Too much bone in whole-rabbit grinds? Too little iodine?

I recently started feeding our cat the whole rabbit (coarse) grind from mypetcarnivore. Here is what they say about it:

The average prey animal has about 10% to 15% bone, about 10% organs, and the rest muscle and fat and connective tissue.  That is Mother Nature's model and therefore our model ratio for all of our Whole Ground products.

Judging by his "output," the mix has too much bone in it. The only boneless meat I can get is beef - he has a chicken allergy. I wasn't sure of how much boneless beef and/or eggshell I should be adding.

As an aside, the coarse grind has small bone fragments, unlike the chicken that I used to grind very finely. Kitty leaves some of them behind in his food dish. We don't seem to have a problem, so I assume that the fragments are not dangerous if ingested. Does anyone disagree?

The second question is about iodine. When I used chicken, I added the lite salt. I stopped doing that with the rabbit, since the head is included. I am probably being too picky here, but how do we know that part of the thyroid gland ends up in every batch? Iodine scares me because I am afraid of having too much OR too little of it.

I would love to know the answers to these questions also! My cats are eating Rad Cat for breakfast and canned for dinner but next month I will be transitioning dinner to ground raw and was going to buy a few pounds of whole ground rabbit to start off with.

I know I need to add a Premix (for meat, organ and bone), 500mg of krill oil a day, an egg yolk a week and a sardine a week. Should we also add in some extra meat and organs??

silverpersian said:

 
I recently started feeding our cat the whole rabbit (coarse) grind from mypetcarnivore. Here is what they say about it:

The average prey animal has about 10% to 15% bone, about 10% organs, and the rest muscle and fat and connective tissue.  That is Mother Nature's model and therefore our model ratio for all of our Whole Ground products.

Judging by his "output," the mix has too much bone in it. The only boneless meat I can get is beef - he has a chicken allergy. I wasn't sure of how much boneless beef and/or eggshell I should be adding.

As an aside, the coarse grind has small bone fragments, unlike the chicken that I used to grind very finely. Kitty leaves some of them behind in his food dish. We don't seem to have a problem, so I assume that the fragments are not dangerous if ingested. Does anyone disagree?

The second question is about iodine. When I used chicken, I added the lite salt. I stopped doing that with the rabbit, since the head is included. I am probably being too picky here, but how do we know that part of the thyroid gland ends up in every batch? Iodine scares me because I am afraid of having too much OR too little of it.

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According to http://catinfo.org/?link=makingcatfood#The_Recipe you add 0.75 lbs of meat to 2.25 lbs of whole rabbit grind.  Since the thyroid gland, blood, and liver is included you don't need to add the Lite salt with iodine nor liver.  However, @mrsgreenjeens I believe adds meat/organ grinds to her whole grinds to dilute out the bone, maybe she has some advice here as well.  Since you're dealing with constipation (too much bone in output?) I wouldn't worry about adding eggshell unless you're adding a LOT of meat.  And then, you'd probably need to worry about adding more organ.

Whether or not bone fragments are OK is an individual thing.  I've watched my cats bust through chicken thigh bones easily, yet I've read that no cat should get the drummette part of a chicken wing.  My cats have not had a problem with shards since the bone was raw and they only get whole bone pieces if I'm standing there.  My best advice is to start small like wingtips and wing flats and see what happens when it comes to bone-in meats.  The grinds, it seems like your cat is doing what she needs if she's getting lightly constipated yet leaving bigger bone pieces behind.  Some raw feeders here feed only 5% bone because the cat just can't handle more than that.  Mine are diarrhea-prone IBS so bring on the bone here!

I did used to add some plain meat to ground POULTRY, because birds boney....more towards 20% bone, according to Hare-Today.  So I would actually add in about 1/3 again mixture of hears/gizzards and liver mixture to the grind to bring down that percentage.  (I say used to because I don't feed ground anymore) 

If your little one is having constipation issues on the rabbit, and they only sell boneless beef, then I would try adding just an ounce here and there and see if it helps.  Sometimes I would just do that.  If someone appeared to be having littterbox issues, I would just up the plain meat in one meal and that would usually take care of the problem for awhile.  I only switched to adding it consistently when Tinky started eating turkey  grind exclusively.  Now he doesn't eat it at all, so I don't have to worry about it  

Thanks to all for the responses! I tried adding 2.5 lbs of beef to the 2 lbs. of rabbit. I added enough organ to balance the beef, and half the amount of eggshell that I normally would have added to the beef. That seems to work well - he is not as enthusiastic about the beef now that he has tried rabbit, but the constipation issues have been resolved. About half a teaspoon of coconut oil seems to have been helpful as well. I fed him the oil in the morning for two days in a row.