What you feed your cat - Siberian or otherwise - is, obviously, of paramount importance to your friendly feline's health. It's just as important for them as it is for us (or any other animal), but just like we've done to ourselves with processed foods, we're also doing to them and our other animals. And this is not a good thing.

I've poked around on the web quite a bit looking for information on the subject of what to feed our furry friends, and I've come to the firm conclusion that the best thing for them is food that's as close as we can reasonably get to what their wild kin would find.

Ingredients

The most important thing, bar none, to take into consideration about what to feed your cat is what goes into the food, regardless of whether it's wet or dry (more on wet/dry later).

Just like us or any other animal, our cats are what they eat. If we feed them crap, they're going to suffer for it. If we feed them good food that is close to what they would get in the wild and they are designed to eat, they'll benefit.

So, what should you be looking for? First, read the label on any food product you're thinking about buying. It's rather ironic, but I hardly pay any attention to what goes into my own food, but I darned well look at the food labels for what Nina and Sasha eat (go figure!).

In general, if you're finding things that you wouldn't consider eating yourself, chances are you shouldn't be getting them for your cat!

Let's look at a couple of examples:

Animal byproducts. These are a big ingredient in many cat and dog foods. This is basically all the stuff that's left over after the "good" meat has been taken. Think about it: beef, chicken, turkey, fish "byproducts". Imagine what's left over once you take away the meat and useful bone! And since that stuff doesn't go into the human food chain, the care that's taken with it isn't so great. But there's tons of it and it's cheap, and manufacturers use it to make their bottom line better. Yum.

Cereal fillers. Just like our own overly processed food that makes us adults fat and our kids hyper, a lot of cat (and dog) foods have carbohydrate-packed grains and grain byproducts to bulk up the food. This doesn't have any positive effect on the nutritional value - just the opposite, in fact, since your cat is a carnivore - but it does make the food cheaper to produce by volume (read: higher profit for the manufacturer).

Preservatives. If what you read on the label has a bunch of words you've never seen before or can't pronounce, or end in "-fate" or "-fite," beware! Sulfate/sulfite compounds are often used as preservatives, and just as with human foods they have no redeeming features except to make the embalmer's job easier after we die.

Artificial this and that. A big part of many cat food manufacturers' job is marketing, and a huge piece of marketing is to make the food look appetizing...to us, not your cat! They want it to look yummy and edible so we'll buy it. So the food will often be colored and flavored to make it appealing to us, but most of this stuff is a witches brew of chemicals (that they don't break out on the label) that isn't going to do your cat any good. Your cat would rather just have a nice juicy mouse, marketing executives be damned.

So, what should you look for? Again, look for natural ingredients, no preservatives, no "artificial <fill in the blank>". The leading ingredient should be meat or fish - not byroducts, but actual flesh of human food quality - followed by other natural ingredients that you can readily recognize.

Dry versus Wet Food

Now on to one of my favorite pet peeves: dry vs. wet food. As you probably know, there are essentially two different classes of food to choose from nowadays: "dry" and "wet." I'm probably going to rile some folks up by saying this, but in my humble opinion the only real option for your cat is wet food.

Why is that? What's so bad about dry food (or so good about wet food)?

There are lots of claims and some studies that have been done about the relative merits of dry versus wet cat (and dog) food. I'm not going to stand here and tell you that I'm some sort of vetrinary nutritionist with a foot-thick study to convince you. But I'm an analyst by trade, I've lived among animals all my life, and I've observed a few things:

First and foremost, dry food is simply not even close to what cats are designed to eat. Cats evolved to be carnivores and survived by hunting and killing whatever critters they could get their little paws on. As most of you probably realize, crunchy kibble does not occur naturally in the wild any more than Twinkies do. As such, this type of food is completely alien to the cat's entire digestive system, from the mouth to the tailpipe.

