Lizardsmells

I feed my cats a raw diet (dogs too) and have for going on 6 years now.  I get a LOT of requests for my recipe, so here it is along with some important info you should know if you plan to feed your cats a raw diet.

Very first thing, cats have very specific nutritional requirements that if not followed can lead to all sorts of nasty things like blindness and worse so I highly suggest reading catnutrition.org and the site linked from there catinfo.org. They’re both FULL of excellent information on cat nutrition, the pet food industry and how and what vets are taught in school about pet nutrition and why it’s generally wrong.

For my 5 cats I buy 40 lbs of chicken thighs at a time and a pound of livers for every 10 lbs of thighs. That gets ground up, bones, skin and all and mixed in with a gallon or so of water (basically to a thick slurry consistency). Before I start I put 4 cups of hot, hot water in a bowl and dump in a couple bottles of fish oil capsules and three bottles of chewable cat vitamins and let them break down while i’m grinding. The chewables save me the trouble of measuring out people vitamins and also don’t give the food a nasty vitamin B stink that the cats hate.

I mix it all up in a 5 gallon bucket. I usually have to stop toward the end and portion out some to make more room in the bucket for the last 5 or so lbs of thighs.

I use the Ziploc small square containers to store it in and a ladle to scoop it out with. I can get 3 ladle fulls in one container and I feed one to two containers a day, once in the morning and once around 5pm when the dogs get fed if the cats have finished the first one, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.   One batch of food lasts about a month for 5 cats.

I will say that since switching my cats to a raw diet the litterbox smells are virtually eliminated, no one has cat breath, everyone is a normal weight and my one cat with IBS hasn’t had any sort of outbreak since I switched. My older cat used to get crystals in his urine, but we haven’t had that to deal with since I switched either.

However, it’s also pricier. I buy chicken thighs from a local butcher by the case at about 40.00 a case, the vitamins run me 21.00, the livers run me about 10 and the fish oil is around 15.  But it’s worth it.  Not only for the nice side effects but also because it means less vet visits for things caused by eating the wrong foods.  (Like IBS and crystals in the urine.) It also took a few months to get everyone on board, so if you decide to start a raw diet and run into issues with the cats not wanting to eat the food, let me know and I’ll pass along what worked for my crew.

Cats’ nutritional needs are very important to meet.  Make sure you do ample research on your own before you jump in.  You must make sure they get several vitamins, minerals and ammino acids that are detrimental to their health when ommitted.

My dogs’ diet is so very simple, chicken backs from the local butcher and whatever fruits or veggies they get from gasp eating our  vegetarian leftovers (don’t call PETA). It works out well for them, their weight is stable and well within normal ranges, their teeth and coats look great too. It actually works out to be a LOT cheaper than feeding even mid-grade commercial dog food at about .25 per meal per dog.

I hope that helped some. There is a lot of info on the net about raw feeding or the BARF diet. Read all you can, take what makes sense, try to ignore the militants, they’re everywhere in the raw community, and feel free to contact me with any questions.  I’ll do my best to answer!