@little daisy wrote:
are you a vet? The vet told me that cat food is very rich in protein more then dogs need. He also said cat food will make dogs fat. So I don't think this is ridiculous. This is just your opinion. I love my dog and don't want them fat and shorten their lives. A dog life is short enough to. So please don't make such a ridiculous statement.
I was curious about this so I Googled it. I found this on VetStreet which supports what @little daisy's Vet said.
Dog and cat foods may seem pretty similar on the surface, but there are some important differences. Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they need to eat meat as their main food source, whereas dogs are omnivores and need a diet with more fiber than a strictly carnivorous diet can provide. Still, there is meat in dog food, too, so why do dogs crave their feline friends’ food so fiercely?
“Since dogs can’t tell us why they love cat food,” says Sharon Crowell-Davis, DVM, DACVB, professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia, “and it is pretty consistent amongst most dogs (they just really do love cat food!), I’m going to guess it’s the higher protein content and the effect it has on the flavor.”
Dr. Crowell-Davis even uses cat treats as incentives for some of her canine behavioral patients because the deliciousness galvanizes the pups, just as long as "the dog loves them and the dog’s stomach can handle them, and it helps motivate the dog in learning how to behave the way the owner wants it to," she says.
But just because something tastes good doesn’t mean we should eat it all the time. Dr. Crowell-Davis compares cat food and dogs to cake and humans. “It’s not necessarily the best thing for our diet, and certainly if we ate nothing but cake, we’d become really sick. But as an occasional treat, it's not going to hurt us.”
But she points out that with some dogs, even as a rare delicacy, cat food can cause problems because dogs aren’t designed to have such a protein-dense diet. “Some dogs will get an upset stomach — vomiting, diarrhea — from eating cat food, while some other dogs with a tougher stomach can handle cat food,” she says. “If your dog breaks into the bag of cat food, is it going to kill the dog? Absolutely not. But if your dog does vomit or have diarrhea, make sure the dog can’t get [into] the cat food again, because it’s obviously one of those dogs whose GI system reacts badly to cat food.”
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