What Obligate Carnivore Actually Means
The word obligate is doing serious work in that phrase. An obligate carnivore is not an animal that prefers meat the way a dog might prefer it over vegetables. It is an animal whose metabolic machinery has, over millions of years of evolution, outsourced certain critical biochemical jobs to its food supply. Cats belong to the family Felidae, and every member of that family, from the Bengal tiger to the street cat sleeping on a Mumbai compound wall, shares the same nutritional constraints. They cannot manufacture enough of certain essential compounds on their own. They must eat animals to survive.
