Can you come and talk to me about RAW please?

[maxybrown]

So, after a very poorly kitten and an overnight stay in the vets and some reading we stopped the crappy Felix :/ and bought some Lilys Kitchen which he loves the foils, not as keen on the tins.

So been looking at RAW as this also works out cheaper than the Lilys kitchen. He's been miles better on the lilys kitchen, good toileting and wolfing food down. BUT the foils work out really expensive.

I read some older threads on here and was looking at getting ssome natural instinct food. Now they come in 500g tubs. Excise my stupidness now but do I defrost the whole lot and will keep until eaten? Or can I carve off chunks to defrost??

Please come and help me!

I have a dog, but I do feed raw.

I buy free flow raw food, it makes lie easier as its frozen pellets so I divide each bag into Tupperware portions whilst it's still frozen (mixing in any extras then too) then I put it back in the freezer and get them out to defrost as required

*life

Hiya

With Natural Instinct, you can either defrost a whole tub ( should keep in the fridge for 3-4 days) or you can leave a tub out for an hour or so, portion out what you need and re-freeze

Cats can be tricky to get onto raw and you can't starve them either - they need to eat or they can get v sick. You might need to leave a good quality dry food down (if they are used to dry) or mix in a bit of wet to each meal to start with :) The main thing is to make sure whatever you feed has enough taurine - so you need plenty of heart and dark leg meat of chicken/turkey, or you can sprinkle on taurine powder

If you are on facebook, there are 2 good groups - www.facebook.com/groups/CatCrap/ (AWFUL name but V V good resource) and www.facebook.com/groups/Rawfeeding.rebels/

Off facebook, this is pretty helpful rawfed.com/myths/cats.html - you can also offer chicken necks/wings for teeth cleaning as well as NI - NI has bone but its minced so not the same tooth benefits.

Also, cheapest place I've found Lily's kitchen is amazon subscribe and save which might help meantime :)

brilliant thank you :) will check the links out

Am thinking to have a go at making my own and get the right amounts of things right - so to speak?

He has had some raw meat before - and happily wolfed it down. I'm not keen on dry food although was looking at Lily's Kitchen dry too.

I went over to feeding Archcat partially raw food about a month ago, mainly because he absolutely refuses to eat good quality grain-free food from a can (Felix from a pouch, no problem ) but has terrible digestion problems of the farting and vomiting kind from the cheapo stuff.

I got the meat from a shop (not in the UK) which only sells raw frozen meat for cats and dogs. If you go over 20% raw feeding you need to start giving supplements as powder. Taurine is the most important component of the supplements, but they contain lots of other stuff too that cats would normally get from munching entire mice. Unfortunately, Archcat refuses to touch food with the supplements on too, so at the moment I'm trying not to go over about 25%-30% raw, and giving him a fair bit of chicken heart to keep the taurine levels up.

I just have freezer bags of various frozen meats (chicken and turkey heart and neck, beef, goat, etc) in the bottom of the freezer, and each night I take out enough for one meal for the following day, and defrost it in the fridge in a sealed container.

The woman in the shop gave me a recipe for 2 kg beef, so you make up the meat and supplements and then freeze it in ready portion sizes for each meal. That's going to be my next goal. The recipe includes small quantities of (disclaimer: I'm translating from German here) chicken fat, salmon oil, vitamin e, taurine, salt, calcium carbonate, beer yeast, bonemeal, haemoglobin powder and cooked potato. Blimey!

ah ok but surely if you get the raw recipe right of bones etc does that not stop the need for supplements?

Sorry I really am so new to this - but so keen to get going. I can definitely not revert back to Felix type food.

We had Felix pouches and he was farting and the poo stank to high heaven. I've had cats all of my life and I've never smelt anything like it. Even when completely removed form the house (and I do it straight away) it lingers for about an hour afterwards it's that bad.

This morning I didn't even know he's been until I saw it! So a huge difference.

I am loving the Lily's Kitchen but realistically we cannot afford the foils long term and the tins he is not as keen on.

Well, he ate one tin ok but the chicken one not as keen. I was mixing it with some of the foil too and that helped.

I find if we just put it down and leave him in the kitchen he does just eat it all though eventually but then I feel mean :/ (am too soft)

Our other cat, rest his soul, would have waited all day and night for something else if he did not like what was in front of him. Though admittedly, we had not discovered the horrors of day to day cat food then.

If you feed a balanced diet you don't need supplements, but balancing it can be tricky. You need approx 80% meat, 10% offal and 10% bone. Taurine is the one amino acid cats can't make, so thats the one you need to monitor - without taurine, cats go blind, so supplements "cover your butt" :)

"ah ok but surely if you get the raw recipe right of bones etc does that not stop the need for supplements?"

That's what I'd have thought, but I've looked at a lot of English and German raw websites and so many of them focus on the need for supplements. It looks like a chemistry lesson more than anything else! Pandora, yes, my worry is not getting the balance right and causing real internal damage that way.

maxy, it really sounds like both our cats have some sort of intolerance to processed cheap cat food, possibly a reaction to grain? Archcat's poo also smells appalling when he's had the cheap stuff - it takes hours to get rid of the smell from the room, even when he's covered it with litter. We have the same problem that we can't afford the pouches or foil trays from good brands because they're exorbitantly expensive, whereas if it were cans from the same brand we could manage that.
I'm currently trying him out with Bozita, which is a Swedish brand. They come in Tetrapak containers and are grain-free. Archcat isn't wild about them, but at least it's not complete refusal like with the cans, so we're persevering with a mixture of Bozita, one raw meal a day (including heart and chicken neck so he gets taurine and bone), and a small bowl of Royal Canin sensitive stomach dry food.

I feed raw and I get human grade meat from the vets done in handy daily cat size portions frozen. My Ragdoll loves it! And no smelly poo and no wasted food.

"I feed raw and I get human grade meat from the vets"

Does the vet watch out for the right proportions then, Minimalist, so there's no risk of taurine deficit?

Arch there is different types of meat each day so he doesn't think it is an issue but I'm happy to add supplement if that is what is needed. Not sure best place to buy from though.

I'm still a bit baffled and don;t know what to get that we can afford. Hmmm not putting him back on easy t get supermarket stuff though. His fur is looking lovely