Warrior Bites: Dietary Needs
[ID: A fish carcass, bird carcass, and mouse carcass on a stone slab.]
Are you wondering how much prey a Clan needs a day? What they should eat to stay healthy? Why food processing is useful at all? All the answers to these questions and more, contained within a general guide to dietary needs for your Warrior Cats!
As an obligate carnivore, a cat's entire diet revolves around processing meat. More specifically, the ideal diet should be 55% protein, 45% fats, about 1% to 3% carbs, with the remainder being various micro-nutrients. You can expect the average 10-pound warrior to need 350 calories per day, about 3.5 mice on average.
I've also included a section talking about obesity, which dives into how canon's depiction of it is both harmful fatphobia and wouldn't make sense from a cat perspective. It also discusses obesity in realistic cats; and how you're free to choose the realism on that aspect.
Below the cut;
Caloric Intake
Nutrition
Food Processing
On Obesity
Caloric Intake
The general rule for how much a cat needs to eat is that an active, non-neutered tom will need about 35 calories per pound of their own body weight, per day, just to remain the weight they are.
That means that the average warrior, assuming they are 10 pounds, will need 350 calories a day.
Kittens, pregnant and nursing cats, and large warriors will need to eat more than average. Neutered cats, elders, and clerics/medcats will eat less. There are calculators online for determining how much an individual will need, but you can estimate how much an entire Clan will need just by taking 350 and multiplying it by population!
Assuming the average population is about 30 cats, that's 10,500 calories to feed a Clan for a day! To put that in perspective, that many calories would feed 7 large humans. If you felt like fighting a group of angry cats to steal their day's worth of mice, I mean.
Generally speaking, land prey will have a caloric value around 5 calories per gram. Aquatic prey is significantly lower, around 4 calories per gram. Birds will be just below 6 calories per gram. To find out how many cats a piece of prey will feed, or how many pieces a cat will need that day, take the category and multiply by the prey's weight in grams.
So for example, the average house mouse is 20 grams and it is land prey, meaning its caloric value is around 100 calories! A warrior will need 3 and a half mice a day to stay healthy, and a Clan will need 105 mice daily to support 30 cats.
105 mice may seem like a lot, but remember that a wild rabbit is 1,800 grams on average which means 9,000 calories. 2 big pieces of prey will feed the whole Clan, with leftovers.
Those estimates include every part of the animal. Cats eat organs, small bones, and even skin. Skeletal muscle, or "fillets" in reference to fish, is so low in calories that it's typically somewhere between 1 kcal to 1.5 kcal per gram. That's what you're buying in the supermarket; but wild animals don't usually cut their food into choice strips.
(unless you're writing a clan that does food processing of course!)
QUICK FACTS
Average warrior will need 35 calories per pound of weight
10 pound warrior needs 350 calories a day
350 x 30 cats = 10,500 calories to feed a Clan for a single day
Birds provide the most calories per gram, land prey the middlemost, and aquatic prey the least.
Calculate calories in prey by taking the weight, converting to grams, and multiply by 4, 5, or 6 depending on broad category.
If you're having trouble feeding a Clan on small animals, look at bigger prey like rabbits and trout.
Muscle fillets are inferior to organ meats and have a much lower caloric value.
Nutrition
Not all food is the same. The more important thing to consider about any particular meal is NOT its calorie count, but its nutritional value. This is especially important to cats because protein is not stored as fat. If the body has no immediate use for it, it's flushed out.
Since cats should not eat more than 3% carbs, ALL of their fat stores will need to come from fat.
The ideal piece of meat would be at least 55% protein and 45% fat. Every individual species will have a different ratio, and more importantly, individual cuts will have a different ratio.
Skeletal muscle has a higher ratio of protein to fat. Organ meat, also sometimes called "offal," will have a more balanced ratio. That said, nearly all meat skews towards protein. PURE fat is very hard to find on the sorts of animals Clan cats hunt, and must be carefully divided, collected, or processed to make sure all warriors are getting proper nutrition.
I'll be going more in-depth with dietary fat at some other time, as this guide is meant to just be an overview! Just know that some Clans will need to eat MORE food to stay healthy because of this.
Cats need more than the "macronutrients" to stay healthy. They can't JUST rely on the juiciest cuts of meat to keep their health intact, they also need several vitamins and minerals to support their body functions, and avoid getting a deficiency.
Here's some of the important micronutrients, where to get them, and what happens they don't get enough;
Vitamin A: Livers, mealworms, eggs
This is one of the most important micronutrients in a cat's body, used for practically everything. Without this, their coats will grow dull, and their joints stiff, and they'll start to go night-blind. In a severe state, they'll start to lose the ability to heal skin lacerations and die. Pregnant cats and kittens need more of this than usual, but it IS also possible to get vitamin A poisoning from getting too concentrated of a dose.
