Quetions for those Feeding RAW Diets

vik61

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Some questions I hope you will indulge me people. I see there have been discussions about this but not too many. Please help me get into feeding my three felines raw. A seven year-old female and two 11 week old kittens right now, one who is suffering a tummy problem (bacterial) and who I think may be one of those sensitive digestive system kitties.

My primary question, and if you answer only one, tell me this: Do you feel feeding raw results in a healthier cat, actually saving you money on vet treatments and giving a healthier experience for your cat?

Other questions are:

Do you feed raw every meal?

Do you supplement dry food?

Do you buy or make your own?

If you make your own:

Do you use one meat primarily? Or do you do different types like rabbit, duck, etc?

Do you get your meat ground or grind your own meat and bones?

Hearts and livers? Are you finding them locally or using an online source via mail?

Supplements. Have you found ONE single supplement that contains everything else needed to add to the meat? (I would think this would be a very helpful product for people making their own cat food.)

Thanks in advance. Of course any links to sources in this thread will be helpful to others in the future who are using the search feature to research this subject.
 

solaritybengals

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Try to get a vet on board with you. sharky kept saying this and it has made my life easier! Trying to do a raw diet on your own is a bit tough. I woudl recommend getting on a raw-fed yahoo users group. FelineFuture and RawPaws are the ones I know about.

Health-wise is it better? Thats the theory. I haven't seen it yet honestly. But most of the problems I'm seeing are not food related. I do see some allergy problems in a couple cats and my cats do have minor gingivitis after a yaer of raw food but I feed the meat ground up until now. I think its important to have some of the meat chunked so they can excersize their gums.

I feed half raw chicken/half canned salmon. Or more specifically 1lb raw to 1 can salmon for each meal. Except now twice a week they get chunked beef for their teeth.

They do not get dry food at all. They do get wet food if I forgot to thaw the meat though.

I buy it. I get preground chicken with bone (bone is ground in pieces). Bone is essential for calcium. Cooked bone is dangerous but for some reason the bone in the canned salmon isn't? I can't remember what my vet said but something about calcifying and its safe. I also feed beef liver twice a week (one inch cubes per cat). You can overdose liver so be careful. Liver is highly nutritious but is very compact. Chicken livers are denser than than beef liver so not as easy to overdose on beef (ie you will see diarreah if you gave to much). I do not supplement heart as my vet says I have plenty of taurine in the diet. Though I do have powdered taurine just in case. I get the beef liver from walmart. I slice it up into portions and put it in the freezer so I can grab and individual serving baggy for feeding twice a week.

Supplements: I used to use Wysong Call Of The Wild. This is a generic raw food supplement. My vet seems to think my cats are getting everything they need and are in no need of it anymore. I do supplement protefood which is a combination of amino acids that are essential to cats but this is primarily for when I have to feed them wet food. I also supplement Zypan to Hope to help digestion and Hepatic support for Meeka since she is nursing and needs all the liver support she can get. Hope and Meeka are supplemented 1/4 tsp cod liver oil everyday (anything above this can lead to overdose). But these are veterinary supplements that have been diagnosed for my kitties. These are not necessarily good for every cat and are situational. This is why its best if you can get a vet that is holistic.
 

sharky

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My primary question, and if you answer only one, tell me this: Do you feel feeding raw results in a healthier cat, actually saving you money on vet treatments and giving a healthier experience for your cat?
Well since I buy there raw at the vet no... I spend more time at the vets getting food and questions answered... My 18 yr old is partly raw and healthier than she has been..

Other questions are:

Do you feed raw every meal?
Dog yes
Cat 18 yrs no she eats about 50% raw 50% canned
Cat 2.5 yrs eats dry with some wet and raw as she permits

Do you supplement dry food?
No


Do you buy or make your own?
I tried making and found premade to be cheaper and easier with added piece of mind
If you make your own:

Do you use one meat primarily? Or do you do different types like rabbit, duck, etc?
I rotate because they like turkey beef and chn

Do you get your meat ground or grind your own meat and bones?

Hearts and livers? Are you finding them locally or using an online source via mail?

