How do I get my cats to eat vegan cat food?

Your cat can't ever get the proper nutrition from vegan diet. There's a difference between plant and animal protein and they need the latter.

I am myself very concerned about the quality of food I am feeding my cat, but it's an obligate carnivore! I don't know if it's available in your area but Bozita makes affordable and high quality food.

If you want to have total control of your cat's diet, consider feeding home made row diet. there's dozens of websites on the topic, just google it.

In the meantime read the following articles to understand what nutrients your cat needs.

Best of luck!

The main reason would be that cats are carnivores. For one, putting your cat on a vegan diet no matter how many suppliments you give them, will never be quite what they need or obviously want for that matter. Personally, if I was a cat that got put on a vegan diet, I would go hunt mice and birds all day instead of eating that crap.

While a human may be able to make their own choices about going vegan, the owner should always repect the fact that cats require meat to live - wheather the owner feeds it to them or the cat takes it upon itself to go and hunt for that source of protein. Same applies to dogs. There is no way possible that your cat will be enough fats from vegan-limited food alone in order to retain their muscle build, among various other objectives. Meat based dry food isn't even enough to suppliment your cats needs.

Your best bet would be to buy eggs from your local farmers market (which are almost ALWAYS from free range, properly housed chickens), and mix that in with your so called vegan cat food, you may give it to them raw, cooked, or (my person prefrence) scrambled and half cooked. Eggs have plenty protein, and are very much cat-approved.

Do take into consideration that cats taste is geared towards meat, and feeding them strictly vegan food is almost like picking a leaf off the nearest tree and telling someone "This is all you can eat to survive! Make it happen!"

It's different for every person. It's not really logical. I used to eat bananas and parmesan cheese (sprinkled on lettuce) and those foods are often on a lot of people's unsafe list. Then again, I could never eat yogurt or almonds (when I found out they were seven calories each and two calories from fat, I felt more betrayed than Jon Snow) but a lot of anorexics would totally eat these. Generally an anorexic will find a few foods that they feel they can eat and portion safely, and have weird obsessions with them. I would down packets of aspartame and binge on frozen corn (your body can't process the nutrients in that form). A lot of anorexics will eat rice cakes, though I never could because carbs. Diet Coke is an entire food group. Seriously, even though it hurts like a ***** to swallow, you just constantly down it. Obviously green tea, lettuce, celery is a big one.

Cats are not natural vegans. Cats love a smelly meat dinner.

However, You could try adding the vegan food to her food in small amounts and gradually increase the percentage of vegan mix until she is eating mostly vegan. You may not be able to get the cat to eat anything but meat.

Let us know if it works.

I'm vegan, so you can imagine I had a hard time when I came across information of studies showing (and proving) that cat's NEED raw meat. We humans thrive on a vegan diet, but natural carnivores like dogs and cats need to have raw meet and the taurine in it to have healthy immune systems and rebuild healthy cells (as live food does for human bodies).

You must know bagged kibble is a terrible excuse for nutrition otherwise you wouldn't be trying something different.

Please just check out these sites. They helped me make my decision to switch my 2 dogs to raw, and after seeing such dramatic results decided we would start our new kitten off raw the day he came home.

I'm happy to say the kitten has doubled his size in less than 2 weeks (we was a runt) and my animals love their food.

You've made a great decision to live a vegan lifestyle, because it's natural. Cat's are natural carnivores, so naturally you should feed them raw meet.

There are companies who are IMO taking advantage of vegans by convincing people it is ok to feed their obligate carnivore a diet containing no animal protein and fat as long as you buy their supplements or diet. But a cat is very different to a human in its digestive system. It is a little machine that runs on animal sourced protein. Nothing else will be as ideal no matter what supplements you add. Proteins from vegetable sources do not have the same bioavailability to the cat as proteins from animal sources.

. Also the cat's pancreas was not made to have to process lots of carbohydrates. Its natural diet -- a mouse -- is like only 3 % calories from carbohydrate. by repeatedly flooding the cat's system with glucose from food high in carbohydrate, you might increase your cat's risk of eventually developing diabetes.

If you do succeed in doing this you will be risking your cat's long term health. You might not see a problem in the short term but this is just not natural for the cat, they can't get the same nutrition from a vegan diet.

If you truly feel you cannot stand to feed meat to any animals, then you need to rehome your cats to someone willing to feed them a proper species-appropriate diet. It is abusive to enforce your own dietary choices onto another species that is not meant to eat that way.

EDIT - Avoid food that says byproducts or anything that just says "meat" and does not identify the specific kind of meat. This pretty much eliminates the cheap supermarket foods. but the vegan food was probably not cheap either.

So anyway some that do have muscle meat, not mystery meat byproducts, include Merrick Before Grain, Wellness, Natures Variety, Blue Buffalo.... I also sometimes supplement with Evanger's game meats and Wysong Au Jus (I think those are just muscle meat. not calcium organs etc.

of course the way to really know what goes in it is to make a home made raw diet like the recipe included on Dr Lisa Pierson's site http://www.catinfo.org./ But understandably you may not want to deal with that! If you can afford it you could order frozen raw food from Feline's Pride. That does not have any grains or veggies (that cats do not need and companies put in the foods to appeal to humans) AND has no mystery meat, hooves, 4Ds etc

http://www.felinespride.com/products/catfood.aspx .

If you are looking for some that cost less I've seen someone on here say that Petsmarts "Authority" brand is decent and affordable and I think also some of the Nutro canned food? I personally don't know but you could check them out.

Good luck in finding a good food for your cats. I really do recommend that site that has the article I linked below. That article is from JAVMA so is written for vets. but the main page of the site has a long very informative article about feeding your cat written by a vet for laypersons.

If you see the sharp teeth on cats, you will know cats are meant to eat meat. This is how they were made. You can't change nature, and if you do, you will have unhealthy cats. Cats by nature eat: mice, birds, small rodents, insects. Sometimes they also eat blades of grass to help their digestion but not as a salad. Don't try to change the way nature made your pets. There is a reason they eat this way. Additionally they need a specific amino acid called taurine. This is very important for cats and is found in the natural diet they would eat.

Why on earth would you want to do that? Cats are carnivores. Look at their teeth. Do you know what a horses teeth look like? A horse is an herbivore, which means that they are made to eat plant matter. A horses teeth are flat for grinding. A cat's teeth are sharp, made to pull meat off the bone.

Just because you don't eat it doesn't mean you need to risk the health of your furry babies so terribly. Think about them. They are made to survive.

Can't force your opinion on others, even if they're cats ;P

Cats are extremely picky about the food they eat. Once you get them to eat a specific brand, they usually won't eat anything else. They're not like dogs, though my cat is very much like a dog because he knows dog commands and can follow them, and can have a conversation with you, haha

Buy them some regular food they're cats they LIKE to eat fish and chicken. Ever heard of the circle of life?

"When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eats the grass, and so, we are all connected in the great circle of life" Mufasa, Lion Kind

You already have their response. They won't eat a food they don't like. But with vegan food, that probably wouldn't be a problem for long, since they won't survive. Cats are obligate carnivores, and they are designed to handle meat proteins, not vegetable proteins.

If you have a problem with carnivores as your pets, then return your pets so they may get a proper diet.