Hare Today Plan & Salmon Oil

Hello, long-time lurker, first time poster here.

I recently started my cats on an all-raw diet. I tried for a long time to find a better food for them, between high-quality canned to commercial raw and everything in between. Either the cats would refuse to eat the food, or it was just too expensive for me. I knew about Hare Today for quite some time, but I was hesitant to try it. I did finally give in and received my first order a little over a week ago now. The cats did eat frozen raw before in the form of Darwin's trial offer, and they did fine on it. One of my two girls has had a little bit of a rough start with Hare Today, but I think that's mostly tummy upset more than anything. My other one has been eating happily and doing just fine.

I plan on ordering 15 pounds (about a month's worth) at a time, since that's all my freezer will hold. A chest freezer just isn't feasible for now, but I may get one eventually. I just wanted to double check my plan to make sure it will give my girls everything they need, and to see if I'm missing anything.

Every month, I plan on ordering:

5 lbs chicken/turkey (alternating every order, to keep costs down)

5 lbs mutton (as long as it remains around $3/lb)

3 lbs rabbit

2 lbs misc. meat

All of these are the grinds with bone, and I'm mixing them with Alnutrin. The 2 lbs misc. meat will change every order depending on what's on sale/ what I feel like getting/ what I can afford. For now I'll be using regular rabbit, but once my kitties are a little more settled, I'd like to try the rabbit, fur and all variety. I also will be cutting down the bone on the chicken and turkey, but I'll just buy the boneless meat from the grocery store.

Will 1.25 lbs boneless meat suffice for 5 lbs bone-in on the poultry?

My second question involves the salmon oil sold at Hare Today. They recommend 2 squirts (about 1,100 mg) per day, but that seems awfully high. Would just 1 squirt (about 500 mg) of the Icelandic Salmon Oil be enough?

Finally, is there anything else I should know that maybe I'm overlooking?

Thanks for the help. This community has been amazing for teaching me more about cat nutrition.

I can't really answer about the balance of your diet, but here are a couple threads about reducing bone percentage in the HT meats. The poultry grinds are VERY high and you need to add a lot of boneless meat to reduce them properly. Because of this, i chose to only feed my cats boneless grinds (they also eat Rad Cat which doesn't use real bone either). I would suggest you make sure you can reduce the bone percentage correctly. 

http://www.thecatsite.com/t/293836/hare-today-question-about-reducing-bone-percentage

http://www.thecatsite.com/t/294067/web-site-with-calculators-for-raw-feeders

Since you will need to add some boneless meat to reduce the bone content (especially with the poultry grinds) I would suggest also adding in some extra organ since that is getting diluted as well.

The chicken and turkey grinds from Hare Today have only about 5% organ (liver) and over 20% bone. So since you will need to dilute the grind with half boneless meant to get the bone content to approximately 10%, your organ content drops to about 2.5%. You will need to supplement extra organ.

Congrats on jumping in with both feet, haedcase!  I have limited freezer space too so I well understand...

The poultry grinds are 27% bone, so you need to add 2.7 lbs boneless meat for every ONE pound of the grind.  Thus, you'd need to mix 1 lb whole grind with 2 lbs boneless meat plus 3-4 oz liver.  The liver you can get in small tubs from Whole Foods.  I mix chicken and turkey for my cats (e.g. chicken grind + boneless turkey or vice versa) and found they like that better than either meat alone.  Also you can use meat chunks for part or all of the boneless requirement, which you can either order from Hare Today or simply buy locally.  Buying locally is a quite efficient way to get the most out of HT orders.  I find it easiest to cut it up with scissors.

Most of the other grinds are 15%, which is fine for my cats but may be too much for others.  Depending on how it goes with your cats, you'll need to add boneless meats to these as well.  I add about half a pound of boneless per 2lb grinds and don't worry about liver, but if you add more you should throw in extra liver (10% of the weight of boneless meats added).

