Why switch from kibble to raw meat? Most people dislike the idea of handing raw meat and watching their pet chew on bones. For this reason, there are very few resources detailing how to implement a raw diet for your pet. Most Americans are not realistic about where their meat comes from and would be appalled if they saw a meat packing plant. You owe it to yourself and your pet to realize where your meat comes from and to recognize that the natural diet of your pet is not a bowl of dried kibble.
Most kibble is made from the diseased animals that die before reaching the slaughterhouse. It is not uncommon for dead cats and dogs shipped from humane societies to make their way into your kibble mix, flea collars and all. This awful mix of meat gets ground up with fillers like corn husks and bi-products from farms that cannot be used for any other purpose. It is neatly packaged and sold to you, the pet owner, who is naively unaware of what you are buying. Because cat and dog food is not sold for human consumption, the manufacturer is not required to disclose the actual ingredients.
When going natural, it is best to consider what your cat would eat if she were a wild cat.
Many “organic” dog and cat foods, whether raw or not, claim that dogs and cats need supplements of vitamins, minerals, etc. The only thing your dog or cat really needs is what it would get from naturally killing and eating prey (bones, organs and all).
There are two “types” of raw meat methods that pet owners use. One is called the BARF diet, short for “Biologically Appropriate Raw Food.” With this method, you grind up raw meat with small bones, grains and veggies. You cannot cook the bones because during the heating process the bones microscopically fracture which can cause intestinal bleeding if your pet eats cooked bone. Once you grind your raw pet food, you then portion it out into patties and freeze the patties, taking them out to thaw in rotation from your freezer to your fridge for each meal. The disadvantages to this are:
- You need to invest in an industrial strength grinder that can handle bones ($250+)
- You spend more time making your pet’s food
- Your pet is still eating ground up mushy food.
- Traditional BARF diets include grains and veggies, which dogs and cats don’t naturally choose to eat themselves in the wild.
I considered the BARF diet, but this did not seem natural. In the wild, cats would not be eating veggies or grains nor would their food be served to them in a neatly ground up mush patty. Feeding my cats a Raw Diet was easier than I thought. The purely raw diet consumes less of your time to implement and allows your pet to chew on bones and eat raw liver and heart, much more natural than a bowl of mushy food.
I feed my cats mainly chicken, but 2-3 times a week I feed fish, eggs, or a live rodent. Variety is key because cats (not sure about dogs) can get hooked on one type of food if you feed it to them too often. Cats eat small bones like the breast, neck and rib bones from chickens. This is how the get their calcium. Eating the organs like liver and heart provide Taurine and Iron. I can buy a 4 pound whole chicken from the grocer for $4 and it lasts a whole week with 2 cats.
Feeding your cat the right amount of food is also important.
Each animal is different, but most cats need to eat 2-4% of their body weight in meat each day to maintain their current weight. Before you start feeding raw, weight your pet and record their weight every 5 days or so. If they need to lose some weight, adjust their daily intake slightly until an ideal weight is reached. One of my cats, Edison is still a young adult, just under a year old. He started at 10 lbs, but is still a growing boy. 4% of his body weight is 4 ounces/day. Because he is growing, I usually provide him with a half to one ounce more than the 4 ounces and let him decide if he needs to eat more or not. My other cat Autumn started at 11 pounds and could afford to lose a half pound, maybe a pound. I give her 3 – 3 1/2 ounces per day. She has only lost 1/4 lb over a three week period, which is a good pace for her to drop the weight. They eat about 3-4 oz/ day to maintain their weight. (Tip: to weight your kitty, stand on a bathroom scale, weigh yourself. Then weight yourself holding your kitty and subtract to find her weight)
Raw is cheaper than a medium quality kibble brand.
Before I switched to raw I was going through 2 bags of Blue Diamond kibble per month and each bag cost $18. At $4 for one whole chicken, I spend less per month on fresh, raw chicken than I spent buying just one bag of catfood.
Some things to noticed when switching to the raw diet.
My cats are more relaxed during the day. They are more friendly towards me and towards each other. Their coats are less oily and are much softer than before. They don’t pace around the house aimlessly. They are more engaged during playtime. They also drink less water. Because their raw meat has water weight and is not packed with fillers or grain, their digestive systems work more naturally. They go through about 1/4 of the water they used to drink daily. Their poo has also changed. Where it used to be smelly, gummy and dark brown, now it resembles poo you would see from a wild animal: light brown, very crumbly. They also poo less because they are not eating “filler” kibble, so that means less litter box cleaning for me and no awful smells when they do use the kitty box.