I don't buy the advertising claims that dry food is better for your cat's teeth. Again, this is not the sort of thing your cat's mouth was designed to eat. And if you read the fine print, some of the studies that the manufacturers trot out to prove this (especially to your local vet, along with a bunch of free samples) were paid for and/or conducted by the manufacturer, not a disinterested third party. In my own experience with dogs, my parents fed only dry food to our Weimaraners, and they had very significant plaque build-up. Going to the vet to have their teeth floated (a very expensive process for us and unpleasant one for the dog) was not a rare occurrence. Not good.

As the name implies, dry food is dry - it has very low water content, unlike the nice water-rich little mice, squirrels, birds, etc. your cat's wild ancestors used to munch on. So in addition to dealing with this unnatural food, your cat also has to make up all the extra water that it would normally get from it's food. Cats obviously need some liquid water regardless of what they eat. But it's a huge leap in what your cat needs between dry and wet foods, and it's yet another aspect of dry food that your cat's plumbing (digestive and urinary) was not designed for.

Because it's conveniently packaged, both in terms of the kibble and the packaging the kibble comes in, many folks forget the importance of freshness of the food. This isn't just a taste issue, but a clear health issue: dry kibble isn't 100% moisture free - it still has plenty of moisture to support mold and bacteria if it's not stored properly or used quickly enough. The worst part is that contamination may not be obvious: the cultures may be too small to see, or perhaps just growing on the side of some kibble you didn't notice as you poured it out of the bag. How long was that bag sitting in a warehouse somewhere? How hot was the back of the truck it was hauled in for hours or days to get to the pet store or your front door? A lot of questions and great opportunities for potentially lethal microbes and spores to multiply in your kitty's food.

Most dry foods are packed with carbs that, just like with humans eating too many Twinkies, often leads to weight gain and obesity. And this often leads to the seesaw of trying to feed your cat less to help it lose weight. So you wind up with a miserable starving (but still fat) cat and miserable owner, when the real problem is that you're not not feeding your cat the right type of food! Remember, cats are carnivores, not herbivores or processedfoodivores. Think mice, rabbits, and squirrels, not Twinkies, Pop Tarts, and Cheerios.

Finally, but not least of all, is what I'll call "edibility." Maybe I'm too much of a softy, but I try to put myself in my cats' little shoes (and it's a bloody tight fit!): if I was my cat, would I want to eat this food? The answer for virtually all of the dry food is a big NYET (read: NO)! The stuff is just nasty, and most cats wouldn't even consider eating it if it wasn't sprayed with a tasty-smelling coating and they didn't have anything else to eat but your stinky shoes. Call me wierd, but I've actually put my money where my mouth is and tasted some dry food for cats and dogs, and it's an enlightening experience: I highly recommend you try a nugget or two and see how good it really is! Sure, I'd eat it if I was starving, but it would be last on my menu before old tires. And this is what we give to our furry friends who have a sense of smell and taste that's far more discerning than ours is? If I had to choose between eating that and eating whatever rodents I could catch, I'd be out in the back forty hunting squirrels! But no, let's give our cats these tasty nuggets. Yummy. Some friends we are!

Good Quality Foods Aren't Hard To Find!

There are some folks out there who make their own cat food from scratch - power to you! I'm not there at this point, but I have huge respect for folks who have really gone the extra mile for the benefit of their kitties.

For the rest of us, there are a number of excellent canned cat foods out there - most of which are not from big-budget advertising manufacturers - that are readily available locally or online. And rather than regurgitate the excellent research someone else has already done, I'd like to direct you to the page on commercial canned foods at CatInfo.org, written by Lisa Pierson, DVM.

In our case, we decided on the Wellness canned food, which is grain-free (remember, your cat's ancestors didn't eat grain unless it was in the gut of the critter they ate) and is a complete balanced diet just by itself. But there are other choices besides Wellness, and Dr. Pierson describes the pros and cons of each one.

And for those of you who insist on feeding dry food, PLEASE use something like Innova's EVO which, while it still has all the disadvantages of a dry food, at least has good ingredients.

So, if you don't walk away with anything from this article other than this one thing, remember CatInfo.org! Dr. Pierson has done a huge amount of research and presented a boatload of excellent information about feline nutrition, and you owe it to your cat to check it out.

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