That's kind of funny. No. Cats are hardwired to hunt. This is how they survived and stayed alive through their evolution. So an outdoor kitty that hunts isn't missing anything. Their bodies are enacting what their brain is telling them to do. Many people get angry at cats for hunting, but they can't help it. This is just part of who they are. And indoor cats will have hunting behaviors too.

Suppose your cat has a condition that a prescription diet can slow the progression of or reverse. In that case, absolutely, a prescription diet based on what your veterinarian is recommending is a good way to go. A healthy cat has no reason to be on a prescription diet. So that's something to discuss with your veterinarian, but I don't think you need to be afraid of prescription diets. Again, food is medicine, and if we can treat a disease through dietary means, in my opinion, that is a much better way to treat it than in other ways we can do that.

This is a controversial area right now. Many people think that canned food diets are better for cats. And the reason is that we do lose many older cats to renal disease or kidney disease. And cats are desert-adapted animals. They are formulated to have very efficient kidneys. And also, they were evolved basically to get their water from their food. Small rodents are what cats evolved to eat. And so canned food diets may be more appropriate for fulfilling that water requirement that cats don't get through a dry food diet. I think it's possible to have cats live a long, healthy life on dry food. However, in the last decade, we've been leaning towards cats at least having some of their calories come from a canned food diet. And part of that reason is that a lot of chronic diseases older cats develop require us to take them off of dry food and feed a canned-only diet.

So there are people out there saying, "Well, why don't we just do that from the get-go?" And that's a complex argument. So again, I think it's possible to have a healthy cat on dry food. I agree with the idea that at least part of their food should come from canned food so that they get more water and moisture.

There are vegan diets formulated for cats. However, I think it's important to know that cats are obligate carnivores. It's challenging to adequately control their nutrition on a strictly vegan diet. Even on a vegetarian diet, it becomes difficult to formulate a diet for cats. There are some on the market. However, studies that have been done on those diets show that their labels are often inaccurate, and they are deficient in the amino acids that are necessary for obligate carnivore bodies. They've also shown that those diets are often contaminated with mammalian DNA. So there are animal products in those diets.

I would not recommend that you feed either a vegan or a vegetarian diet to a cat unless there is a medical reason to do so, and your veterinarian has recommended that. If that's the case, then I would only use a prescription diet as these are frequently tested for contamination, and they've been formulated for cat-specific amino acid requirements. Or I would work with a veterinary nutritionist to formulate a vegan diet that you then home cook for your kitty.

There are many dog food myths. There are a couple that are big for me. One is that many people are very afraid to feed foods that have the word byproduct on the label. I think it's a poor understanding really of what byproducts are. Byproducts are organ meats. They're not the inedible parts of the animal. Byproducts are not horns, hooves, beaks, feet, hair feathers. Those are not allowed to be byproducts. Byproducts are organ meats. There's not a big demand in human nutrition for organ meats. A lot of people don't buy organ meats for themselves.

When animals go into pet feed, there's a lot of waste. What pet food manufacturers have done, they're able to buy those organs and put them into their diets, and they're tremendously healthy. I think honestly; dogs don't get enough organ meats in their diets. We're looking at lungs, spleen, liver, kidneys; all those things are very healthy, digestible, and nutritious for dogs. There's no reason to be afraid of the word byproduct.

There is some marketing in pet foods where they say, "Does not contain byproducts," but then if you look at the labels, they're listed out—heart, liver, etc. They're included in there, but they've gotten away from saying that they're byproducts, so they don't scare people off. Don't be worried about byproducts; they're very nutritious.

It could. Free-choice feeding is one of the culprits in obesity. There is undoubtedly a growing epidemic of obesity in our small animal patients, just like it is mimicking human obesity. We don't want to allow a dog to eat as much as they want.

There are a very small number of dogs that don't overeat, and with those animals, grazing is fine. We need to control how much the vast majority of dogs are eating, and meal feeding is an ideal way to do that.

Human food won't necessarily make your dog overweight. What makes your dog overweight is eating more calories than they expend and being sedentary. Again, human food is no more harmful than a kibble diet as far as weight gain goes; if they're eating more calories than they're burning off. That's the thing to focus on.

Boy, isn't this the $10 million question? Over a long period, people have been asking that question, and I always find it interesting. Studies have been done on it, and they have not shown any deficit in a diet based on grass eating.

We suspect that some dogs eat grass when their tummies are upset. It's more of an upset digestive tract symptom rather than a deficiency in the diet. However, most grass-eating dogs just simply like to eat grass, and there is no concern over that. Even if it makes them vomit, there's not a big concern with a dog eating grass unless it's grass that's contaminated with something.

A prescription diet would be better if the dog has a medical condition that that prescription diet helps treat or slow the progression of.

Again, a healthy dog does not need a prescription diet. If they have a condition that your veterinarian has suggested may benefit from a prescription diet or, again, slow progression of that disease process, then a prescription diet's a good way to go. They've been heavily researched and with feeding trials done and studies to show that they are beneficial, but I would go by the guidance of your veterinarian on that.