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bonefall · 10 months ago

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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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goombasa · 2 months ago

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What's Your Default Software Spread?

This is a quick one to sate some curiosity I've had. With so many large software developers alienating their audience as of late, I'd love to know what sort of software people are using in their day to day lives or in their creative pursuits. Do you still use larger, well known brands or are you using smaller, more independent or open software? Just be aware, I'm not interested in something that is ‘better’ than what I or other people use, I'm just curious what you use, and why you use it. So to start us off, I figured I'd give a quick list of some of the stuff that I use with some relative frequency, and maybe some of the other stuff I use occasionally.

(Unless otherwise noted, the programs I use are totally free)

Librewolf: I've been in a position where I've been taking browser privacy really seriously lately, and so far, Librewolf has been my answer to that. It's basically a pre-hardened Firefox with everything that could be used for tracking and fingerprinting disabled by default. This does lead to some issues; anything requiring webgl basically won't work with this out of the box, and so websites that have a lot of interactivity don't always work, so I have to keep another browser on hand for those at times, but as it stands, Librewolf out of the box is really, really good if you are pretty privacy conscious.

Freetube: Youtube sucks. Or at least a lot of the corporate ideology behind it sucks. So I've taken to using Freetube for basically all of my youtube viewing. While it does keep me from engaging in the social aspect of Youtube (I can't post comments, for example), I can view my videos and subscriptions without ads and without an algorithm constantly telling me what to watch next. It isn't perfect (there are times when an update temporarily breaks its ability to play videos) but I vastly prefer it and the huge swath of customization options it offers to any of the official apps or the website itself.

Discord: This is one I wouldn't mind replacing down the line if a better option became available, but Discord is basically where all my friends are, and it's voice and text chat options make communicating with my friends very easy. It's also one of the few non-open source softwares I still use.

OBS Studio: While I would love to start streaming at some point down the line, I primarily use this as a means of recording footage on my computer, and at least on my system, it does so without taking up a lot of my system's resources, and let's me play around with a bunch of different layouts and building a fun looking visual, and keep different layouts for different uses.

Thunderbird: I prefer using a client to keep track of my email, and Thunderbird has made some really good strides forward in terms of layout and usability, and while I was using it beforehand, it's become one of my favorite email programs, especially after switching away from using Gmail as my main email client.

Web Apps: This one kind of straddles the line a bit. It's an app that comes pre-installed on Linux Mint and I've found it very useful for turning websites into standalone applications. Any time I want to scroll through a web feed or use a video-centric site like Twitch, I turn it into a web app so I have the site as a standalone app, which helps in making it much easier to focus on it if I need to. Sadly, much like Librewolf, it isn't fully compatible with every webiste, especially ones that are heavier on interactive elements, like virtual tabletops and the like, but it works decently well otherwise.

Audacity: Can't get much better for open source audio editing. It's not as powerful as other DAWs, and I do find it very clunky trying to edit together multiple audio tracks in it. However, when it comes to recording and editing voiceover and apply effects, I find this to be a very dependable, easy to use program, powerful enough to make my voice sound halfway decent.

KDENLive: As a Linux user, video editing is a bit difficult. Yes, you can use Da Vinci Resolve on Linux, but it's a pain to get working and an even bigger pain to keep working, and I prefer stuff to work out of the box if possible. There are a few native video editors for Linux, but when it comes to ease of use, learning curve, and doing what I need it to do, KDENlive is the best from my perspective. If it did have a native version, I'd probably rather use Hitfilm, as that was what I used back on Windows, but with how simple my videos tend to be, this one works just fine, at least for now.

Retroarch: It's one of the most versatile and wide-ranged suites when it comes to emulation you could ask for. Not entirely 100 percent, there are still some other stand-alone emulators that I have to use for certain systems, but Retroarch makes working with my older systems really, really easy to work with rather than having to have a bunch of individual programs for it, and pretty much anything I would want to play runs perfectly through here.

Solanum: It's a pomodoro style timer. There are a ton of timing apps like this out there, but I find this one to be the most helpful for me. I actually don't use it very much for working. Instead, I use it as a way of keeping track of how much time I've spent sitting, and when I should get up and actually stretch my legs a bit.

Onlyoffice: Office software is a must, because I generally don't like to store a lot of my stuff on microsoft or google servers. Only Office is the only software I've found that is open source and gives me the option to work on a document or spreadsheet cooperatively with a friend without having to sign up with a bunch of guff that I don't need, while also giving me some very solid Microsoft Office alternatives for when I prefer working on something locally instead of putting something on a server.