Helping your cat make the switch
Some cats are addicted to kibble. Others will take right to eating raw. There is no magic plan to making the switch, just go at your cat’s pace. Pushing her isn’t going to help her and starving her into submission can actually harm her. If a cat goes more than 24 hours without eating there is a danger that she will develop a fatal liver disease called hepatic lipidosis. Hepatic lipidosis occurs when a cat’s fatty deposits are metabolized in the liver for energy. A cat’s liver is not built for long term fat metabolism. What can happen is the liver becomes overwhelmed and covered in fatty deposits, which causes organ failure. Don’t make your kitty go cold turkey.
There are some general steps you can follow.
Some cats don’t need to take all these baby steps and will jump from kibble to raw meat and bones, while others may need more time on each stage. Simply offer your cat the next “stage”. If he loves what you gave him, try the next stage. If he sticks up his nose and won’t eat what you offer, step back one stage.
- To get your cat off the kibble, you can start wetting it with water. Softening the kibble helps kitty get used to non dry food.
- Try giving your cat canned cat food. If she refuses, crush up some kibble and sprinkle it on the canned food.
- Move to canned herring or sardines. These have tiny bones and skin still on the fish.
- Cutting raw chicken or turkey into bit size pieces will help your cat get used to the texture and smell of raw bird.
- Next, try giving her larger pieces of chicken. She will have to learn to break up the meat with her molars in order to swallow.
- Add in some small bones with her raw meat meals. Leave tasty morsels on the chicken ribs and neck bones. You will get to watch the true carnivore come out!
- The final step would be to let your cat try to kill her own mouse or fish.
Basic Raw Feeding Tips:
- Frequency: I have found that feeding my cats 2oz in the morning (like 8am) and then 2oz at night (9pm) is best for them. I could get away with feeding them once a day, but this is the equivalent to them catching a mouse in the morning and a mouse at night and eating each prey item entirely.
- Never cook bones. Cooking bones creates microscopic fractures in the bone that can cut your kitty’s soft intestine causing internal bleeding.
- ALWAYS SERVE RAW MEAT AT ROOM TEMPERATURE. This goes back to thinking about how a cat naturally catches and eats prey items. They would never eat a cold piece of raw from the fridge. If cold raw meat hits your kitty’s tummy, she is liable to throw it up. An easy way to thaw out food is to set it in a dish submerged in warm water for 10-15 mins.
- Giving your cat a balance of 47% meat and 33% fat, 15% bones and 5% organs is an approximate ratio of what they would ingest by eating a whole prey item. Your kitty isn’t going to eat the large thigh bones of a chicken, but she will crunch up and eat the little neck and breast bones, wing bones and connective tissues. If you buy a whole chicken, you can use everything.
- Invest in an accurate scale. Weigh out the portions you give your cat each time.
- Record! Get a logbook just to keep track of what you give your cat, what she actually eats and what she weighs every 5 days or so. You can also record foods that she refuses to touch in case you want to reintroduce them later.
- I usually take one day a month to prep all my cat’s food for the entire 30 day period. I buy 4 whole birds from the supermarket, butcher them and bag them in weekly portions that I can thaw out for the week at a time. I even save money on birds sometimes by offering to take and butcher birds from friends of mine who keep chickens for egg laying. Sometimes a hen will get a taste for eating eggs. She’ll start stepping on fresh eggs to eat them. Once she does this, there is no cure and she must be removed before she teaches the rest of the hens how to be egg eaters. I make myself known as someone who will take these hens away for my cats. People generally don’t like eating hens that are egg layers because with age the chicken’s meat toughens up. Most birds humans eat are killed at 9-12 months of age.
Raw Diet meal plan I feed my cats:
- Eggs (or just the yolk) 2-3 times/ week
- Fish 2-3 times/week
- Tuna and Sardines have needed Lineolic acid (so does safflower oil, sunflower oil or corn oil)
- Cod (has Arachinodic and Vitamin A)
- Bird with bones for all other meals
- Whole mouse/rodent (usually live)
Cat nutrition:
- Though cat food usually only consists of 26 percent protein and 9 percent fat, cats get about 47 percent protein and 33 percent fat in the wild, so their bodies are set up for the increase.
