Raw food - recipes please!

[vanilla]

Anyone have any raw food recipes? How do you do it? Does it need additional vitamins added like taurine??

[meriad]

Depending on what you feed it may require additional minerals and vitamins. I'm definitely no expert so please do make sure you do lots of research before switching your cat over.

I think the moment you cook the food (ie if you wanted to can / preserve it) it loses all the goodness so you'd have to add, but I'm not 100% sure. Whereas if you buy the raw meat and mince or chop it into smaller pieces it should be OK but it needs to be a good mix. The main meats are the muscles (heart is perfect) as they are quite high in taurine but I'm sure you need to grind some bone in as well for the calcium - but as said I'm no expert.

Good luck with it - I tried to get mine onto it more than once, and they all just turned their noses up at it. Some say the best way to try is get a raw chicken wing and cut it into two or three pieces by the joints and then see if you cat will eat that. If they do, then progress to other meats

[Crayon]

I am just starting out in the raw diet topic bought all supplements and learning I mean there is a lot to study about it! But after watching documentaries about what is out in pet food I don’t wanna feed them anything else!

[fjm]

I came to raw/home-cooked feeding through researching it for my dogs, where the usual recommendation is to feed a meat mixture that is 80% muscle meat, 10% bone and 10% offal (of which around half should be liver). It is advisable to feed a range of protein sources to ensure all bases are covered, including some oily fish. For dogs many people add carbohydrates and cooked vegetables, although this is frowned upon by purists; for cats they are probably not required at all, but I add some of the gravy from the cooked vegetables to the cats cooked food. Taurine is depleted by cooking, but you should not need to add it if you are feeding raw, especially if you include some heart which is particularly rich in taurine.

There are several ways to achieve the right balance. If you want to go full on prey model you could buy whole frozen mice, rabbit, chicks etc - probably a step too far for most of us! You can buy all the ingredients separately, and combine them in meal sized portions (I have found Morrisons is the best UK supermarket for reliably stocking heart, liver and kidney) - chicken wings are good for the teeth and high in bone, so can balance out several bone-free meals. Or you can buy specially prepared human-grade pet mince, which contains the correct balance of muscle/bone/offal. I use DAF (Durham Animal Feeds) and find them excellent, although it does help if you have enough freezer space to buy in bulk.

These days I feed some raw (bone in chicken like wings is safe raw, but very unsafe cooked!), and more home-cooked. The meat comes in 1lb/450g packs, and I batch cook several varieties together, then portion it out and freeze it. That way I just have to defrost each day's meals. A typical cat would need 100-150g of the raw mince, depending on which kind of meat it is and the cat's size and activity levels, and I have found mine have very decided preferences as to which they like and dislike, and which they prefer cooked to raw, so if you can find a local stockist and buy small quantities to start with it may help to avoid waste. The simplest way is probably to start by offering the cat a portion of the meat you buy for yourself. The wings from a free range chicken, a tablespoonful of minced beef, a slice of lamb or pork before you cook it - you will soon discover his preferences, and replacing just a few meals a week will not upset the balance too much.

[HarryAzhar]

Stir well. Measure two cups (475 ml) of water into a bowl and whisk in the eggs, vitamin B complex, vitamin E, lite iodized salt, and added taurine (if using in place of hearts and/or adding because of freezing). Mix the chunked meat, ground mixture, and supplement mixture together. Fill containers.