I started feeding my cats raw food and nobody has died!!

[catdoc]

After much research and assembling all the components I needed to undertake this new food adventure, I made my first batch of raw kitty food last week. It was far from perfect both the prep and the outcome, and I really screwed up the measuring of the various components of nutrients and types of meat and bone. Because the initial batch was to be mixed with their regular canned food, I figured I had some wiggle room with respect to ratios of supplements, meat and bone. (the math stuff for ratios drives me crazy!!!) Mostly it was a measured success. I have 11 kitties and of the 11, 4 were WOW, gimme more!! The others were either reasonably ok with the introduction and only 1 actual hater. They still want their kitty crack (aka kibble) at night for a bedtime snack. My question here is, the recipe calls for chicken legs and thighs (including bones) as well as chicken heart (for the taurine) and chicken liver. Should or could I include breast meat, bone-in or should I stick with the legs and thighs? The first batch I made last week did have chicken breast, the batch I made today did not. Additionally, I included chicken kidney in the batch today. This is because the only reasonably organic chicken gizzards I can buy here are already mixed together and cut up. No one at any of the supermarket butchers I have spoken to thus far will sell me either all hearts or all liver. Is chicken kidney ok to feed them?

 

[Dr. Sara]

Congratulations! It sounds like your kitties are taking to the raw about as well as could be expected.
Yes, you can use bone-in breast meat instead of legs and thighs. There are two concerns with feeding breasts.
First, they are more lean, but that is not generally a problem.
Secondly, because the meat to bone ratio is much higher, the calcium to phosphorus ratio can be unbalanced. You can trim off some of the meat to help this, or add skinned necks as a bony source to balance the meaty source.
Are you sure that what you are feeding is kidneys? Chicken kidneys are closely adhered to the inside of the bones of the pelvis, and are not generally sold separately. Perhaps you mean gizzards? The gizzard is a round muscle that grinds food for the bird, and is often included in packages of giblets / organ meats.
Chicken hearts are higher in iron and zinc than gizzards, but the protein and fat content is similar. Many holistic vets prefer hearts because of the micronutrients in cardiac muscle, and the apparent beneficial effects of eating hearts for the heart. Liver is quite a different matter, as it is an organ that is not a muscle, and has a much different nutrient profile.
When I fed home prepared raw, I used all the organs in the diet, as an animal would eat all of them. When I butchered my own chickens, I included the lungs, heads, and feet as well.
Hope this helps!

 

[catdoc]

It does, and thank you. What I mean by gizzards (and this is probably my English background) is a number of the inside organs. . .heart, kidney and liver being the primary ones. Who knows what else I was buying from the grocery store at the time, because the contents of the package were chopped up and mixed together.

 

[Dr. Christina]

Congratulations for taking the super healthy leap. It can be scary and many will not try. Never think you messed up. Making fresh food is so much better than feeding the same processed food twice a day - or worse yet for many kitties - dry food (crack) sitting out all day. There is no "right" formula as every (cat and person) digests and assimilates food differently.

Dr. Sara gives you some great general guidelines and rationale for feeding a lot of heart meat as well as more details about composition. Good for her to have butchered her own chickens.

Processed food has only been around for a hundred years, and only popular for about 50 - just like TV dinners! As you continue to make fresh food, think "fresh food" not "making cat food". Then you will continue to offer different ingredients and may discover what the 4 would love. You are blessed to have only one who did not like the food and it may jut take patience to get her to love it. You can powder some of the dry food and sprinkle like salt over her portion.

You may want to keep exploring some of the dehydrated treats (heart, venison, chicken strips, etc) available to feed as late night snacks rather than dry food "crack".

Keep us posted in the forum on how it goes for you. Since you have 11 cats, it would also be useful to keep track of the costs, as that is a concern for some people. I found it cost 50-75% less than feeding high quality canned food with supplements.

Dr. Christina

 

[catdoc]

Thanks Dr Christina. It would be lovely to be able to feed dehydrated treats to the kitties, but being here in Merida Mexico, it is not that easy to source these kinds of foods. Cats are still second class citizens here. In the long run, raw is best in terms of overall cost. The hidden cost is, of course, the time and energy to source what you need and in the actual making of the food (I have been able to do the making of the food plus cleanup to an hour and a half) While organic and grass-fed are not that common here, the concept is catching on. I am hoping that global awareness of everything bad happening in our environment is catching on all over the world.

 

[catdoc]

Postscript. . . before it is too late!!!

 

[catdoc]

PPS: I am so enjoying the seminar/webinar this weekend. It has made a world of difference in my level of understanding of symptoms into rubrics. Thank you so much1

 

[Dr. Christina]

thanks so much.
Living in Mexico certainly has its challenges. Maybe you can speak with local farmers and find out if they are using glyphosate, round-up, or GMO seeds. They may not even though they are not officially "organic".

You spend an hour and a half daily or weekly or less? Should be less.

Post in the repertory thread if you have any questions about possible rubrics.
Dr. Christina

 

[Deena]

I just LOVE the title of the thread. For my kitties it would be "I started feeding raw and they lived". More than my dogs, I find my cats are constantly teaching me "let thy food be thy medicine". Clara was classic. I adopted her from a shelter at 9 yrs old. She was obese with nasty teeth. Her vet records said they cleaned her teeth every 6 months. I immediately switch her to raw, including whole food like chicken necks. Within a few months, she was a healthy weight and her teeth were clean. My vet was shocked. A year later, I noticed a change in her eating pattern. I would feed her my "bird in a bag" meal consisting of chicken meat, neck, heart, gizzard and liver. She would eat the heart 1st, with gusto, then pick at the rest. If I gave her a choice of heart and something else, she always ate the heart. I suspected she might be self medicating so off to my TCVM get we went. She found a heart murmur and recommending a cardio eval at Tufts. They diagnosed her with moderate hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and told me it was progressive and fatal. I chose to medicate her only with the young healthy raw hearts of as many different animals as I could source, in addition to her diversified raw diet. LIKE CURES LIKE. She was 10 at the time. Clara became an angel last year...at TWENTY THREE years old using Gail Pope's Animal Hospice protocol. Her weight and teeth were perfect and she had no symptoms of HCM. "Let Thy Medicine Be Thy Food".

 

[Dr. Jeff]

Fantastic Deena!

Would you like to start a forum thread devoted to Clara and HCM?