raw food diet for cats

[incywincyspideragain]

I'm reading up on this and would like to give it a go, has any one done it? how do you do it? I'm ok with the first bit of a few bit of raw meat but I can'tfind enough info about what an average day amount of food would be like

I feed Dr Hill's from kitten onwards as advised by the vet .... and the older cat who has had it all their life (female cat) has now kidney disease. So all that stuff that Hill's is so brilliant I am not so sure about any more, also I thought that female cats were much less likely to get kidney disease compared with male cats.

I would be interested to know why you end up feeding your cat as I may want to try it with our current kitten (at the moment on Hill's as he doesn't like tinned food).

sorry, not why, but what you end up feeding

It's not easy to do though, taurines essential to them and is destroyed by chopping, mincing and general processing.

There was a study in America where they fed whole minced rabbits and possibly venison but they suspended it when the cats started dying from lack of taurine. The mincing process had destroyed it.

Fluffy is right whole in chopped liver should for part of the diet to provide taurine. However, not too much otherwise the cat can get hypervitaminosis D.
Kidney disease happens in male and female cats regardless of what you feed it is enormously common.

Thanks.

I tried this when I first got my cats. I tried every type of commercial food going and they constantly had diarrhoea so bad that I was worried they would dehydrate. They were bottle-fed as babies so I think that's why their tummies were so delicate. I fed them raw meat of various types as well as organs - heart, liver, kidney etc. Sometimes I blended it, but they didn't seem to mind eating it whole. Within a day or so they were doing solid poos and looking a lot brighter!

I don't feed them raw anymore and when I offer it now they turn their noses up. They seem to be doing alright on Iams dry food and Whiskas pouches now but when I tried them on those as kittens it made them poorly. It's time-consuming and quite expensive but it's not a bad idea.

thanks, I was thinking of the 'prey model' not grinding or mincing raw food but only found references of it on line and not sure how people do it in practise

I feed mine Natural Instinct raw mince. You order from the website and they send it frozen in the post and it's already got all the taurine and things cats need to be healthy.

It is AMAZING, both our cats have been in super health since they've been on it and it makes their poo completely non smelly! it works out cheaper than commercial cat food and they don't need as much as it isn't full of rubbish like regular cat food. I highly recommend it.

I feed raw, I follow the recipe listed at the end of this post: here. I try to buy the highest quality chicken I can (organic) and chop it, along with the organ meat, by hand into relatively large chunks. You feed approximately 3% of your cat's body weight per day, though you may find your cat needs less/more. I put a day's worth of food into little tupperwares and keep them in the freezer, and take one out to defrost the day before feeding. It does work out cheaper then feeding a high quality canned food.

As mentioned above, if you choose to grind your meat+bones then you will experience nutrient loss so you should add a taurine supplement sold here. Even though I don't grind, I add a bit of taurine to every few meals just to be on the safe side (taurine in excess of the cat's needs is expelled through the urine).

Like you OP I am interested in feeding whole prey - I'd like to add whole mice to my cat's diet. I would breed them myself but currently am not in position to do so as I live in shared rental accommodation, and haven't found a nearby breeder to buy from. I'm unsure about buying mice online as I don't know what conditions they are kept in.

I do feed whole day old chicks, but only as treats because I don't know their nutritional make up. I'm not sure they would count as complete prey because the chicks have never eaten anything besides the yolk in their yolk sac and may be missing key nutrients.

Rabbit is another animal to potentially feed if you can find it. I think a difficultly with feeding whole prey is sourcing it, basically!

I used to feed raw food. I followed a recipe that had every requirement for a cat's diet, including the essential taurine. I used chicken thighs/whole chicken and ground it in a mincer bones and all. (this was quite important if I remember right) I made 2 months worth at a time and froze it, leaving the food to thaw over-night for the next day. A quick search gave me

www.catnutrition.org/recipes.html - which has the recipe I followed.

My cats loved it, I stopped because it was far more expensive than buying catfood.