Supplements. Have you found ONE single supplement that contains everything else needed to add to the meat? (I would think this would be a very helpful product for people making their own cat food.)
Call of the Wild and a few others have been mentioned... I use multiple since I have different ages and species
Thanks in advance. Of course any links to sources in this thread will be helpful to others in the future who are using the search feature to research this subject

www.catinfo.org
 

sharky

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the reason salmon bones can be cooked is they really arent bone s but cartilage


Yes My VET IS VERY HELPFUL
 

solaritybengals

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Originally Posted by sharky

the reason salmon bones can be cooked is they really arent bone s but cartilage
Oh that makes sense! They sure feel like bones if you bite into one accidentally though... I've gotten catfish that seemed laden with those little spikes...other times my catfish have none.
 

renny

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I'm about to start on raw, and the only premade RAW in Canada that I can find is Healthypaw (www.tryhealthypaws.com). The ready made ones come in a variety of meats, though chicken, beef and turkey will probably be my mainstay. I haven't looked into supplementing them. I'm hopeful that the raw diet will benefit them (especially Rambo since he's 1.5 years old and already had a UTI and I would like to keep it to only 1).

I'll be starting as soon as my fostering dies down (just too many mouths to feed right now)
 
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vik61

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Interesting that there IS a one complete supplement. My reading thus far is comprised mainly of this woman's articles and recipes but she doesn't mention one single product for all the nutrients needed to be added to the diet:

http://www.catnutrition.org/

and I gleaned this link from one of the other discussions in here on raw feeding (though it was not titled raw food).

Her approach seems very straightforward and she has an open letter to the veterinary community so I have been assuming that vet support would be almost impossible to find. I was thinking vets would be leery of treating animals fed this way, but hopefully that is not the case and I will be discussing this with my new vet this week when we talk about Boo being sick (since he is the reason I first started thinking about this). I love the idea of having the vet online with this project--that would be such a relief. Crossing my fingers!

I am not uncomfortable at all anymore with making the food according to this woman's recipes. The only problem I am having is the vitamins supplements--they look expensive and she buys them all over the place. Get's her "glandular supplements" one place, salmon oil somewhere else, etc. But that is a matter of getting set up and definitely doable. Have my little shelves set up for kitty cooking, I love the idea.

Before buying a $200 meat grinder though, I am going to lay it all out for the grocer: tell them what I want in exact weights and how I want it put together, and what is to be ground. With this woman's step by step recipes this should be easy to do, provided I find a grocer with ALL the meat I need to complete the first recipe and don't have to chase hearts down one place, livers another, etc.

She says if freezing the food to add more Taurine, and put capusles of taurine on the food as you are serving it--I guess they can't get too much Taurine but they CAN get too much of some of the other things mentioned and also listed in this recipe.

I was looking at prices for already made raw food at Feline's Pride? http://www.felinespride.com/products/catfood.aspx

Two cats for twenty days cost starting at $85 or so. I have three mouths to feed and they say the kittens will actually eat MORE than the adult cats? Yikes. This is why I thought to approach it myself. I like cooking and baking and have the time, but money is tight. Its not THAT much more than what I have budgeted for my current cat food needs (still learning about this though).

It's really not as complicated as I thought either. Keep the stuff frozen; take out what you need for a day or two at most and run kitties' breakfast lunch and dinner under warm water while it is still just slightly frozen sounds like it will produce the best results. This isn't all that much more work than getting the cans out, covering them, etc, at each mealtime.

Beyond not leaving it out to grow bacteria and other organisms which people generally know is not a good idea anyway, these days, there isn't much that can go wrong, is there?

And yes, I was definitely going to get it cut up into nickle size pieces for the little darlings to gnaw away on, being it's good for their teeth. That's going to help, I think. I don't like the idea of feline teeth crunching on dry food with the notion that this is going to help their mouths somehow. It never did make sense after I actually looked at their teeth and how they aren't really made for chewing like dogs or humans.

This is just the type of project I tend to take on and enjoy so I hope my first experiment goes well and they eat the stuff! Please continue with any comments or advice.
 
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vik61

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Originally Posted by sharky

My primary question, and if you answer only one, tell me this: Do you feel feeding raw results in a healthier cat, actually saving you money on vet treatments and giving a healthier experience for your cat?

Well since I buy there raw at the vet no... I spend more time at the vets getting food and questions answered... My 18 yr old is partly raw and healthier than she has been..

www.catinfo.org
This is kind of funny, sharky. I hope it gets routine after awhile? How long have you been raw feeding them?
 

renny

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$85...wow. I was looking into it and came to about $50-$60 a month for my two adults. That depends on how often i get them the more expensive meats like rabbit or quail. Healthypaws also offered the minced meat and vegetable components seperately to allow you to decide what percent of vegetable component you want in the meal (there premade meals have 17% vegetable/fruit matter...and i've been reading some debate on this amount).

