My cats have been on a raw diet for around 7 years now. The motivation came from European travels when I was 17 and seeing an Austrian family add raw meat to their pet's commercial food diet. Feeding Ember and Skie raw certainly hasn't eliminated all their health & environmentally-induced problems, however it sure has presented them an opportunity to thrive.
Compare the commercial food cats typically eat today to an American eating out of a freezer box or canned food for every meal, every day of her life, never tasting or experiencing or benefiting from healthy, fresh, raw foods. Then take that thought down a few notches to include a bunch of grain fillers to keep it cheap and meat not fit for human consumption that is allowed in pet food (at least in the past...maybe it's changed in the past 5 yrs), such as diseased, dying, dead animals and slaughterhouse "waste"... doesn't sound too healthy, aye?
See this excerpt from the site I just pulled up in 2 seconds via google, www.rawfedcats.org/toxic.htm about the meat you might find in your wonderfully nutritious, commerical pet food:
"If you were to step inside a rendering plant, what you’d find [is a] pit [into which] carcasses, diseased bits and pieces of flesh, bone and offal, grease, rotten food, styrofoam, plastic, pesticide ear tags, dead companion animals, flea collars and other waste materials are thrown, to be slowly ground and chipped together into a foul pulp...[it's then] cooked at very high temperatures, which destroys virtually whatever limited nutritive value the stuff may have ever had to begin with. The fat and [separated] powdery grit...is known as the familiar "meat and bone meal" [typical ingredient in your pet food]...and this lifeless stuff is what you’ll find forms the basis of most all commercially manufactured pet foods."
I might add that this is, frankly, a typical and one of the worst examples of capitalism i've seen - basically this is all legal and the pet food "industry" was started in order to, you guessed it, capitalize on the waste leftover from the human meat industry. Cash for waste...sweet!
Anyway, enough soapboxing... here's the diet:
- Raw meat (muscle & organ meats)
- a mineral mix (maybe 1 tsp)
- Dream Coat (from Halo Pets) oil/vitamin blend (read instructions for amount)
- sometimes i add a little steamed chopped veggies (except onion or garlic-not good for cats)
These days, your options (in Portland, at least) are as great as your wallet. If you have more $ than time, you can get something like RadCat, which is a complete diet, including all of the above mixed up, ready to go.
Or you can do-it-yourself by purchasing "pet meat" from New Seasons Markets (mixed muscle meats and organs) at about as cheap as you could do it yourself, add a mineral mix and the oil supplement.
Mineral Mix (1)
1c wheat bran
1c bone meal*
1/8c (2TBS) kelp powder
3/4c nutritional yeast
1/2c soy lecithin granules
just mix the ingredients together and store in the fridge. Add maybe 1tsp to the cat's meal (based on 2 meals/day). A similar mineral mix is sold by www.halopets.com, if you have more $ than time.
* I substitute ground eggshells for bone meal. If you have your own chickens or a neighbor who can save you shells, great....free calcium supplement that has something like 2x the calcium as bonemeal. If you use commercial eggs, put them in the oven for about 10 minutes to remove the strange coating they put on commercial eggs. then grind 'em up in a blender.
Dream Coat provides omega fatty acids and vitamins A, D & E to the cats.
And you can toss in anything else you like from time to time... a raw egg, almond pulp (i sometimes feed a little to them after making my own almond milk), a little oatmeal, whatever. Ember and Skie absolutely love corn...they whine at me anytime it's boiling on the stove. And Ember still loves to jump up on the counter, grab a piece of cooling steamed broccoli and run down the hall with it...now that's dedication!!
There's plenty of controversy around feeding grains, wheat products/gluten, garlic (onions are still not good regardless from what i understand), bones, etc..... however the diet even as above is probably still 10X healthier than the heat treated, non-human consumable, dry/wet processed, commercial food you're feeding them... so, at least until you feel like an expert on the raw diet, who cares.
Enjoy!
References:
(1) The New Natural Cat, a 90s book by Anita Frazier - Mineral mix recipe, etc.
(2) Natural Nutrition for Dogs & Cats, Kymythy Schultze
(3) www.rawfedcats.org - one example of a site advocating for raw food diets
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