Calcium: Bones, eggs
With a calcium deficiency, the warrior will feel stiff and sore, and experience painful muscle spasms. Most cats will simply crunch the bones of small prey and never have to worry about this, but if your cats cook or scavenge, they have to be told to NEVER eat the bones of a roasted bird. Because bird bones are hollow and cooking makes them brittle, they can splinter and cause fatal internal bleeding.
Thiamine: Trout, boar meat, mealworms, eggs
Called a Fish Seizure because raw carp and raw bream contains thiaminase, which will destroy thiamine in the body. Lack of thiamine will cause neurological issues, such as the aforementioned seizures, general confusion, memory loss, and muscle weakness. This can be counterracted by eating trout, which is so high in thiamine that there's a theory that carp evolved it specifically to eat salmonids better.
Potassium: Trout, boar meat, mealworms, eggs
As cats get older, they begin needing a lot more potassium for their bodies. It's a very common micronutrient found in most meat, but elders should get the first bite of special snacks "out of respect" which helps keep their potassium level up. Without it, they become very weak.
i feel like that evil struthiomimus from land before time with how many times i typed eggs
QUICK FACTS
The ideal ratio of a cut of meat is 55% protein 45% fat
Organ meat > Muscle meat
Micronutrients are important
But micronutrients can also cause poisoning if, somehow, they're too concentrated
(very hard to come across concentrated micronutrients without the science of chemistry tho. Like if a cat swallowed a vitamin gummy.)
Food Processing
"Food Processing" is when you do something to your food before you eat it. Just a little bit of care is going to go a LONG WAY when it comes to health of the warrior.
Cats that eat raw meat the way canon warriors do are almost guaranteed to get worms. Roundworms, hookworms, and tapeworms are all passed through the infected tissue of rodent prey, and in fish, roundworms, tapeworms, and flukes can pass through raw meat.
All parasites do something a little different, but most digestive worms aren't fatal unless the cat is sick or a kitten. However, nearly ALL of them screw around with digestion, making the cat need to eat more just to stay healthy, or causing stomach irritation. Some of them can even pass in milk, infecting a suckler's nursing kits.
The easiest way to reduce this kind of infection is simply to slice the prey open from mouth-to-butt, Tigerstar-style, and hook and lift out the GI tract before eating. There's nothing in that worth eating raw anyway. It can just be discarded, or cleaned out and used to case tiny sausages! But it's only a reduction; there's still a risk of catching worms from raw meat.
There's also always the possibility of getting salmonella poisoning.
Many believe that cats are immune to this, but that's not true! Carnivores just have a shorter GI tract than omnivores and herbivores, so salmonella spends less time in their gut and ergo has less chance of causing an infection. It still happens, ESPECIALLY when cats hunt songbirds.
Nothing can be done about salmonella in raw meat, besides eating it as quickly as possible. It's innate to the bodies of birds and reptiles, and usually found on raw eggs too.
Some animals are small enough to be dried and carried around as rations, such as minnows or grasshoppers. Others could be sliced up into strips, and marinated in spices like valerian or catmint for an extra boost of energy. It could also be worthwhile to cut the pelt off a particularly soft animal, like a mole, to dry and keep as bedding material.
All of the above examples of food processing are possible without fire, but if your cats DO have fire, they will have a DRASTIC increase to the quality of their health.
Such as;
Cooking will almost completely eliminate those foodborne parasites. Their eggs don't survive extreme heat.
No more salmonella poisoning! GONE! Cooking is the only way to eliminate this!
It can increase caloric absorption from anywhere between 20% to 50%. Our example warrior who needed 3.5 mice a day could suddenly need one less mouse; and even a meager 20% drop in how much the entire Clan needs saves 2,400 calories a day. 24 whole mice!
I HAVE TO STRESS HOW BIG THAT IS. You save anywhere from 2/10 to 5/10 successful kills.
Thiaminase is destroyed by cooking, making bream and carp healthier and reducing "fish seizures."
It allows for fats to be processed and stored as tallow, lard, and oil, so it can be added to other dishes to make them both healthier and tastier.
Most food preservation requires fire in some way; by heating, jellying, boiling, etc. The only other two ways to reliably store food is by having access to a ton of salt, which is hard for most non-coastal clans to acquire, or vinegar, which is so acidic it's a notorious cat-repellent.
While cooking can also destroy some micronutrients, its benefits FAR outweigh any potential "strengths" of raw food. Destroying micronutrients is also not always a bad thing; as TOO MANY micronutrients can cause poisoning. Fire-using Clans will be more likely to "seek" micronutrients than non-fire Clans as a result, though they probably won't recognize the science behind a hankering!