- Nutrients that may need to be supplemented: vitamins A, B-complex, D, E and calcium, which can be aquired naturally. Vitamin A can be found in cod liver oil, and calcium is present in bones, which your cat (or dog) will ingest.
- Cats also require linoleic acid, arachindonic acid and taurine, all of which may need to be supplemented in a homemade raw diet. Lineolic acid can be found in safflower, sunflower or corn oil as well as some fish such as sardines and tuna, and arachindonic oil can be found in cod liver oil. Taurine is found in organ meat, such as heart meat as well as tuna, mackerel and clams.
The transition to raw diet is simple, cheap and healthy. Cats usually make the switch easily as long as the right protein sources are chosen. My cats turn their nose up at shrimp and clams but love to eat lamb, tuna, herring and tilapia. I keep an aquaponics system to grow herbs for myself and fish for my cats. It is sustainable and very green 
Enjoy watching your kitty find her inner carnivore.
Check out this website for more instructions on raw feeding cats.
http://www.rawfedcats.org/practicalguide.htm
dominant ‘new atheist’ prejudice against any institution with strong beliefs.” I can agree with the first observation that the victims, young children would have been terribly confused as to what to do after being raped. Their parents told them to trust priests and that priests are there as representatives of Jesus, whom they have been told is someone they should worship. Does a child tell her parents, another adult, who does she trust? And when she tells someone, do they believe her? And IF they believe her, do they have the guts to questions their own pastor or religious environment enough to raise a stink?
has been more concerned with covering it’s own backside than it is with solving the widespread problem of child rape in the priesthood. It is much more concerned with it’s public image than it is concerned with admitting faults and making amends with the victims.
food they have decided to deprive themselves of for 40 days. I vaguely recall a passage in the gospels where Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for publicly displaying their fasting and how god will not “count” it on the list he is supposedly making and checking (twice). You poor martyrs! How terrible that you have to do without soda, candy, chocolate, video games, TV, etc for a WHOLE FORTY DAYS. Have you given any thought as to all those who live in abject poverty and NEVER have ANY of that stuff? How arrogant of you to think that your god will reward you for giving up such luxuries when so many starve to death every day because they have nothing to eat? Four years ago I gave up eating all processed sugars, sodas, fast food and excess. I have never owned a video game and have not owned a TV for 3 years. I do this because it benefits my health and encourages exploration of the world. I fail to see how you giving up candy for Lent and complaining about it does anything to benefit you or those who go without every day of their lives. For Lent, try giving up God and see how clear things become.
can’t “eat meat”. The last time I checked, fish was meat. This whole fish on Fridays tradition has an interesting metamorphoses through history. Fasting rules for Catholics in particular used to be very strict. It progressed from no meat allowed on EVERY Friday of the year to only Wednesday and Fridays during Lent and then lastly to “no meat” on only Fridays during Lent. Then, as people tend to do, the faithful found a loophole in their rules because they did not “count” fish as meat by saying that it came from water animals, not land animals. After decades of their flock bending the rules so they could have fish on Fridays, the Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI decided to allow Fish on Fridays in 1966. Now, I don’t mind accommodating my vegan friends, people with allergies or intolerance to certain foods. What does bother me is the “poor me” message that “fasting” Christians bring to my dinner table and to the world. McDonald’s even caters to their “fast” season, commercializing and capitalizing on the pointless tradition of one religion. I fail to see how eating expensive fish, now in short supply is a sacrifice.
to connect how eating 2 to 3 times the amount of calories needed to live each day equates to starving children dying in third world countries. Even here on American soil, families are finding it difficult to find enough food to survive and the pious obese flock to church every Sunday to be reassured by their pastor that they are checking off all the necessary dates to be admitted into heaven. This type of hypocrisy abounds during Lent when the biblical reading encourage homilies about abstinence, moderation, charity and self denial. Obesity is perhaps the most un-Christian behavior of all, exercising gluttony, sloth, greed, addiction, destruction of your “god-given” body and a complete lack of compassion for those who have no food to eat. I fail to see how being 200 pounds overweight exemplifies Christian behavior.
