Feline and Human Lactose Intolerance: Cause and Effect

feline lactose intolerance
No! This is wrong…Poster from about 1901
People who know about the food requirements of the domestic cat understand that they are lactose intolerant. I suppose there are degrees of lactose intolerance so that some domestic cats will tolerate cow’s milk better than others but by and large cats should not be fed the milk that billions of people drink daily and neither should they be fed cream but some cheese is either naturally lactose-free of treated during manufacture to make it lactose-free.

Why are domestic cats lactose intolerant? Well, there comes a time when a mother decides to wean her kittens. Kittens rarely wean themselves. The mother prevents her kittens having access to her milk. The kittens come hungry and seek alternative food sources.

In the meantime the mother brings back prey to the den and tears it up so that it is easier for her kittens to eat. Up until this point the kittens’ digestive tract is geared up to digest mother’s milk. Milk sugar is lactose and an enzyme, lactase, breaks it down.

When milk sugar is substituted for the sugars in muscle the kitten develops an alternative enzyme called sucrase to break it down. Lactase has been substituted for sucrase whereupon the kitten is no longer able to digest milk.

Lactose intolerance means that when a cat ingests lactose it can cause diarrhoea, gas, cramping, bloating and feeling sick.

This in turn can lead to the cat feeling sufficiently unwell to be apathetic. The same thing can happen to people too. For people, lactose intolerance is caused by an insufficient amount of lactase leading to lactose staying in the digestive system where it is fermented by bacteria causing the symptoms mentioned above for cats – the symptoms are the same.

There is another aspect to this: many people are also intolerant to cow’s milk. Cow’s milk is meant to be drunk by cows and not by humans. I always drink lactose free milk because if I don’t, the cow’s milk irritates my sinuses so that if I catch a cold I invariably develop a secondary bacterial infection in my sinuses. Since drinking lactose free milk this has hardly ever happened. I wonder if some cats are both lactose intolerant and cow’s milk intolerant?

For centuries domestic cats have been fed cow’s milk! I immediately wonder how many millions of hours have elapsed during which domestic cats have felt apathetic and ill simply because their owner fed them cow’s milk. A great shame and a blot on the copybook of centuries of domestic cat welfare but at the time people simply were unaware.

There are many paintings, posters and photographs of cats drinking milk and even today there are probably millions of people putting down milk for their cat when really it is not the right thing to do. Cats like milk, even though it is not good for them, because of the fat content. Fat is high in calories for energy. It’s about survival.

17 thoughts on “Feline and Human Lactose Intolerance: Cause and Effect”

  1. Thanks for your input Joe. There is some truth in what you say. Perhaps cats are less lactose intolerant than I have stated but they are nonetheless lactose intolerant. They don’t have the enzyme to break it down. That is why there is specialist milk for cats. Are you sure that the cats you refer to were super healthy?

  2. Nonsense. I am 45 years old. And I raised hundreds of cats growing up as a kid. We fed the newborns on whole cow’s milk from the store. They sucked it down like there was no tomorrow. And they grew to be the healthiest cats I ever saw. There were never any problems. Much of the information today is the result of heavy political lobbying by corporations and the vet industry. They want YOU to take your cats to expensive vets instead of using cheap and easy methods right at home. That goes for everything today.

  3. I am atheist and a realist. I believe in equality for all including non-human animals. I believe in fairness, justice and honesty. I believe is trying to do what is right – absolutely right.

  4. And what do you consider yourself to be, as far as that “mystical and mysterious?” 😉 We would like to know. At least, those of us who do not know “which way you lean. I know. I feel the same way. I respect everyone elses religious believes, but I personally? do not believe in a religion.

    That, as you know, does not carry any weight against my spiritualism.

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