Meat
Me: (picking up the pain pills at the vet) So how I give these to him is I smear them with peanut butter? Oh wait, that's for a dog.
The Clerk Lady: Well, you can fold it in some turkey or some salami, or we sell some things called "Pill Pockets" that are salmon flavored or something.
Me: (the world is totally recalibrated. This sounds dumb but I had totally forgotten that you could go to the store and buy meat.) Oh yeah. Right. Thanks.
***
So I have some questions. I read online that organic ground beef is a totally good food for cats and also that cats should eat a mostly raw diet. I tried to buy some organic ground beef but it was so BLOODY. It's not that I mind the blood, it's just that I couldn't quite believe that I should give it to him raw so instead I copped out and went with a tiny bit of roasted chicken from the deli. Does anyone actually have experience with feeding non-processed food to cats? Do you seriously just like plunk down a hunk of raw beef and say, have at it, kitty?
posted by Evie P. @ 11:41:00 PM
4 Comments:
The reason you want raw meat is that cooking destroys taurine, which is an amino acid that cats need but, being pure carnivores, can't manufacture themselves and can't get from vegetable sources.
You can mix the hamburger up with a little cooked grain--some oatmeal or millet, which a cat feeding itself would get from the digestive tracts from the birds or mice it ate. This will make it less goopy. You can add calcium, which they get from small bones, by buying bone meal at a pet food or health store, or by baking egg shells until they're dry and then smashing them up. You can, if you wish, also add yeast or a B-vitamin supplement (also available at health-food pet stores) and even taurine, which you can get at any health food store in capsules--you just open the capsule and pour it in. That would be a complete diet for a cat, and you can use it to totally replace cat food (which would be a very nice way of feeding him in his last days--yummy and healthy). Clams are high in taurine; you can simply buy canned clams, drain off the juice, and mix them into the raw food or simply feed them straight. Heart is also good for cats, if you can find beef heart. If you mix up a big batch of the hamburger/millet/B-vitamin/eggshell/taurine food, you can freeze small amounts of it to preserve it; freezing doesn't damage taurine.
I fed my cat, who is allergic to poultry, a raw food diet like this for years. She's amazingly healthy. A really good book on the subject is "Dr. Pitcairn's Natural Health for Dogs and Cats"--it has recipes.
I'm really sorry about your kitty.
Thanks, Dr B. I actually already put that book in my Amazon cart before I read your response. Nutro, the kitty's processed food, seems relatively full of all the necessary elements, but it does seem like he'd like raw meat better. Thanks for the info about how to serve it to him: I'm going to try it out ASAP.
Ms. P. I have that book. Let me find it. You can have it.
I was going to say what bitchphd said. (Except that I'm not industrious enough myself to make the raw food - I found other commercial alternatives.) But I will say that as canned foods go, Nutro is very good. Also, I've seen people say that one of the problems with many commercial foods is that they use a ton of tuna, which is very strongly flavored, so it takes some cats a while to get used to the raw food after eating canned. So you may want to start in small batches or mixing it in with the current food, if your kitty ends up initially unimpressed.
And I meant to comment on the earlier post - I'm sorry to hear about your cat too.
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