Category Archives: nutrition

trusting your gut

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Or in this case, theirs.

The cats have been on a raw food diet for over a year now, with fantastic results. Their FLUTD completely cleared up. Their coats have become much softer and shinier. Their teeth are white, their breath is odorless (as are their poops!) and they’ve became much more lean and active.

But this past week, there was something ‘off’ about their chicken. They wouldn’t touch it. This is free-range, organically-fed, antibiotic-and-hormone-free human grade meat. Not cheap stuff, either. But they wouldn’t eat it. I became concerned after their second meal was left alone, not so much as a nibble. And I did what any (somewhat sane) pet mommy would do. I ditched the chicken and bought some fresh meat. After 36 hours of eating only chunks of dehydrated chicken, their special treats, they gladly sank their teeth into it.

I don’t know what it was about that batch that bothered them, but I knew enough to respect their instincts. Four cats can’t be wrong (especially when one *cough* Scully *cough* is such a food fiend).

It reminded me of last year’s food recall when several dogs died of liver failure due to a corn fungus in their food. A few owners told of their dogs’ reluctance to eat the food, how they turned their noses up until hunger drove them to eat it, and it was only in hindsight that they realized what their pets knew all along. I cannot imagine the grief and guilt I would feel if that were my dog.

And now again pets are dying. You do your best to protect them and yet in some twisted irony, that which is intended to sustain them – kills them. The recalls are spreading. I pray comfort to those who have lost their precious companions.

Without intending to sound smug, it does make me glad that I have such a large measure of oversight as to what my cats are eating. I know where it comes from and what happens to it along the way. Even when things go somewhat awry, their senses, honed after generations of carnivores, alert them. A lot of people think raw feeding is inherently dangerous. At the moment, I can’t think of anything that would be safer.

testing my personal limitations

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I feed the cats a whole prey model raw diet, which means I try to provide a balanced diet of meats, bones, and organs in as whole a form as possible (i.e. whole chicken). But whole chicken isn’t really whole chicken, it’s been plucked and devoid of, among other things, it’s head and feet.

So I took the next logical step and ordered really-truly-authentic whole prey: mice.

No, not live mice, that’d be cruel (have you ever seen how cats treat their prey?). Rather, these are humanely euthanized mice from a company that mainly supplies snake and lizard owners.

Cats eat mice, of course, I know this. But carving up a not-so-whole chicken is a lot easier than thawing out a little mouse. Why? I know the mouse was treated a lot better than the chicken ever was. It met a much kinder end.

A Raw Food Tutorial

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This diet is based on the recipes at catinfo.org and catnutrition.org. There are other sites and several books written on the subject of raw food nutrition for cats. I would encourage anyone interested in a raw diet to seek out such resources. Research before raw.

Now that my public service announcement is out of the way, on to the food…I am a highly visual person, so there are a lot of pictures to illustrate the process. Quite obviously, there’s a lot of shots containing raw meat. If you’re squeamish, consider yourself warned.

We start with four pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs purchased at the local store or butcher of your choosing (in this case, Wild Oats). Using meat that is preservative/hormone/antibiotic-free is important when feeding a raw diet, though it’s not such a bad idea for humans either.

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The chicken is diced into small, bite-sized chunks. This encourages chewing, which is not only good for the kitties’ teeth, but also stimulates the process of digestion.

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Next, we take one pound of raw chicken hearts (shown below, whole) and cut them into similar bite-sized pieces. Heart muscle is packed with taurine, an essential nutrient for cats.

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The bulk of the diet consists of ground whole chicken. The ground chicken and chicken hearts are purchased from Hare Today, small farm that raises, among other things, free range chickens without the use of hormones or antibiotics.

I buy the ground chicken in 5-pound ‘tubes’. Within three days of shipping, it arrives on our doorstep still frozen. For the time being this method is the most convenient, because we don’t have any way to grind our own meat.

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All together the ground chicken, chicken hearts, and chunks are nearly ten pounds of meat. It sounds like a lot, but four fully grown cats can eat a combined pound of food a day. I’m starting to understand how real zookeepers feel.

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*throughout this whole process, hands are washed and the counters are wiped down multiple times – raw chicken isn’t something to be fooled around with*

Next, we add 1½ cups of water. This is actually less water than the recipes call for, but that comes into play later on at meal times: adding warm water to the thawed food makes it much more palatable.

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The water and various meats get mixed together.

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And we move on to supplements…

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from left to right: Vitamin B Complex (400 mg per 10 pounds of meat), Taurine (8000 mg), and Vitamine E (1600 IU).

The supplements are mixed together with one tablespoon cod liver oil and eight large egg yolks (no egg whites – they contain avidin, which can impede absorption of biotin in the small intestine) Separating the egg yolks is probably the most tedious part of the whole process. The eggs are from a local farm, so unlike commercially farmed eggs, they’re large with thick shells and similarly thick egg whites. It makes it very hard to separate, but the yolks are large and healthy (and a rather bright yellow color). By the way, these eggs also make a great egg salad sandwich. Cooked, that is.

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The ‘supplement slurry’ is added to the meat…

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…and mixed together. Now it’s ready to be stored. I find Mason jars to be the most convenient, but be sure to get the ones for canning and freezing.

One half-pound per jar, which divided among four cats is equal to one meal:

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All told, there’s enough food for nine days. After setting aside the next few meals in the fridge, the rest of the food is packed away in the freezer, and each can is taken out and placed in the refrigerator to thaw 24 hours before it will be served.

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Now all that’s left to do are the dishes:

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in praise of raw

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It’s been over a month since the three youngest cats have had any sign of urinary problems. Which may not seem like very long, until you realize that from the end of December until the end of February, every two weeks there would be at least one cat at the vet.

But a month ago, after it seemed like we would never get to the root of these issues, the vet thought it was time for a radical diet change. I agreed. Only I had a very different change in mind.

Raw food isn’t a universal solution. But has worked for us, and marvelously. The cats are sleeker, have softer, shinier coats, and absolutely no signs of ill health.

Our vet is somewhat anti-raw food (and by ‘somewhat’ I mean that he thinks it’s stupid and dangerous). So it gives me no small amount of pleasure to think about the next time the cats have their check-up (many, many months from now), when I will have the opportunity to educate the vet about what has been working for us.