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10 Ways to Increase Your Cat’s Lifespan

Here are 10 evidence-based ways to help your cat live a longer, healthier life:

1. Keep Your Cat Indoors

Indoor cats are generally protected from many dangers, including traffic, predators, toxins, diseases, and injuries. Many indoor cats live significantly longer than outdoor cats. The average indoor cat lives 17 years. The average outdoor cat lives 2 years.

2. Feed a Balanced, High-Quality Diet

Choose nutritionally complete cat food appropriate for your cat’s age and health needs. Good nutrition supports everything from immune function to organ health. Cats are not designed to eat cereal. Their intestines are too short. They do much better with real meat.

3. Prevent Obesity

Excess weight increases the risk of diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, and other health problems. Measure food portions and avoid excessive treats.

4. Schedule Regular Veterinary Checkups

Annual exams, and often twice-yearly exams for senior cats, can catch health issues early when they are easier and less expensive to treat.

5. Keep Vaccinations Current

Vaccinations help protect cats from potentially serious infectious diseases, especially if they have any exposure to other animals.

6. Provide Fresh Water

Adequate hydration supports kidney function and overall health. Many cats drink more readily from fountains or multiple water stations.

7. Spay or Neuter Your Cat

Spaying and neutering can reduce certain cancers and reproductive diseases while also decreasing behaviors that can lead to injury or disease exposure.

8. Encourage Daily Exercise

Interactive toys, climbing structures, and play sessions help maintain a healthy weight and support cardiovascular and mental health.

9. Protect Dental Health

Dental disease is common in cats and can contribute to pain, infection, and systemic health problems. Regular dental care can make a meaningful difference.

10. Reduce Stress

Cats thrive on routine and a sense of security. Providing hiding places, vertical spaces, predictable schedules, and a calm environment can support both physical and mental well-being.

Bonus Tip

Learn your cat’s normal habits. Changes in appetite, thirst, weight, grooming, activity level, or litter box use are often among the earliest signs that something may be wrong. Detecting problems early can add both years to your cat’s life and quality to those years.

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Surprising Truth About Cat Food

When you learn the surprising truth about commercial cat food, you’ll probably want to change your cat’s diet immediately.

Let’s start with some simple observations. When cats eat grass, what happens? Right, they regurgitate it.

The grass they eat doesn’t get digested. In fact they can’t digest grass. They aren’t designed appropriately. The intestine of animals who do eat grass is quite long. The intestine of a cat is very short. The cat is specially made to eat meat.

If you fed nothing but grass to your cat, and if the cat could actually keep it in, the cat wouldn’t be able to get enough nutrition.

That’s why they eat small animals. That’s what they are designed to eat. That’s where they get their nutrition. An outdoor cat eats mice, gofers, and the occasional bird, and they do just fine. They have done fine for thousands of years.

So it would be silly to feed them anything like grass, wouldn’t it?

Yet, most commercial dry cat food is composed mostly of grains like grass. Oh, it doesn’t look like grass, because the grains are ground up, and colored to look like meat. Then an artificial odor is added so the grain-based food smells attractive to cats.

Many older housecats suffer from arthritis, and urinary tract problems. Many cats of all ages suffer from intestinal problems, generally diarrhea. In time, many, maybe even most, die from these diseases. Guess what? These are the cats that eat dry commercial cat food.

If you simply switch to real meat, simulating a cat’s actual diet, these diseases are exceptionally rare.

Unfortunately, many commercial canned cat foods do not contain as much meat as you might like. And dog foods are often even worse, because dogs can get away with less protein than cats need. For best results, read the labels and try to find the most real cat food you can. If you have the time, the best bet is to make your own cat food from whole chickens and other small creatures.

But what about the cat’s teeth? Have you been led to believe that they need the dry food to keep their teeth clean? Have you ever wondered how a single bite or two on each morsel of dry food can actually clean a cat’s teeth? As you know, the cat doesn’t really chew the food up. The dry food doesn’t really do much for the cat’s teeth at all. Nature takes care of that. The cat’s teeth are designed to eat the way they do. The cat’s saliva has anti-bacterial qualities. The teeth don’t need any special attention beyond what nature already provides.

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Mouser

On farms, in food processing plants and even just in homes, cats can provide the important function of keeping rodent populations under control.

A mouse can have eight babies. Assuming four of them are female, and knowing that a mouse can give birth 60 days after being born itself, after 18 months, a pair of mice can become 4.5 million.

If it weren’t for cats, perhaps we’d be overrun.

A mouser in Scotland killed 28,899 mice in her career.

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Cats and Taste

It is often reported that cats cannot taste sweet flavors. Actually, they can sense sweetness, but do not have much interest in sugary things. What is particularly interesting about their sense of taste, is that they have a special taste for the flavor of water, which we humans cannot taste.

Whereas a human has around 9,000 taste buds, a cat has 473 taste buds.