Indeed, they may be of greater purity, with less contaminants,” he told The National. “Manufactured nutritional supplements are designed to have the same nutritional content as those naturally occurring.
Vegan food for cats is available and typically will contain taurine produced synthetically instead of being derived from animal ingredients. Rather than requiring meat or other particular ingredients, he said that pets needed specific nutrients, so cats fed commercially available food labelled as being nutritionally complete for them should receive everything necessary. Prof Knight said that vets “were understandably cautious about unconventional diets of all kinds” and is set to present what he described as “the wealth” of recent research on vegan diets for pets to the BVA.
“They require animal-sourced ingredients to provide essential nutrients, such as taurine and preformed vitamin A, which are minimal or even absent in plant ingredients,” the organisation stated. In 2021, in response to a spike in media interest, the British Veterinary Association issued a statement saying that cats were obligate carnivores and should not be fed a vegetarian or vegan diet. The results come despite advice from some veterinary organisations that cats should be fed meat or animal products. None of the reductions were statistically significant, but Prof Knight said that the findings nevertheless “reveal a strong trend”. They were also 55 per cent less likely to be transitioned on to a medical diet because of health problems, were assessed as seriously ill by their owner 23 per cent less often and had 16 per cent fewer health disorders if unwell.
Based on results from 1,369 cats, the research found that cats fed a vegan diet had seven per cent fewer visits to the vet, needed to be given 15 per cent less medication, were four per cent less likely to be assessed as unwell by a vet, and were eight per cent less likely to be recorded as seriously ill by a vet.
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