine and cobalamin levels along with some improved health benefits and here is a link to the study -
http://www.vegepets.info/assets/Vegetarian%20Cat%20Study%20Wakefield%20et%20al%202006%20JAVMA.pdf
Here is an overview of the study:
"Objective—To determine motivation and feeding practices of people who feed their cats vegetarian diets as well as taurine and cobalamin status of cats consuming vegetarian diets.
Design—Cross-sectional study.
Animals—34 cats that had been exclusively fed a commercial or homemade vegetarian diet and 52 cats that had been fed a conventional diet for ≥ 1 year.
Procedures—Participants were recruited through a Web site and from attendees of a national animal welfare conference. Caregivers of cats in both groups answered a telephone questionnaire regarding feeding practices for their cats. Blood was obtained from a subset of cats that had been fed vegetarian diets. Blood and plasma taurine and serum cobalamin concentrations were measured.
Results—People who fed vegetarian diets to their cats did so largely for ethical considerations and were more likely than people who fed conventional diets to believe that there are health benefits associated with a vegetarian diet and that conventional commercial cat foods are unwholesome. Both groups were aware of the potential health problems that could arise from improperly formulated vegetarian diets. All cats evaluated had serum cobalamin concentrations within reference range, and 14 of 17 had blood taurine concentrations within reference range.
Conclusions and Clinical Relevance—Vegetarian diets are fed to cats primarily for ethical considerations. Results of this study should aid practitioners in communicating with and providing advice to such clients.
FYI the cats with taurine below reference range were not low enough to be considered critically deficient." -
http://www.vegetariancats.com/study.htm
END OF STUDY
Another thing to add, is that just picking up pieces of human grade meat isn't enough for cats, you need to be feeding them organs with high amounts such as hearts and even then they recommend taurine supplements. The fact of the matter is for a cat to get enough amino acids from meat they need to be eating whole corpses of small animals and nothing else, because the meat you buy from stores will be one part you have to constantly be buying different parts and mixes to attempt to get all the animal amino acids and even then they will probably still recommend a taurine supplement.
Lets also talk about the natural diet, cat and dogs descendent's ate meat in the wild but when we get to domestication for thousands of years they've been living on human scraps and i doubt that had enough of the animal amino acids yet they continued to survive for years. After that came commercial pet foods, which when processed provided little amino acids so cat's were deficient for years until they discovered that they needed animal acids like taurine and cobalamin so they started putting in synthetic and that's where they are at today.
The fact is vegan pet food gets a bad rap when the exact supplements are used in commercial pet food, which is further backed up by the above study. So a few conclusions can be drawn from all this, a common ancestors natural diet isn't the same as an domesticated animal, vegan pet food contains the same amounts of amino acids as commercial since they both use synthetic sources, to have a cat with those acids from meat would require them to be only eating small animals whole so they can receive all the nutrients from various body parts which would be destructive of natural wildlife and finally we can see from all these facts that there is nothing wrong with vegan pet food since cat's and dog's have lost their natural diets and can live fine on a vegan diet(as seen in the above study).
My point of this post isn't to argue all animals should be on a vegan diet, it's to provide the facts about a non-animal diet for pets after researching the idea with a un-biased approach seeing as i have neither of these animals and wanted to know the facts for myself. On the research against, i mostly found information about the impacts of amino acid deficiently which didn't take into account artificial supplements and the fact that commercial pet foods also use these supplements.
The issue some vegan cats (male) can have is urinary problems from the larger intake of carbohydrates, although the same issue can arise from commercial pet foods and the percentage is still small the cat may need to have a percentage of meat added to it's diet.
Products like veganpet are meant to be mixed with over foods for meals like tofu, potatoes, TVP etc. the same goes for feeding a cat commercial pet foods, do not just give them tins/dry food and expect it to be nutritionally sound.
Either way if your cat is vegan or not it should still have it's diet nutritionally tested but i do think if a person reads enough into keeping a vegan cat as well as having vet checks to see if the particular cat takes well to it then there isn't a problem, although in situations where the cat isn't taking well to the diet the person needs to add meat if necessary. If you don't want the extra time researching into the diet or taking some of the risks then it's probably not a diet you want to explore with your pet.
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