Trillium Notes: When I'm not working on a story or a video script, I've taken to using Trillium Notes to working on documents. Heck, I'm writing out this (along with all of my blog posts) in Trillium right now. It uses a tree structure that makes formatting and organizing my notes and sections of a document really easy, it lets me export my notes as HTML or Markdown, it easily lets me nest my documents together and group them based on topic so that I casn very easily organize and find what I'm looking for if I'm, say, doing worldbuilding for a D&D campaign or such, and probably my favorite feature is that it constantly autosaves. I've been spoiled by this program in that I have never once had to hit CTRL + S at any point while using it. It's fantastic.

GIMP: I'm aware that there are other Photoshop alternatives out there. I actually used Affinity Photo back on Windows, and really liked that, but Affinity doesn't run well on Linux, even under compatibility layers, and I don't really like using web-based applications. If you haven't noticed, I prefer local software, so while Photopea is really giving Photoshop a run for its money, I don't really use it that much. GIMP is a good image manipulator, and it works great for the simple tasks that I need it for, though I am under no illusion that it is the best. My biggest criticism for it is that it is very beginner unfriendly and fairly unintuitive in the way its tools and features are laid out. However, after some practice, it's easy enough to wrap your head around, and it works great for everything that I need it for, which is usually just putting together a basic video thumbnail or editing together a simple stream background or layout.

Krita/Inkscape: I'm putting these two together for right now because for me, they both are serving a similar purpose, which is learning how to do some proper art. I'm very early in my journey, but both Krita and Inkscape have proven invaluable for starting programs in learning how to properly art. While yes, they focus on two different kinds of art (Krita is more traditional raster images while Inkscape is for vectors), making some basic stuff in both has been really helpful with getting to grips with the fundamentals.

Blender: Much like traditional art, I've started learning some basics for 3D modeling as well, and of course Blender was going to be my starting point, it's free, it's powerful, and it basically has everything that's needed for every step of the process, with its newer versions being far more user friendly than it was before. I did actually try to use it back before version 2.8 came out, and boy was it a struggle.

Had to split the list because of the character limit for blocks of text.

Godot: If it isn't obvious already, I'm trying out a lot of different new hobbies and mediums, always slowly and perpetually moving forward with them, and game design is one of them. I chose godot mostly because of its open source and visual building capabilities, giving me the ability to learn how to make and build a simple game and ease myself into how to code a game as I go rather than having to learn to code right at the start, which, as someone who has not really had any experience in coding, makes me feel more at home with the environment, and with a lot of learning material cropping up for the engine as of late, I'm enjoying my time with it.

VSCodium: While I might not be much of a programmer, I do want to learn, especially as I get more into the weeds of game design, but this program is more for me to freshen up a passion that I had back in high school, which was building simple web pages with HTML, and this program is purpose built for viewing and editing code. I could use basic VS Code for this, since it does have a native Linux version, but VSCodium is basically the same program, just without the Microsoft telemetry. Yes, there are some add-ons that don't work outside of the Microsoft version, but honestly, any add on that I want to use is available for this version, so at least for me, I haven't lost out on much by keeping Microsoft's spyware off my system.

Tellico: I collect a lot of stuff. Books, games movies, I love going bargain hunting and coming back with a big armful of things that I didn't have before, whether they're rare or common, interesting or banal, I just like physical media. But sometimes it's tough to keep track of everything that I have. Tellico allows me to create and maintain a collection database that is pretty versatile and easy to work with and lets me enter in everything in my collection and keep track of it.

Calibri: As much as I love physical media, sometimes it's easier to just keep hold of a digital collection, and Calibri is fantastic for digital books in this regard, mostly because I don't have to worry about the file format or having it locked down to a single service. I can also use it across multiple devices, which is great when I have a very large library to maintain.

Handbrake: This one is lumped in with KDENlive somewhat, as I use the program primarily to compress the videos I edit since KDENlive doesn't have a built in compressor itself. It's also really useful as a DVD and blu-ray ripper.and that about does it, apart from basically listing out every program that I use for viewing or listening to the files on my computer, like Elisa for music files for example, but I don't really have a lot different to say on those, and I don't think they're worth listing out here at the moment. I'm interested to hear if you guys use anything similar to these, or if you use something totally different.What are the applications that you tend to use the most, and why?

#Software #Open Source #Free #What do you use?#Frequently Used

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