Raw Feeding Felines
Hi, my name is Lisè and I am so happy that you have found your way here.
Let me give you a little background on how this site came to be. It was late in 2007, when after numerous visits to my vet with one of our cats who kept suffering from repetitive blocked anal glands that my vet made two comments. The first was that he was surprised that cats had ever survived the domestication process, and the second was that he felt our cat's problem was due to her diet. At the time she was on a diet that was manufactured by one of the major pet food companies and was available on a prescription only basis because she was starting to put on too much weight.
I did no more than come home and check her diet food. I was mortified to
find that the dry food she had been eating was full of cereals, grains,
extracts of vegetable origin, and a manufactured gravy flavoured coating, called
digest, with
the only meat source being chicken bone meal.
Even at that point I knew that cats were obligate carnivores, so what on earth were the pet food companies doing marketing an omnivores food as being suitable for an obligate carnivore? An Obligate carnivore HAS to eat Meat, and needs a high protein, low carbohydrate diet, with all the necessary vitamins, minerals to ensure a balanced diet, which is abundantly present in a cats natural food.
That was when I began researching a cats biology and how their digestive system,
chromosomes, heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas and spleen work. My research was
exhausting, I needed to know how these animals bodies worked before I could
start researching how to feed them a more species appropriate diet.
Our female cat stopped being fed dry food (she was chuffed to bits and so excited) and started to eat the wet diet food prescribed by our vet that her brother ate, until I could teach myself what I needed to know. Her brother has a very severe form of irritable bowel disease facilitated by eating inappropriate food with masses of colourings, additives and the other rubbish we find in commercial pet foods. Yes it's even in the specialist "prescription" diets. Next time you open a can or bag of cat food, just look at the ingredients, do you see corn, maize, gluten, wheat listed as well as various sugars and EC permitted colourings? There's a wake up call shouting to be heard, but the pet food companies just aren't listening.
My research took hours and hours, which stretched into days and days and then weeks.
I took all of my research to my vet to read, full of trepidation, his comments
were, "I see nothing wrong with anything that you've shown me. I
think it's a great idea, keep me updated on proceedings". I was
ecstatic!!
Some cats will take to being fed raw food like water off a ducks back, (excuse the pun), others like mine wont, so it is my intention to share with you how I did it, at all times I let our cats lead me, not the other way around.
I started by offering a chicken wing to our cats and slices of raw chicken, which they repeatedly refused, I then ground up meat, bone and liver and started adding that to their canned food. Over a period of two weeks I reduced the amount of canned whilst increasing the amount of ground until finally they were eating just ground raw meat. I then started introducing chunks of raw meat and bone into the ground food whilst reducing the amount of ground food until they were eating just chunks of bone in meat. They now eat whole rabbit, whole chickens, sardines, and herring which I portion into manageable sized large "chunks", each "chunk" is the equivalent of their daily food intake. The only supplement I add is wild salmon oil. My ultimate goal is to have them eating whole prey, but at the moment they are failing to see mice, rats etc as something that they can eat.
Since I started feeding raw to our two cats the following benefits to them and to us have been noted:
They have far more energy and appear more relaxed and content. They no longer appear edgy, skittish or frenetic! They display contentment and pleasure when eating. The quality of their coats has improved dramatically they now shine and are luxuriously soft. Their faecal deposits no longer stink the house out, they are pretty odourless and hard and we never get diarrhoea from them any more, which was a frequent occurrence when they were fed processed foods. Visits to the vets have decreased greatly we were always taking one or other of them to the vets on a monthly basis, which means that we spend much less at the vets.
They have beautiful, white clean teeth and their breath doesn’t smell. We have two very happy cats, we can never undo the damage that we may have done by feeding them an inappropriate diet for the first five and a half years of their lives but at least now we can make sure that we don’t stack further problems onto their innocent shoulders.
Please visit my links page, I hope that you will find the websites listed there helpful, I have not attempted to plagiarise any existing web sites, these are where I found what I needed, I think you will too.
This site is dedicated to Molly, our witches cat, a casualty of a feline inappropriate diet, dearly loved and so sorely missed.18th February 2006.
