Kitty update

From Brad, taker of the kitties to the vet:

"Grishka has a urinary tract infection, which is pretty common with cats. (Katya may also have the beginning of it, too.) So to the vet they went today for testing.

The vet told me that most run of the mill cat illnesses are food related. We got onto the subject of cat food. Having had vets tell me since I've owned cats that high quality dry food was the only good thing, that's what we've been feeding our cats.

Some recent studies about diet (and vaccines) have shown that dry cat foods are not good for cats. The problems are apparently numerous: (a) the lack of moisture is bad for them; (b) rather than being good for their teeth, it's actually bad, because their teeth are designed to tear meat (pure carnivores) and instead, pieces of food get jammed into their gums, turn into sugar, and then cavities; (c) the nutritional balance is way off.

The last one was quite a surprise. They did something really simple: they took the typical feral cat diet (mice) and decided to see what foods stacked up compared to it. Pretty much none of the commercial dry foods, and only some of the commercial wet foods. Even among the prescribed foods, many were not nutritionally balanced.

The primary problem seems to be an overabundance of carbohydrates, and too low protein, as well as generally too little water in the dry foods. Since cats are carnivores, their digestive systems are adapted for very high protein content, but can't hardly deal with much carbs at all. Most of those extra carbs do to cats just what they do to people: turn into sugar, which eventually turns into fat that's hard to get rid of, as well as causing over production of insulin and causing -- no shit -- diabetic cats.

So basically this study has shown that the declining trend in cat health is almost entirely the fault of these foods over the past decades. He showed me a chart comparing most of the typical cat foods to the "optimal" mouse diet, and the best commercial food was, unbelievably, Fancy Feast canned food (the beef, chicken, and liver varieties; the fish varieties are not balanced as well, and shouldn't be used unless they're counterbalanced).

He recommended immediately changing their food (as well as anti-biotics to cure the current course of UTI). He said that even a year ago, he was calling things like Fancy Feast 'kitty crack' and telling people not to feed it to their cats. Oh sweet irony. So off I went today, and picked up 96 cans of Fancy Feast, trying to overcome the built-in sense that I was doing something wrong. "

He weighs 13 lbs, 4.5 oz. She weighs 12 lbs 12 oz. Not oversized for Siberians.