Mary Allen
It might be practical if the kitty keeps eating from Bello’s bowl. It’s not healthy at all. Dog food or even home-cooked food can lead to heart disease.
Animal lover Karin Sattler thought it was the best: her dog Herkules and her cat Peterle have always gotten along well and shared bed and bowl with each other. The fact that there are different types of food for dogs and cats on the market always seemed exaggerated to her. She suspected a publicity stunt to achieve higher sales. So she always bought the big and cheaper dog food cans and fed them to Hercules and Peterle together. But that would have bad consequences.
As early as the late 1980s, researchers had discovered that a striking number of cats suffering from heart muscle disease had been fed dog food or home-cooked food. So the scientists went in search of clues as to what could be the reason for this phenomenon. They came across a substance called taurine. When fed the same, dogs had enough of it in their bodies, but cats did not. The exciting finding: dogs, like humans, can produce taurine in their own bodies. But a cat cannot do that. It is dependent on getting the amino acid taurine through food. If she doesn’t, she has a high risk of heart disease.
Tomcat Peterle was five years old when Karin Sattler found him in his basket one morning, breathing heavily and coughing. She immediately drove him to the vet. The diagnosed cardiac cough. This occurs when the heart’s pumping capacity becomes too weak because body fluid then builds up in the lungs. This liquid causes the urge to cough and difficulty in breathing. An X-ray confirmed the suspicion: Peterle’s heart was much larger than it should normally be.
The Industry Has Adapted
Because the heart chambers had expanded due to the lack of taurine, the valves could no longer close properly – a vicious circle with fatal consequences was set in motion. Peter had been suffering from an enlarged heart for several years, but his owner could not tell because he was basically behaving normally. She attributed his reduced desire to exercise and increasing fatigue to the weather and all sorts of other circumstances. Only in the acute situation, in which Peterle was obviously in a bad way and his life was hanging by a thread, did she find out about her eternally wrong feeding.
30 years ago, when the knowledge about the importance of taurine for cats was still less, many more cats suffered from this heart muscle expansion, which is called “dilated cardiomyopathy (DKMP)” in technical jargon. After the scientific discoveries, the industry reacted immediately and significantly increased the amounts of taurine in cat food. Today, heart disease due to a lack of taurine is much less common. However, it has not completely disappeared, because there are still people who feed the wrong food out of ignorance.
For Peterle it is now about survival. The drugs that are supposed to get his fluid out of his lungs have worked. He’s breathing easier again, but he’s still tired and exhausted. He now gets high doses of taurine from the vet. But none of this can change anything about his enlarged heart. With a bit of luck and expensive heart medication, he can survive for a few more years. And when it comes to cat food, Karin Sattler will no longer save.