Check into: www.felinefuture.com. It's a dried supplement, and fish oil that you just add raw meat and liver to.

Has anyone heard of or tried this?
 

sharky

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I started trying raw a few meals a week about 2.5 yrs ago ... It went badly since I was ill informed and had no support ... then I came here and learned homeade did that for while... about 12 months in current feedings ( about 8 months of using premade ahhhhhh its much easier)
 
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vik61

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Your prices are better than mine sharky and Renny. Whatever I can do to keep the price down. The site I'm coming from is using all top quality meats like free range, no steroid given or antibiotic animal meats.

The site I quoted my prices from felinespride is also premade food. $85 is the lowest cost recipe. Others are higher but at least you can offer the munchkins some variety.

I have that link Kai gave in the other thread but I haven't read it yet. Was doing research yesterday... Here it is, add this to sharky's list:

http://www.bravorawdiet.com/
 
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vik61

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Originally Posted by sharky

I started trying raw a few meals a week about 2.5 yrs ago ... It went badly since I was ill informed and had no support ... then I came here and learned homeade did that for while... about 12 months in current feedings ( about 8 months of using premade ahhhhhh its much easier)
Oh, I never would've even considered this had it not been for this site. I think getting on with one of the discussion forums Solarity Bengals suggests is a good idea, at least.

I guess as long as I don't see anyone throwing up, or getting sick, or not eating, I would be okay with it with just the online instructions but the support is important.

What can go wrong, is my only other question then....
 
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vik61

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Oh Wow. So FelinesPride is doing what I was wondering about. They've got a kit. All you do is add your meat! Even the salmon oil is provided in little individual package--that is too NEAT.

I just love that. It's like StoveTop Supper for cats!


Hmm. They are using bone meal to replace the ground bone. My site is saying don't do that...here we go with the controversy. I suppose you could also just put the ground bone into the mix, with some help at finding the right quantities.

They are in Canada, so add shipping for this product, non-Canadians.


http://www.felinefuture.com/products//#whatistc
 

sharky

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that would be very expensive if it doesnt include meat ...\\

I use columbia or omas ... not sure about free range but they are organic ... and they are USDA Inpected( not much but at least you and I could eat it


Sounds like you pay for pachaging... I pay 5.50-6.50 for two lbs(meat and organ or meat and bone)( 5lbs meat bone organ and veggies is 10-11) which is a weeks worth for my 1.65 eaters
.. with supplement I measure out it comes to ten bucks for 1.65 eaters all who weigh 9-14 lbs( or 2/3 less than what I paid for canned and dry for the same kids

if you get premade and put a few days in the fridge I cut a corner off and do it pastry chef style
 

sharky

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Bones help clean teeth and most bone meal is cooked leaving alot of mineral s out of it
 
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vik61

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Originally Posted by sharky

that would be very expensive if it doesnt include meat ...\\

I use columbia or omas ... not sure about free range but they are organic ... and they are USDA Inpected( not much but at least you and I could eat it


Sounds like you pay for pachaging... I pay 5.50-6.50 for two lbs(meat and organ or meat and bone)( 5lbs meat bone organ and veggies is 10-11) which is a weeks worth for my 1.65 eaters
.. with supplement I measure out it comes to ten bucks for 1.65 eaters all who weigh 9-14 lbs( or 2/3 less than what I paid for canned and dry for the same kids

if you get premade and put a few days in the fridge I cut a corner off and do it pastry chef style
Too COOL. Much better than what I would expect to hear. I realize I have only done limited research to this point, but I had to start asking questions!
 
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vik61

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Originally Posted by sharky

Bones help clean teeth and most bone meal is cooked leaving alot of mineral s out of it
I agree it's too expensive. The good thing is now that one company is doing it, or, at least one, you know more will be on the way, with hopefully better prices.

The one thing I kept hearing stressed for raw feeding was the necessity of having the meat / bone ratio right. I don't like the idea of cutting corners on the bone part, especially with such a pricey product.
 

sharky

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Originally Posted by Vik61

I agree it's too expensive. The good thing is now that one company is doing it, or, at least one, you know more will be on the way, with hopefully better prices.

The one thing I kept hearing stressed for raw feeding was the necessity of having the meat / bone ratio right. I don't like the idea of cutting corners on the bone part, especially with such a pricey product.
70-75% meat
20% bone
10-15% veggies( I do my own at a lot less
)
 
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