Why Raw Feeding?

When I brought Calcifer, my first Siamese home, he had been weaned on a combination of Royal Canin biscuits, wet food and cooked food.  I carried this diet on, and didn’t have any problems with it.  Cooked food would include roasted chicken, scrambled eggs, or poached white fish.  When he was a little older, I found I was using less commercial wet food.  Over time, I began to notice that the litter tray was noticeably more unpleasant after Calcifer had been eating pouches of wet food.  I stopped feeding the pouches, and Calcifer grew, developed and maintained excellent condition without the commercial food.  I was still free feeding RC biscuits, and he still thinks they are the best thing ever!

One of my mistakes during this time was to feed way too much tuna.  It has since been pointed out to me (thanks Kat!) that there are some problems associated with this.  I think I was lucky in that the RC biscuits are a nutritionally balanced food, which provided Calcifer with his dietary requirements.  A diet relying too heavily on tuna is lacking in several components.  The most noticeable seems to be vitamin E, and a vitamin B deficiency can also occur.  The other vital nutrient for cats is Taurine – a lack of which can seriously damage eyesight amongst other problems.

So, the boys still have tuna as a treat – always in spring water, never oil or brine, but their diet is far more balanced now.

A friend of mine introduced me to the idea of feeding raw turkey mince.  I had never heard or thought of feeding raw meat to cats before, but she had been recommended feeding it to her new Maine Coon kitten, to help him bulk up, and grow well.

I was really quite surprised at how well this went down right from the start.  Calcifer always adored his raw turkey mince.

My second cat Sirius came from the same breeder, and so had been raised in the same way as Calcifer.  When he first arrived, I put down kitten RC biscuits as well as the adult ones, until he was six months old.  Other than that, he moved straight onto the same diet as Calcifer, including the raw turkey mince.

Sirius was a tiny kitten.  Not unhealthy, but really small.  He is now eighteen months old, and a strapping four kilos.  He is so strong, and so healthy with a lovely soft coat that if only he had ever heard of the breed standard, he would be perfect.

The range of food I gave to the boys gradually widened.  They would now have a variety of scrambled eggs, cooked or raw turkey mince, roast chicken, cooked white fish and tinned pilchards in tomato sauce.  Another complete revelation to me was the love of tomato sauce exhibited my strange little people!

It was really the third kitten that brought the biggest change in terms of diet.  A couple of weeks before he was due to come home, Kat casually mentioned that this baby was a total raw feeder.  My interest was instantly caught, as I already did my best to keep commercially prepared, additive filled foods out of the boys’ diet.  I hadn’t realised the extent of raw meat that was suitable for feeding to cats.  I hadn’t realised the full range of benefits it would bring.  I hadn’t realised how, with a little research and planning, it would be straightforward to incorporate into my life.

From the start, I never had any objections at all to Indiana continuing his raw feeding when he came to us, so the first thing was just to make sure I had some of his favourites ready for him when he arrived.  For a while, there was a range of food on the kitchen floor that wouldn’t have disgraced the buffet table of a medium sized hotel.  There was a certain amount of juggling of timings too.  I didn’t want Indiana to start filling up on interesting smelling cooked foods and train himself off his lovely raw meat.

I did some more research, partly following the links Kat sent me, and partly just doing searches on the internet, to see what I would stumble across.  Although there are some articles and opinions against raw feeding, they mainly seem to come back to the fact that raw meat could carry bacteria, and anyhow, commercial cat food is purposefully balanced to have the correct range of nutrients.  I’ll admit that of course raw meat can carry bacteria.  So can most things.  I don’t intend feeding out of date, festering, maggot ridden or even slightly past its best meat to my babies.  How familiar is the image of a half empty can of cat food in the fridge with dried bits of food round the top and no cover?  Food refrigerated in tins once opened will be tainted by the metal can.

I’m not contesting that good quality commercial food may be scientifically balanced.  It also contains additives and preservatives necessary in non-refrigerated canned, pouched or boxed foods.  Often, it also contains cereals as a bulking agent.  These are not naturally part of a cat’s diet, so the animal needs to consume greater quantities of food in order to absorb the level of nutrients needed.  They are also not easily processed by the digestive system.  There is a reason that most of us feel the need to include fresh foods in our own diet, rather than relying on highly processed pre-prepared meals.

The third objection I sometimes hear is that I wouldn’t eat raw meat myself.  No, I wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t eat cat food either.  I’m not a cat.

How to start raw feeding?

Now I was in a fairly lucky position of already having a cat household that was free of commercial wet food.  But the boys loved their RC biscuits.  And they were used to having biscuits available all day.  To begin with, I started offering raw food that I thought would be easy for them to manage.  The turkey mince was already one of their favourites anyway.  I introduced minced lamb and beef, which took a couple of tries for them to get used to.  As Indiana had arrived with a love of chicken wings, I would also put down some wings chopped into two or three pieces.  Calcifer took to these straight away; Sirius has only recently come around to the idea.

From the minced meat, I started to use diced meat for some of the meals -   turkey thigh meat, braising beef or frying steak.  Again, most new additions were viewed with slight suspicion at first.  I quite often had to throw away most of a plate of meat, and try again the following day. 

After two or three weeks, I realised that I was going to have to stop putting the dry food down altogether.  For starters, Indiana was starting to favour biscuits and was eating less raw meat.  Also, the other two were never properly hungry at meal times, so there wasn’t much incentive to try new foods.  To begin with, this caused a bit of an outcry, but they very quickly got used to having structured meal times.  In hindsight, stopping the free feeding right at the beginning would have been a better idea.

Throughout the changeover, I kept a close eye on everyone’s weights to make sure that the boys were all actually getting enough food.  Sometimes I’d use pilchards, cooked chicken, or some dry biscuits mixed with their meat to encourage them to eat.  They were also still having cooked food for some of their meals, so as not to make the change too sudden.

One of the other considerations was getting some offal into their diet.  Lambs’ hearts were more easily accepted than I thought they would be.  Sirius in particular loves red meat, and will happily eat chunks of heart.  I have found that kidneys are less popular, but if they are mixed in with some other food, they will get eaten.

Sirius doesn’t have particularly good teeth, and isn’t keen on chicken wings or thighs.  I have come across lamb ribs though.  The bones are small enough that I can cut them into squares and he will eat these, so I try to include them regularly.

Having gradually increased the raw meat and decreased the cooked food in the weekly diet, we are now at a stage where most of the meals will be raw meat, with a good amount of bone included.  They also still have cooked white fish once or twice a week, and cooked chicken around twice a week.

What has raw feeding achieved?

There have been several noticeable changes resulting from the natural diet the boys are now on. 

Everyone’s coats are beautifully soft, shiny and stroke-able.  We don’t have separated coats, ever.  The boys are all more lively and active.  This, probably in addition with the improved food, has led to them having lovely firm muscles.  All three really are bursting with health and vitality.

We have very little vomiting.  Calcifer has always been a little prone to this, and it’s a huge relief to know that most of the time his dinner is staying in his stomach.

The wet commercial food was the main cause of the offensive smell of the litter tray, so this had improved right back when I stopped using it.  However, cutting out the biscuits has led to even more of an improvement.  All three usually have firm, formed stools, and cleaning the tray is now a quick and easy job.

The boys really enjoy meal times.  Their food takes time for them to tackle – they sort it, pick the bits they want first, tear it, chew it, and crunch the bones.  Then usually someone will take a particularly prized piece to a quiet corner to really be able to concentrate and take some time over devouring it.