QUICK FACTS
Worms. Basically unavoidable if your cat's eating like a canon warrior.
Some parasites can spread through milk.
Slicing and lifting out the GI tract can significantly reduce the chance of catching worms.
Salmonella can only be eliminated with cooking
Cooking will drastically increase the quality of a Clan's health, if your cats are advanced enough to figure out fire.
Warriors need to hunt a LOT less prey, and can store that prey, if they have fire.
Fire-using Clans will intentionally try to put more types of food in their diets and get 'cravings.'
On Obesity
Warrior Cats is not a realistic series. The boundary that any particular writer draws between humans and warrior cats is completely arbitrary. The series itself follows no sense of realistic genetics, regularly shows the cats using herbs that would poison them, and gives the characters human-centric morals like monogamy and paternal involvement.
So when it comes to being fatness in your project, please keep that in mind. You do not need too follow realistic cat weight distribution, if that's not what your project about. That said, let me tell you about humans vs cats in this department!
Humans have a massive diversity of weight distribution, with varied genetic predispositions to gaining and losing weight. The shame, bullying, and medical discrimination that comes with fatphobia is a LOT more harmful than being fat itself, and the causes of the "obesity crisis" are ridiculously more complicated than "ppl r snorking 2 much food".
Realistic cats aren't the same way.
When REAL cats are fat, that's VERY bad. It's a sign they are being fed the wrong things by humans, or live somewhere that they are able to eat what they shouldn't. They just don't have that same diversity in fat distribution that humans do. Because of how adipose tissue secretes certain hormones, feline obesity is like a chronic inflammatory disease which can cause arthritis, bladder stones, hepatic lipidosis, and more.
But with that in mind, fatness should be perceived very differently even in the most realistic settings. In comparison to humans;
It is harder for a wild cat to put on weight.
Most of what they're eating is raw protein, actively trying to fill the 45% of daily fat intake they need to stay healthy. Protein isn't stored as fat, it's immediately discarded by the body if there is no use for it. A cat would need to be taking an INSANE amount of prey to start becoming dangerously overweight.
Housecats are often fed human food, which has carbohydrates. Low-quality cat food will also use carbs as filler. High carb food is VERY bad for them, since they're only supposed to have 3% carbs at most. This is one of the reasons why it's easy for pet cats to become overweight.
Realistic cats don't look start looking overweight until they are significantly obese.
Most of their fat is stored around their ribs and internally, unlike humans with our thick hips and round bellies, and they are covered in a naturally sagging pelt of fur. It's not as obvious with them. Visually, weight will be noticed best from a bird's eye perspective, unlike humans where it's apparent at every angle.
Putting on the fat that CAN be acquired is ridiculously important
3.5 raw, whole mice a day, per cat, are needed to fill their basic dietary requirements. There are going to be days or months especially during winter where they might be below that number, and that stored fat is going to be lifesaving. Bulking up is actually a big deal!
So not only is how canon treats overweight characters full of malice, it's full of lazy malice. It makes no sense from a realistic standpoint for wild cats to develop an association between fatness and greed or laziness. It's important, hard work for them to acquire it!
Though the Clans are notoriously xenophobic and kittypets are more likely to be overweight, it still doesn't make sense from a realistic cat perspective to be fatphobic in the same way as canon. It's more likely they'd see fat housecats as having "unearned" weight given to them by humans, like they're cheating, or they might be disdainful of how much junk food they eat, or pitiable because it's a sign of a bad twoleg... or just "sour grapes" variety jealousy ☕.
Bottom line is that there's a LOT you can do here which is better than canon's vicious bullying. The writers just lifted British cultural disdain for fat people and put it into the books. They simply did not think it through.
So please do what they didn't, and just put a little extra thought into how your project is going to view fatness! Consider if fatphobia is even a theme you need in your text.
As stated, you do not even have to write weight in your cats as being realistic in this way! I encourage you to pick and choose what's most fun and fitting for your own work. I personally give my characters a more human weight distribution, simply because I want to spite canon and be more body-positive. I am a fat people and you can take Bumble's big chunky bod from my cold, dead hands.
