Animals are an important part of practically everybody’s life, and they are basically divided into wild and domesticated, where people usually opt to keep animals like cats, dogs, rabbits, parrots and other such tame animals as pets, while wild animals like lions, bears and hippopotamuses are better left in the wild or cages at the zoo. Upon keeping an animal as a pet, the owner is faced with the dilemma of the pet’s diet, and there has always been some confusion on whether to feed an animal a diet of raw foods or a diet of cooked foods. So to let all pet owners, especially cat owners, learn about the diet and living habits of cats, Francis M. Pottenger Jr. set about writing the book, Pottenger’s Cats: A Study in Nutrition. The highlight of the book is the specification on which form of food is exactly better for a cat to live a healthy life. In the book, Pottenger provides a detailed comparison of the lifestyles and health habits of cats that are on a diet of raw foods and of the cats that are on a diet of cooked food. And in the process, you learn from the book Pottenger’s Cats that the cats that follow a diet of cooked foods generally have more health problems like arthritis, skeletal deformities, sterility and allergies, than those on raw food diets.
The 123 pages of the book, Pottenger’s Cats, explains the accidental findings of Dr. Pottenger. He found out that cats have a tendency of degenerating unless fed with raw food. Dr. Pottenger carried on a ten year study on over 900 cats, and through this diet, he found out that cats that were made to follow a diet of 2/3 raw food and 1/3 raw milk, with some cod liver oil added in between, that the cats were healthier. When the food was cooked, whether it was meat or milk, the cat’s health started to degenerate, and with this, it was found that cats found it rather difficult to reproduce by the third generation.
Dr. Pottenger states that cats that are fed with a diet of cooked food have a tendency to suffer from various diseases; some of the diseases the cats may suffer from with a diet of cooked food are heart problems, farsightedness and nearsightedness, as well as under activity and inflammation of the thyroid. In addition to this, it is possible for the cat to develop inflammations of the joints, nervous system and infections of the liver, testes, bladder, ovaries and kidneys, and the consequence of a cooked food diet in a cat can be realized upon seeing the result of the third generation cat where the bones usually become soft like that of rubber. Moreover, these cats on a cooked food diet also tend to suffer from lung problems, pneumonia and bronchitis. The female cats were also found to be more irritable and dangerous while the male cats, more passive and had no interest in sex.
Upon reading the book, Pottenger’s Cats: A Study in Nutrition, you will learn that it is not only humans that suffer from heart problems. Even animals like the domestic cat have a tendency of developing heart problems with the wrong food diet. Keeping this in mind, Dr. Pottenger has even tried feeding humans in his sanitarium with more raw food, to find out the effects on human beings. With this experiment, he had found out that his patients had actually started showing signs of improvement in their health with this modification of the addition of raw foods into their diets, and with this diet, of more raw food, it was found that humans are generally free from degenerative diseases, like heart disease, cancer, tooth decay, arthritis, stroke, diabetes, and digestive disturbances, which are more rampant today than ever before.