People are reporting great success with the rabbit fur and all, and the lower price is nice!  Have fun experimenting with other meats too.  There are so many to choose from and you really can't go wrong with any of them.  My cats didn't like the beef with tripe or duck and were indifferent to goose, but they are enthusiastic about everything else.

So it seems I'll need a lot more boneless meat than I thought. I'm also not sure if I could find a local supplier of the organ meat, so I would probably need to buy that from HT as well. I should do some number crunching then to see if it might be cheaper to just use boneless meat and the other Alnutrin for the poultry. It would certainly be less complicated, and since I'm still new to this, I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible.

Thanks for the help!

Here is a link to a calculator you can see to determine how much meat and organ you need to add to various HT grinds. You are shooting for 80% meat 10% bone and 10 % organ. Chi ken and turkey are 27% bone so you need to add about 6 lbs of boneless and almost 1 lbs of organ. The HT site does list the bone /meat/organ ratio of their grinds. When you are on the site click on the individual grind you want and the information page will pop up

I think you ( and most importantly your cats ) will like HT.

I used to add less boneless than was required but until recently HT did not list the meat/bone/organ ratio.

http://www.rawcalc.org/

So I am having a bit of an issue with my older kitty. So far she has thrown up with both goat meat and mutton, but she did fine on duck, and she was doing fine before then. She has no other symptoms and is asking for food again shortly after her vomiting, so any thoughts on this?

Some cats are not able to eat "red" meat (or very fatty meat like lamb/mutton/pork) unless you introduce it verrrry slowly. Some cats (like my boy, Malibu) just cannot eat red meat at all. He does better on all poultry, rabbit and cavies.

Or it is possible that the food might be too cold for her so when it hits her stomach, it comes right back up. Have you tried bringing the food to mouse-body (room temperature) to see if that helps?

I did want to mention that lots of big grocery stores (walmart, Winn Dixie, etc) do have tubs of chicken liver in the frozen food section.

The reason it is less expensive using the grinds from Hare Today than feeding commercially prepared cat food is because with HT, you have to do the math and take the time to supplement and balance the food. Once you figure out a balanced recipe that works for you and your cats, it is so very easy and cheaper than commercial raw.

I feed my cats 2 meals a day. For dinner they eat HT grinds, including rabbit, goat and cavies. These grinds are pre-prepared with the necessary amount of Alnutrin and I add fresh krill oil on each meal.

For breakfast, I feed them Prey-Model-Raw. But instead of using the balanced 80/10/10 ratio, I use about 82% meat, 6-8% bone and 10-12% organ (liver and kidney) to balance the bone-heavy, organ-light HT grinds. I feel like my cats are doing really well on our diet.

Going on the assumption that my older cat can't tolerate red meat (I'll see how she does on the rest of my current food), I've made a new plan:

1 lb ground Cavies

2 lb Chicken

2 lb Turkey

5 lb Rabbit

If they like the cavies, I'll get more of that next time. I'll be adding about 3 lbs boneless meat to the chicken and turkey along with some organs, according to that calculator that was posted. I'll see if I can find the liver tubs locally, otherwise I'll just order them from HT as well.

haedcase said:

 
So it seems I'll need a lot more boneless meat than I thought. I'm also not sure if I could find a local supplier of the organ meat, so I would probably need to buy that from HT as well. I should do some number crunching then to see if it might be cheaper to just use boneless meat and the other Alnutrin for the poultry. It would certainly be less complicated, and since I'm still new to this, I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible.

Thanks for the help!

Click to expand...

I feed mine the boneless grinds because i also feed Rad Cat which also doesn't use real bone. I just add the Alnutrin for boneless. As of recently i haven't been adding organs because my cats do get quite a bit of freeze dried treats which have some organs mixed in. I also mix Rad Cat with the HT meats which also have organs. Although I'm getting a HT order tomorrow and i did order chicken organs this time. I have a cat with a sensitive stomach as well and he does well with this mixture. Right now i feed RC Turkey, chicken and lamb (although they dont love lamb) and HT chicken breast, turkey thigh, and duck (they LOVE duck).