Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet Forums => Off Topic => Topic started by: Suoaei on February 04, 2013, 04:43:34 am
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Has anybody had success with a raw diet for a cat? I'm feeling like I really don't understand how her body works, and it's so sad when I know she's hurting and I don't know what to do.
This is what I've done so far:
I've been feeding my 9 year old kitty raw food for a couple of years, and it's been quite a journey. When I lived in a house where other cats ate wet and dry food, it was very hard to keep her from eating it too. She was very overweight and possibly diabetic from a lifetime of canned food and kibble. I restricted her portions and fed her chicken livers blenderized with ground turkey and chicken meat. She lost weight and is now normal sized (under her 2-3 inch coat). It's only been the last 6 months or so since we moved that I can feed her 100% raw. Lately I've been giving her just pastured organs cut up--pork livers, hearts, and kidneys. Recently she's been acting very unusual--waking up at odd hours, meowing excessively, walking around crying as though she is in pain.
She has a very small abscess that has been dormant for months that seems to be acting up, my housemate showed me how to keep it soft and drain it. She has runny eyes ("normal" for her) and a runny nose. She also appears to be constipated: I mean 5-7 days at a time, no poop in the litter box. She doesn't relieve herself outside.
It's incredibly frustrating because she can't talk to me and tell me what she needs. So, I decided to go with whatever she wants. She doesn't want a lot of meat, either organs or fish. She goes outside and nibbles on the grass. She wants to be on my lap all the time, even when I sit down to eat. This is how I discovered that she is craving milk like nobody's business, so now she's drinking raw milk every day. I did a little research and gave her an egg yolk, which she devoured and then finally made a little tiny poop. But after that she didn't want any more egg yolk--just milk. Yesterday she also ate a quarter of a biscuit (even a raw foodie needs a home-baked biscuit once and a while! Raw honey and raw butter on them, mmm mm!) and some time afterwards she finally had a sizeable bowel movement.
After some listening to her, and to my instincts, and looking at Pottenger's study, I've started giving her raw milk, quality cod liver oil, and raw meats (pastured organs and wild fish meat, fish with scales/fins/bones at least once a week) with the occasional biscuit. If you have any advice or experience with RAF cats, I would really, really appreciate hearing it!
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Hello Suoaei,
If your cat was consistently eating much liver, it may have a Vitamin A or mineral overdose (copper/iron/cadmium). I was frequently eating liver in high amounts and got too much of a good thing; the overdose symptoms hit suddenly and painfully, I avoided liver for months afterwards.
Vitamin D helps against Vitamin A toxicity, so more oily fish and avoiding liver may help.
In regards to constipation, offering the whole animal including sinewy and gritty substances like connective tissue, tendons, cartilage and fish scales my help out.
I hope you cat gets better soon :).
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Suoaei,
I know nothing of cats so you can feel free to claw apart what I say.
However I would tend to not cut things up, so as to make her work a bit for her dinner. More as would be the case in the wild.
Also does she get outside?
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I've read online that when animals seek out grasses to eat there can be something wrong with them. They seek out those grasses for certain nutrients.
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I got information about feeding my cat B.A.R.F. (biologically appropriate raw food) from a Yahoo! group on that topic. You can find a lot of that kind of information online. My cat ate ground chicken that I processed myself - offal, bones, muscle, skin. It was a mess! Other options with mouse- and bird-sized animals are even more appropriate because a cat's natural diet would not include big old chickens. You can buy frozen mice from pet-food stores. Don't forget the option of ordering pet food blends from grassfed beef companies.
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Ha ha I actually considered buying live mice from the pet store, rather like people do for their snakes. But she's so domestic, I don't think she'd know how to kill it--and I don't want any mice loose in the house!
Thanks for the information about BARF (yuck--I wish they'd chosen a different acronym!) I will look into that.
If anybody else has experience with raw kitties, I appreciate your help :)
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Lately I've been giving her just pastured organs cut up--pork livers, hearts, and kidneys.
Too much organ meat. In the wild cats would be eating small animals like mice, voles, birds, rabbits etc. The organs in these animals are tiny.
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we have a very sweet tame now feral cat at the farm, she eats and wants grass fed cows liver day after day. Animals can eat much more than people without overdosing. They also can tell instinctively best than most of us (Iguana excluded) when to stop.
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Off-topic, but I recently read that wild otters usually eat the liver and kidneys of their prey but leave the rest alone.
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Off-topic, but I recently read that wild otters usually eat the liver and kidneys of their prey but leave the rest alone.
Otters eat 15-20% of their own body mass each day. So for an average otter that would be approx 1.5 to 2 kilos of food per day. They would have to kill a hell of a lot of fish, which make up more than 90% of their prey, to obtain that much weight in liver and kidneys alone.
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Update: in addition to meat and milk, my cat apparently prefers water that has a fresh-cut plant in it. My housemate says her mom always had 'flower water' for the cats-- right now we are using a whole rose blossom, including a bit of stem and leaves. This calls to my mind AV's 'living water' idea; never would have thought to use flower petals, though.
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Otters eat 15-20% of their own body mass each day. So for an average otter that would be approx 1.5 to 2 kilos of food per day. They would have to kill a hell of a lot of fish, which make up more than 90% of their prey, to obtain that much weight in liver and kidneys alone.
Well, admittedly, that one story was about an otter eating 250 fish in one pond, so maybe they were exaggerating.