Research overview: the cat's essential need for dietary arginine

Cats have an exceptionally strict requirement for dietary arginine because their continuous high rate of protein metabolism generates ammonia that must be detoxified through the urea cycle, for which arginine is essential, and cats have limited ability to synthesize it. A single arginine-deficient meal can cause acute, severe hyperammonemia with neurologic signs. This overview compiles the nutritional-biochemistry literature rather than one source, describing why the cat's protein-centric metabolism makes arginine acutely essential, how deficiency rapidly disrupts ammonia detoxification, and why this requirement is built into feline diet formulation. It matters because the arginine requirement is among the most dramatic illustrations of feline metabolic specialization, showing how the cat's carnivorous physiology creates nutritional demands far stricter than those of omnivorous species.