Cats and raw food

Acc72

Hello All,

Please be gentle - I am sure that this is a stupid question .....

After reading this forum, I am thinking of introducing raw food into my cats diet.

I just wanted to clarify : by raw food, I take it you mean just take the uncooked chicken out of the fridge and let them eat it ?

What about the skin and bones etc.

Sorry for the obvious question, we often feed our cats cooked chicken but it just feels weird to give them an uncooked chicken wing or something ! (yes, I know it is silly as outside they would not cook a bird before they ate it !).

What do others do ?

krlyr

Yes, you feed it uncooked, and you include all components. You should never feed cooked bones because the cooking process makes them brittle and this can cause punctures to the throat, stomach, intestine, etc.
It is not just as simple as giving a cat raw chicken wings every day though, commercial diets are supplemented with the RDA of vitamins and minerals. To achieve these in a homemade raw diet, you need to feed a variety of meats, as well as bones and offal. Liver, for example, is chock full of vitamin A - but also be aware that you can have too much of a good thing, some vitamins are not simply passed out if given in excess, but build up in the body and can have nasty side effects (vitamin A in a large overdose can be fatal - but you'd need to feed quite a lot of liver to do that, milder side effects that you'd be more likely to see are things like diaorreah). There was a study done on cats fed just rabbit, I believe, and the cats showed deficiencies because of the lack of variation in the diet. Sorry, their website is filtered at work so can't look up the exact study to refresh my memory. But with cats, it's essential to do your homework because cats cannot produce their own taurine and a taurine deficiency can cause very serious problems, so it's not something I would just take a stab at and make up as I went along.

I raw-feed dogs, not cats, but imagine many elements are the same. It's worth having a good read up first, I've just nabbed these links off Google so no personal recommendations
http://www.rawfedcats.org/
http://www.naturalpetcare.co.uk/nutrition/nutrition/rawcats.html
http://www.holisticat.com/rawrecipe.html

spike7451

I agree with the above,you could also have a read of this thread here;

http://www.purrsinourhearts.co.uk/index.php/topic,26919.0.html

antw23uk

I feed both my cats a RAW diet and the results are amazing. Nothing would make me go back to commercial cat food.

I buy from a company called natural instinct and they take out all the guess work for you by adding and mixing the correct amounts of meat (heart/ muscle etc) and put in the supplements such as fish oil so you egt a complete balanced meal.

If you just want to give them a treat but keep them on commercial cat food then i would go for a couple of chicken wings a week .. perhaps a lambs heart once a week .. just as a treat!

Personally i still do the chicken wings as a treat but it also bulks out the food and keep the costs down.

Good luck but please do your research first. Its well worth it and your cat will thank you for it :T

Acc72

Thanks you very much for your replies.

I was just thinking of mixing up their current diet rather than moving completely from a processed food diet to a raw food only diet.

There is plenty of reading to keep me going.

paddypaws101

Some great replies above.....so I will just add, that a basic guideline is that you can feed up to 20% of the diet ( 3 meals a week) with whatever raw you fancy, without worrying about it being exactly balanced. Any more than that and you do have to look at specific calculation of bone, liver, offal etc.
Game season is a great time of year to experiment....I just bought 2 wood pigeon from Waitrose, and the small, softer bones in something like this are much easier than chicken wings for a 'starter' bone.
Natural Instinct frozen food is a great product and you might also want to check out the informative Facebook Group, Cats Completely Raw and Proud...or Cat Crap for short!
Be warned, if you are lucky enough that your cats will take to Raw feeding, then it is dangerously addictive. The improvement in coat and body condition is such that most people will soon want to move away from the commercial rubbish and give more and more raw food.
One other point...just because they do not like one meat doesn't mean they wont love another....turkey and pork are favourites here with lamb being the least popular.

spike7451

paddypaws101 wrote: »

Some great replies above.....so I will just add, that a basic guideline is that you can feed up to 20% of the diet ( 3 meals a week) with whatever raw you fancy, without worrying about it being exactly balanced. Any more than that and you do have to look at specific calculation of bone, liver, offal etc.
Game season is a great time of year to experiment....I just bought 2 wood pigeon from Waitrose, and the small, softer bones in something like this are much easier than chicken wings for a 'starter' bone.
Natural Instinct frozen food is a great product and you might also want to check out the informative Facebook Group, Cats Completely Raw and Proud...or Cat Crap for short!
Be warned, if you are lucky enough that your cats will take to Raw feeding, then it is dangerously addictive. The improvement in coat and body condition is such that most people will soon want to move away from the commercial rubbish and give more and more raw food.
One other point...just because they do not like one meat doesn't mean they wont love another....turkey and pork are favourites here with lamb being the least popular.

Thanks,just applied to CC...:p

Acc72

paddypaws101 wrote: »

Be warned, if you are lucky enough that your cats will take to Raw feeding, then it is dangerously addictive. The improvement in coat and body condition is such that most people will soon want to move away from the commercial rubbish and give more and more raw food.

Would this be a problem ?

The Natural Instinct website looks interesting - I would rather use something like this (with the nutrients calculated and balanced) rather than trying to guess myself.

paddypaws101

Acc72 wrote: »

Would this be a problem ?

The Natural Instinct website looks interesting - I would rather use something like this (with the nutrients calculated and balanced) rather than trying to guess myself.

No I don't think it is a problem at all, just warning you!
NI food is a great product and for a 5kg adult cat you are looking at around £4.50 a week for all the food it needs. I think that compares very favourably with most supermarket foods, especially what I think of as the overpriced luxury tins/pouches, most of which are not even complete foods.
Once you get more confident with the NI as a base then you will probably branch out to offer more variety and maybe even make up your own food. Waitrose have 3 chickens for £10 at the moment....add a bit of kidney, liver and heart which are dead cheap from a butcher and away you go!

Acc72

paddypaws101 wrote: »

No I don't think it is a problem at all, just warning you!

NI food is a great product and for a 5kg adult cat you are looking at around £4.50 a week for all the food it needs. I think that compares very favourably with most supermarket foods,

Ok thanks, no worries.

I agree with regard to the costings. I am looking to change to improve their health, but the figures coming in at comparable levels doesn;t do any harm !

Fire_Fox

Meat, offal, skin and bone for a balance of all the nutrients they require. You can just supplement with raw bone in meat a couple of times a week if you want to clean their teeth. I found frozen Value/ Smartprice chicken portions the cheapest when I last did the maths, chop the bone open with poultry shear to encourage them to eat the mineral rich bone and marrow.