You can choose to make your work however you'd like, and now with this guide, you can have an easy reference for what your cats should eat! Thank you, StarClan, for this prey <3
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to add onto my earlier submission, i humbly present: ddba!mm having a major corruption kink.
in ddba, matt’s a little older. a little more weathered and battle-scarred than before. he has a well-respected and established law firm, and is probably so well-known that columbia probably asks him to be a guest lecturer a few times a year (a prof!mm x law student! reader fic might be incoming 👀). long story short, he KNOWS what he wants and he doesn’t see the point in waiting around and hoping that someone reads his mind.
so when you find yourself in his bed for the first time, you’re a tad unsure at first. he’s an older man, older than you by at least a decade (i imagine he’s in his mid-40s), judging by the smattering of gray in his stubble and creeping up his sideburns. he’s not silver fox status, not even close, but he’s nearing salt and pepper and by god that does something to you. combined with his dark glasses, his expensive leather suitcase and sharply tailored suit, he looks so distinguished and classy, standing out among the rough bikers and disheveled patrons in Josie’s.
even when you’ve been together for a few months, you’re still unsure if you’re enough to satisfy him. you can’t help but feel like you’re at a disadvantage. the age gap made it impossible for your experience to measure up to his, even if you hadn’t been so focused on school and work that your social life had suffered.
and matt knows how you worry about your own imagined inadequacy, but he can’t figure out how to soothe your insecurities. he’s tried countless times, but there’s little he can do without first confessing that he knew of them in the first place. but when he kisses you on some random tuesday before he heads to work, it’s his hand around your throat that tilts your head up. your pulse skips two beats, then begins hammering beneath the pads of his fingers, your blood rushing south in a way that seems so very out of place for a simple goodbye kiss.
that night, when he has you face down, ass up in his bed, he reaches under your arm and up to your throat, his hand once again encircling your neck. you clench around him, your body fluttering as he squeezes slightly, your orgasm sneaking up on both of you.
and from then on, matt is hooked, slowly beginning to introduce you to his usuals: restraints and blindfolds. you take to them beautifully, accidentally sinking into subspace on one memorable occasion when he’d tied you up and made you cum no less than four times. you’d been so cute, blinking blearily and loopy, your skin warm as you snuggle up to him, clutching onto him like he was a beloved stuffed animal. after proper aftercare, you’ve returned to coherency enough to comprehend and answer his questions and ask a few of your own.
it feels a tad strange, almost like he’s tainting you, polluting your innocence with his own debauchery, his lust, his desires. he feels a bit… dirty, for lack of a better word, like a perverted old man taking advantage of an innocent young woman who doesn’t know any better. but god, you sound so pretty while you beg for him, moaning out his name as you plead for mercy. he could’ve been making you wait until sunrise to cum, or forcing you to endure orgasm after orgasm until your legs are shaking and your mind is mushy and useless, but you’d take it all the same, enjoying every single thing he gave you without a second’s hesitation.
he teaches you everything he likes and everything he doesn’t. you learn to anticipate his wants and needs, learning to read his body language and his expression when he first walks in the door, to understand whether he wanted privacy or comfort, solutions or submission, your mind or your body.
and you’re all too happy to offer him both.
quick blowjob under the breakfast table as he looks over his casework for the day? you make sure to turn off the stove before heading over, kneeling between his legs as he sips his coffee and reads his notes.
being woken up in the middle of the night by his mouth on you, his tongue sliding through your slick folds as he brings you to orgasm with little effort, the only part of him that’s visible between your spread legs being the sharp red horns of his helmet? who are you to reject his favorite decompression activity ?
letting him slip his cock back into you before falling asleep so you can cockwarm him through the night? yes please!
it gets to the point that you find yourself needy and unsatisfied when he goes on business trips, leaving you without pleasure for days at a time. you resort to your various toys in times like that, but it’s never the same. you’re not submitting the way you’re used to, just seeking physical pleasure without the mental release.
when matt returns from his trip, he finds you face down on the bed, your hand between your legs, pumping one of your dildos in and out of your pretty pussy and whining in frustration at how little it satisfies you. he can smell the salt of your tears in the air, the hitched sobs you muffle with the pillow as you desperately chase your orgasm, needing the physical release even if your mind was tumultuous and chaotic.
until you hear matt chuckle, deep and low and taunting.
“poor thing,” he’d say, smirking at the way you yelp and freeze in place at his sudden presence in the doorway. he shushes the soft, relieved sob you let out, a dark sense of pride rising within him as you raise your ass up, presenting your pussy (with the dildo still lodged inside you) like an animal in heat. “i’m sorry, baby. looks like i’ve trained you too well.”
and as he nears rounds the bed, he pushes at your hip, having you roll onto your back so he can easily access the toy. you’re obscenely wet, his fingers nearly sliding on the slick silicone base, but he finds his grip easily enough, obliging your desperate whimpers by resuming the gentle pumps in and out, angling it just right so that it brushes that little spongy spot inside you.
you’re reduced to a babbling, drooling mess within a minute or two, your mind easily sinking into that blissfully fuzzy headspace once more. matt is back. you trusted him to take control, to please you, to make any discomfort turn into pleasure.
he’s trained you well, after all.
- ⭐️
share your mm fantasies
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