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The concerns with a dry-food diet include hydration, carbohydrates, and calories. Cats in the wild get the majority of their moisture from the prey that they eat, as opposed to drinking from streams and such. Thus there is a danger that, for an indoor cat, even if you leave water out, they may be kind of perpetually in a semi-dehydrated state, which I guess can lead to liver or kidney problems.
To keep the pieces of dry food to hold together into a manageable "chunk" the pet food manufacturers have to add bulk in the form of some sort of carbohydrate. Stuff like corn, wheat, rice, potatoes, yams, fruit, etc. Not to mention that those ingredients are of course cheaper, so there is financial incentive to add more and more of that stuff into the food. What executive wouldn't be tempted by decreasing the meat and increasing the grain to reach their yearly bonus? And none of that stuff is thought to have nutritional value for the obligate carnivore, so they are eating a lot of "junk". That leads to the potential problem of calories. They need to eat more of the dry food to get the same nutritional value as wet food (which includes all those calories from grains and potato etc), plus the fact that most people that feed dry food don't carefully measure it out, they are just "free fed", which can lead to cats eating too many calories and becoming overweight.
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The little monsters 3
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