Pet Forum / Miscellaneous / Animal Health / September 2006

........Dogs can make their own taurine if they have the raw material
available.  In cats it's essential, in dogs they're now calling it
conditionally essential.

......?????  As far as I know all meat has taurine.  It's plants that are a
poor source of taurine.
http://www.supplementnews.org/taurine/
Taurine is abundant in nearly all mammalian protein.  Higher sources of this
amino acid include egg, fish, meat, and milk products. [2]  Vegetable
proteins contain trace amounts of taurine.

.........from what I read about this issue of lamb meal and taurine,
apparently there's a deficiency of sulfur bearing amino acids available to
the dog due (maybe) to poor digestibility, which means the dogs can't
readily synthesize their own on the studied lamb diet.  I didn't read the
whole article and it's really impossible to say at this point as even the
authors of the article come to no firm conclusions.  But it definitely isn't
because lamb has less taurine that other meats.  I think this is an issue
that is not too black and white at the moment and the variability of reasons
that one food is more or less digestible than others is huge.  I think it's
a huge mistake to take a commercial diet with a certain kind of protein and
make pronouncements about all foods containing that protein.  If they really
want to know how lamb affects taurine synthesis on dogs they should be
looking at comparisons between raw lamb, cooked lamb, a lamb diet without
cereal, a lamb diet with cereals, etc.

An abstract to the study:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1439-0396.2003.00446.x

.....In any case issues such as this are a good argument for rotating
protein sources and/or adding things to kibble - like sardines, eggs,
yogurt, to make sure they're getting all they need.

.....Nutro, like some other companies, has been adding taurine since 2001:
http://www.nutroproducts.com/press100201.asp

buglady
take out the dog before replying