Considering switching to raw foods, a few questions

[jessica991]

Hi all! I just adopted two kittens - Dolly & Benny. They are about 8 months, one week old. I have been feeding them Hill's Kitten Healthy Development dry kibble which is what they were being fed at the shelter. However, I have been hearing amazing things about raw food and am interested in switching. But I've got a couple of questions!

1. Are the Primal Freeze Dried Nuggets a good choice for kittens under a year old, or should I hold off until they are older?

2. How many Nuggets would each cat eat per meal? Do they get chopped up or dropped in the bowl whole? 

3. The Nuggets are very expensive. Are they worth the price tag? I can't help but wonder how long one $30 bag would last. 

4. Is is true that these Nuggets, and raw food in general, eliminate litter box odor?

5. Both Benny and Dolly could stand to lose a little bit of weight. Would the Nuggets be conducive to weight loss or are they less nutritious than standard dry kibble?

6. I have a third cat, Tammy, who is 7.5 years old. Would a middle-aged cat benefit from switching to a raw diet? She LOVES her dry food, I cannot get her to eat any canned. She also needs to lose weight, a decent amount. ;-) 

 

[lisahe]

 
Hi all! I just adopted two kittens - Dolly & Benny. They are about 8 months, one week old. I have been feeding them Hill's Kitten Healthy Development dry kibble which is what they were being fed at the shelter. However, I have been hearing amazing things about raw food and am interested in switching. But I've got a couple of questions!

1. Are the Primal Freeze Dried Nuggets a good choice for kittens under a year old, or should I hold off until they are older?

2. How many Nuggets would each cat eat per meal? Do they get chopped up or dropped in the bowl whole? 

3. The Nuggets are very expensive. Are they worth the price tag? I can't help but wonder how long one $30 bag would last. 

4. Is is true that these Nuggets, and raw food in general, eliminate litter box odor?

5. Both Benny and Dolly could stand to lose a little bit of weight. Would the Nuggets be conducive to weight loss or are they less nutritious than standard dry kibble?

6. I have a third cat, Tammy, who is 7.5 years old. Would a middle-aged cat benefit from switching to a raw diet? She LOVES her dry food, I cannot get her to eat any canned. She also needs to lose weight, a decent amount. ;-) 

Congratulations on adopting your kittens! It's great that you want to start them on some raw food while they're young. I can't answer your first question with anything other than "I don't see why not" for starting them now... but I'll see what I can say about the rest.

Just for background: We feed our two cats quite a bit of Primal -- it's about half of their diet. They get two meals of Primal a day, a snack of Rad Cat, and several canned meals/snacks. They're about three years old, smallish, very active Siamese mixes.

2. It depends on how often you're feeding them. Each of our cats' Primal meals is about 1-1.25 nuggets per cat.  We crumble the food into smallish pieces. One cat likes larger pieces than the other; the other cat likes the food wetter. We blend several Primal flavors in each meal, in various proportions, usually with a little Stella & Chewy's, too.

3. Primal's worth the money for our cats because they eat everything so there's no waste. Raw food also seems to satisfy them better than some, if not most, canned. For us, Primal is about the same price per meal as "premium" (whatever that means) canned foods. Prices do vary: it pays to shop around.

4. Yes, at least for us. All the raw and canned foods we feed are high-protein and low-carb and the litter box is not smelly at all. You can tell when a cat has been in it but, hmm, it just smells a little barn-like rather than really stinky. (We know bad box smells from our previous cat: we didn't know then how to feed cats properly and her box was horrendous.)

5. Primal is complete food. So is kibble but I'd say Primal is more nutritious than kibble because it's meat based and doesn't have lots of carby fillers like kibble. As for weight loss, I'd say that yes, it's good for that because the carb levels are low. There are vegetables in Primal (for nutrients) but they're not carby, caloric ones like potatoes or peas.

6. Yes! Maybe she could learn to eat freeze-dried food that's been rehydrated?

I'd also highly recommend Rad Cat: it's how we started our cats on raw food. They loved it from the start and it's still their very favorite food. It took them longer to really get into Primal but now they really love that, too.

Primal, by the way, will send samples if you write to them.

Good luck!

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

I agree with everything LisaHE has said. 

I feed Primal DRY to my crew as treats. I just break it up into pieces and toss "em to the kits.   None of them like it rehydrated, so I just make sure that when mealtime comes around, I add plenty of extra water to their food.  Since Tammy is a kibble addict, I see no reason why you can't feed her the Primal instead of kibble, however, it IS possible to teach an old cat new tricks.  I think Callie was 10 when I switched her over from kibble to raw.  Have you seen these threads?

http://www.thecatsite.com/a/transitioning-free-fed-kibble-kitties-to-timed-meals

http://www.thecatsite.com/a/transit...-to-a-new-type-of-food-canned-raw-or-homemade

Weight loss for all of them is going to be dependent on how much you feed them.  Calories consumed vs calories burned, just like with humans.  I never got my Darko to lose weight until I got him off free feeding kibble and onto scheduled meals, with all food measured so i knew how much he was really eating.