How much liver is too much?

coaster

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Twinkie just LOOOOOOOOVES raw chicken liver. It's the only meal that I can count on him to clean out his dish. Usually he's a picky eater and leaves food behind. So I do like to treat him to a meal of chicken liver, and do so about once a week. I know too much liver is not good. I've just never found out how MUCH is too much. Are there any guidelines as to how much chicken liver is OK?
 

sharky

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if memorys serves it is a 100 grams a week or roughly 3.6 oz
 
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coaster

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Thanks, sharky. He gets a little bit more than that, I think, so I'll scale back. Especially since he's a small cat.
 

blaise

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Originally Posted by sharky

if memorys serves it is a 100 grams a week or roughly 3.3 oz
sharky-
Do you have a reference for that?
 

blaise

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Originally Posted by coaster

...I know too much liver is not good. I've just never found out how MUCH is too much. Are there any guidelines as to how much chicken liver is OK?
coaster- do you have any recollection of where the "too much" thing might have come from? I know that "common sense" says 'too much of anything isn't good'....however, perhaps you read/heard of something specific...???

sharky-
That reference is from a commercial site selling ingredients for home-made meals - and, there is/are no reference/s given for anything on there...

This exerpt is interesting:
The catâ€[emoji]8482[/emoji]s natural, all prey diet provides her daily with fresh, raw liver. To meet her caloric needs, an adult, wild-living cat would catch and eat 5 mice-sized prey animals daily (mostly rodents). With the average mouse weighing 28g, the wild cat would consume about 140g of prey per day. The liver of a mature mouse weighs 2g, with a total of 10g raw liver consumed by the cat almost every day.
Given that (if those facts are accurate), the "average" "cat-in-the-wild" could consume 10g of raw liver a day....and, that I personally have never heard of "liver poisoning".........if Twinkie were here, he'd have all the liver he would take!
 

sharky

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Originally Posted by BLAISE

coaster- do you have any recollection of where the "too much" thing might have come from? I know that "common sense" says 'too much of anything isn't good'....however, perhaps you read/heard of something specific...???

sharky-
That reference is from a commercial site selling ingredients for home-made meals - and, there is/are no reference/s given for anything on there...

This exerpt is interesting:


Given that (if those facts are accurate), the "average" "cat-in-the-wild" could consume 10g of raw liver a day....and, that I personally have never heard of "liver poisoning".........if Twinkie were here, he'd have all the liver he would take!
lol.. it was that excerpt I thought was interesting
...

it is not liver posioning but overdosing of vitamin a with too much liver ... that DOES happen

http://www.petplace.com/cats/vitamin...ats/page1.aspx


http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pic...1&blobtype=pdf

here is a little adage from a nutrition class I took many years ago
... fat gets stored in your adek ( sounds like attic) A, D, E and K are fat soluble and thus easier to OD on
 

mimosa

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In a prey model diet you feed 5-10% organ, half being liver. You feed about 3-4% of the cat's bodyweight in total (but it depends on the age, weight, and activity level of the cat, the weather, etc). A 4 kg cat would get about 840-1120 grams of food a week, so in that model you would feed approximately 40-50 grams of liver a week.
In practice you can always skew the percentages a little, of course, there is still space between ideal and too much, as Sharky's guideline shows.

I've found myself and have heard reported by others too that to much liver in one sitting gives your cat the runs, so giving your cat "all the liver he/she can take" might also be a bad idea for that reason.
 
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coaster

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That's never been a problem for Twinkie.

"Too much liver is bad" is the "common wisdom" circulating around the cat world. Blaise - some interesting points about the "prey-model" diet. Twinkie's diet includes commercial canned cat food, so he's probably already getting an over-abundance of vitamins in there.
 

solgoode

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Blaise wrote:

"Given that (if those facts are accurate), the "average" "cat-in-the-wild" could consume 10g of raw liver a day....and, that I personally have never heard of "liver poisoning".........if Twinkie were here, he'd have all the liver he would take!"

My friend just slaughtered about a hundred chickens the other day, meaning his cat got all the liver he could take. It died an awful, bloated death. The vet agreed that the cat died as a result of the toxicity caused by consuming too much liver. Were I feeding my cat home prepared foods, I would make sure that it were balanced with a variety of meats and meat types as well and the vitamins and minerals cats need. 
 

plimpton

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I've also asked this since our new kitten Ollie arrived...

He eats like a machine and flies around like a ninja... eyes wide for almost any food, but absolutely flips over raw chicken livers... especially marinaded in milk with a hint of parmesan in it...

So... I have been incorporating them into his cat food with raw chicken hearts and beef mince...for the past week...

When he left food in the bowl, I started worrying that he was sick from the food I had been feeding him and searched for answers on the net... On checking about Liver, I found the following:-

Liver in large amounts can result in vitamin A poisoning:- http://pets.webmd.com/cats/ss/slideshow-foods-your-cat-should-never-eat

Vitamin A poisoning can result in death:- http://www.petmd.com/cat/conditions/toxicity/c_ct_vitamin_a_toxicity

Although, this seems to be a chronic situation that develops over an extended period of eating liver... 

I have had cats all my life and have never heard of these toxicity issues with commonplace items such as tuna, milk, raw eggs and liver... all of my cats have eaten these and not been poisoned... as far as i know...

...Sharky's observation of ~10 g liver per day would equate to 70 g/week... so if one were to indulge their cats in say 20 g mixed in with other food... it should be fine... although for mine... I will be using it more as a treat say once a month in lieu of other less contentious foods such as raw meats, hearts and oily (cooked) fish...
 
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