What do you think of when you hear the word “marriage”? Happy couples, cake, rings, wedding bells and day to celebrate? Young couples today are beginning to think beyond the wedding day, considering the financial implications of combining taxes and sharing debt obligations. There are many alternatives to getting legally married. The easiest one is co-habitation, but this carries with it some disadvantages when you want to be tied legally to your partner. What are the pros and cons of marriage?
of years they have been alive. But why does this mentality persist when people live to be 90 or 100 (provided they lead a 
Perspectively, life has just begun and the real YOU has just recently taken shape. Change careers, go back to college, move far away, get in the best shape of your life, pick up a sport you’ve always wanted to try, whatever it takes to make you happy. Why? Because this day will never come again and if you lead a healthy life, you may be living whatever path you set for yourself for another 70 years. Continue to reinvent, change and challenge yourself.
“mother nature”. I didn’t have to wait very long. Haiti’s misfortune brings up the blaring inconsistency in religion, especially the monotheistic religions: the problem of good and evil.
This December I read an article on Treehugger.com addressing healthy armpits. Armpits are a common conundrum among health nuts like myself who have decided not to use deodorizers with chemicals and metals in them. So many armpit products today advertise as an “antiperspirant”. But do you really know why they work or how?
natural salts to kill the bacteria that eat your sweat and exude that awful stink you are trying to get rid of in the first place. Get rid of the bacteria producing the smell, don’t force your skin to swell shut preventing natural sweat.
bodies, Winter Solstice has stood as a turning point in the seasons.
Having just visited the gynecologist for a yearly examination, I noticed an overwhelming ill feeling a few hours after leaving the doctor’s office. For the rest of the day I had a mix of a headache, abdominal cramps, nausea, fatigue, and an upset stomach. The symptoms would come and go without pattern. I generally just fell unwell. I have had this feeling after every doctor visit where lube is used vaginally to insert some instrument (or someone’s hand). They squirt out that nasty lube and smear it all over their hand or tool before sliding it in. I had to know what was in that stuff.
a skin irritant and is known to cause allergic reaction in humans. That would explain why I felt like crap after the doctor used a half cup on her hand.
reasons to say “no thank you” to the receipt: Saving paper and staying BPA free.
myself there is something to be said for being buff AND tan. Spray on tans are by far the most common alternative to frying your skin in the cancer coffin on a regular basis. I’ve tried the spray tan booth a few times myself and was hard pressed to avoid breathing in the spray. Holding your breath for 15 seconds while being doused with dye. I inevitably inhaled the stuff.
nanoparticles are not able to penetrate the skin, but upon entering the body, they are able to move around freely causing oxidative stress and cell death.
increase the growth of already present cancerous cells. These findings augment the all to familiar adage: “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing”. It should come as no surprise that a healthy balance of anything, including folic acid is the best way to enhance the body’s functions. An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but 100 apples will certainly make you sick.
when the nails were being hammered into the wrist that tendon would tare and brake, forcing Jesus to use His back muscles to support himself so that He could breath.
women’s hormones make her more likely to choose a mate who exhibits more masculine traits and to also choose a mate who is genetically less like herself through the body’s response to pheromones of the opposite sex.
It is plausible that there are endless numbers of other universes “floating” about and our universe is just one of them. Within each of these multi-verses different laws and properties may govern the interactions within. This “
held in hand. He told us it is the only thing that works and turned to leave. Dylan and I looked at each other. I grabbed a tube of 
habits in the majority of Americans. HFCS is made from the same type of corn crop that is used to make Ethanol used to fuel E-85 vehicles. But recently, we may have yet another reason (like there aren’t enough) to avoid Corn Syrup. In a recent 
Let your skin regulate itself by producing natural oils that protect the skin and keep it moisturized. Washing your face strips your skin of it’s natural defenses, leaving it dry and vulnerable, often leading to an overproduction of oil that causes acne breakouts. It is a vicious cycle. Go cold turkey and see what “nothing” can do for you! The day you start this method, use a mild scrub (see below) and steam the follow day to start the cleansing process.
Hot water strips away the natural oils in your skin, leaving it dry. If you can’t stand a cold shower, take a warm shower (not hot) and turn the shower handle to cold at the very end when you rinse your face. If there are very oily spots on your face, go ahead and gently rub them with your fingertips, but on most days just a cold rinse should be enough.
warm water and an all natural paraben-free 
A cheaper and more natural alternative is to use organic coffee grounds from your morning brew. Coffee grounds not only exfoliate, but the caffeine helps tighten your pores giving you smooth skin. If you have dry skin, you can add a tablespoon of cold-pressed coconut oil to a handful of coffee grounds and use to exfoliate.
processed sugars,
Follow: