catadoption_pune
A cat needs taurine, and taurine comes from meat. Roti, rice and milk have almost none of it, so a cat living on doodh-roti is slowly running short of something its body cannot make and cannot borrow from anywhere else. That is the whole reason. If doodh-roti is what you can manage right now, keep feeding — the last section is about what you can add when you are able to.
The one thing a cat's body cannot make
Taurine. Cats can't make enough of it themselves, and it comes from meat. A cat short of it for a long time can end up with heart damage and eye damage, and the hard part is that neither shows up early. By the time you can see it, it has been happening for a while.
"Obligate carnivore" is the technical way of saying this. It doesn't mean a cat prefers meat. It means a cat's body is built to run on animal protein and cannot switch to running on anything else, the way ours can.
Dogs manage roti. Cats mostly don't.
Dogs are omnivores, so they digest grains like rice, wheat and oats reasonably well. Cats lack the enzymes to digest those carbs efficiently. So the building's dog doing perfectly fine on roti tells you nothing about the cat, and a cat is not a small dog.
We see this on adoption forms sometimes, in the food column: milk, pedigree. Pedigree is dog food. It is an easy mistake to make and nobody means any harm by it, but the cat is getting a meal built for a different animal.
And the milk part
Both adult cats and adult dogs may be lactose intolerant. That usually shows up as a tummy upset or loose motions, which is uncomfortable for the cat and miserable for whoever cleans the floor. Cats do love milk, so this one surprises people.
Kittens are a separate question and a more urgent one, and it's answered on the page about feeding a rescued kitten.
If doodh-roti is what you have
Small additions count, and you don't have to change everything at once. An egg. A bit of boiled chicken when you're cooking anyway. Anything animal, added to what's already going into the bowl.
Upasana, who has fed and rescued cats in Pune for years and is vegetarian herself, does it like this: curd with chicken powder mixed in, bone broth added to dal, and boiled chicken sometimes. A vegetarian kitchen is not a reason a cat can't be fed properly, and she is the proof of it.
Plenty of people give cats the same food they eat, and honestly, what else are they going to do. Some food and support is better than none, against a life outside with the cars and the monsoon and whatever is going around. That's why we say community cats can have a decent life too. This page isn't asking you to do more than you can. It's just so you know what the gap is, and can close a bit of it when there's a bit to spare.
Questions? DM us.
We're @catadoption_pune on Instagram — DMs are how everything here works.