# Persian cat on raw diet?



## Pugzley (Mar 11, 2008)

I have a 10 mo. old Persian. He's got some health issues, like chronic secondary URI most likely from Herpes exposure. Not 100 percent sure of that without further diagnostics. 

After reading all about the raw food diet with supplements, it sounds very good for cats.

However, I can't seem to wrap my head around the idea of this docile little cat with a smushed in face trying to wrestle down a raw chicken wing. 

I can, however, see him eating raw ground up meats with the supplements on them, if he will do it.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? This type of cat is so much different than a "normal" cat, at least that is my experience that I wonder if he has what it would take to go raw. 

Regardless, I have got to get this guy off the Royal Canin and Fancy Feast junkfood diet he is on now. 

I know the raw purists say to let them rip and tear their food apart, but I just can't see this cat doing that. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyone have a Persian extreme peke face going raw? 

Thanks in advance for any input.


----------



## Pugzley (Mar 11, 2008)

Maybe I should have posted this under health and nutrition. 

OOPS!


----------



## coaster (Dec 1, 2004)

Grinding it up is fine. It's a lot of work. And there's the expense of the grinder. I suggest a 1200-watt grinder. I have a 1000-watt grinder and it's marginal for grinding the whole chicken. I have to buy chickens under four pounds, otherwise their bones get too big and heavy for the grinder to cope.

Your cat will eat raw food just fine. And maybe even surprise you by showing you the wild animal within. :lol:


----------



## Jeanie (Jun 18, 2003)

I'll move this to Health and Nutrition for you.


----------



## Pugzley (Mar 11, 2008)

Thanks coaster. I'll check into a grinder. I was going to get one for the house anyway. 

And thank you Jeanie for moving this post to the right spot.

Ok, well the next thing is to locate a grinder and see what this little feline can do.

I learned so much about reading cat food labels the past few days, I went to Walmart today and started reading bags and can ingredients. ugh! 

I don't even want to feed my cat this crap anymore.


----------



## Pugzley (Mar 11, 2008)

Oh, just wanted to add. There are no health food stores, etc around here to buy the really good meat for my cat. I know this is optimum, but I can't do this. The cat is going to get the same grade of food we eat and that's grocery store grade. 

I read about using the grocery store meats and searing the outside of the meat to kill off the bacteria etc. because when you grind this up, all the bacteria mixes into the food that is on the outside.

Any thoughts on this? 

I am not going to be able to do the absolute best thing for this cat without access to the food, but I have to think that moving from dry and canned food to even this would be better for him. 

I asked my husband today: What do cats eat? 

He is from another country, not the USA and he said: Well, we used to throw them the fish heads and guts and when we were cleaning chickens they got whatever we didn't want to eat, same with other meat being cleaned for human consumption and he remembered seeing them eating grass from time to time. 

I can't tell you how thankful I was that he didn't say "Cats eat cat food." 
Bahahaha! 

So he's down with this raw food thing for the cat, too. At least I won't have him asking me what the heck I am doing to the cat when he sees raw food on the cat's plate. 

Always good to have support in something like this.


----------



## chris10 (Feb 20, 2006)

If you don't want to drop a lot of money in a quality electric grinder right now, and don't mind a little elbow grease, you can just use one of those old cast iron food grinders. The popular ones are Universal 3 or 2(I have and use the #3) or Griswold's. Punch those names into ebay and you can find many for a good price. Here is a pic of mine grinding the bones up (refresh if it doesn't show pic)









I am not sure about the bacteria thing. I usually just firmly wipe the chicken while rinsing it off. Haven't had any problems so far(6 months).

Its funny that coaster mentioned the wild thing. one of my cats is fine with the ground food but when he gets a whole neck he starts growling at any cat in sight. Letting them know that the neck is his.

Also just to let you know that if you start feeding raw their is a good chance that your kitty will start bouncing off the walls. Raw=lots and lots of energy. 

Anyway good luck


----------



## coaster (Dec 1, 2004)

I wouldn't sear it. That'll just warm it up. I suppose you could rinse it off before grinding. But I buy my chicken at the grocery store. Just look for chicken that's grain-fed without antibiotics (no chicken is fed hormones these days.) I usually buy the Gerber Amish brand. This week I splurged and bought some Smart Chicken. If you have a real meat market you can shop at, you can ask the butchers where they get their chicken from. So long as it's not a mass-producer like Tyson, Perdue, Pride, etc you should be pretty good.


----------



## nanook (Jun 12, 2005)

I only give my cats raw occasionally because I just don't feel confident enough (YET) to go all the way. But I have a question; one thing I read was to always freeze the meat first as that will kill parasites? bacteria? I'm not sure now, but I know I read that you should freeze and defrost it before feeding. Any insight?


----------



## Pugzley (Mar 11, 2008)

Chris10, that is sooo funny that you posted this grinder! My sister called me tonight and she works for Habitat for Humanity and they happen to have one of these grinders at their store for sale. She's going to buy it for me Monday and ship it to me. 

Thanks Coaster, for all your input on this. I am sure I am going to have a lot of questions. 

Would anyone mind sharing how they use the supplements like taurine and iodine, etc. when making the food? I'm reading a lot on other sites, but I really want to hear this from people who are on this board and are actually doing it. 

I'd love to hear your recipes and how much your cats eat each day. 

Do you measure their food or do you let them eat until they stop eating on their own?


----------



## Pugzley (Mar 11, 2008)

nanook, I read that same thing when researching. It makes sense to me. 

The small portion of breast I gave Purrkins tonight had been frozen and I remembered it when I took it out of the freezer. 

I swear he had a swagger when he left his feeding area. heh! (Doing the wild thing maybe?)


----------



## Pugzley (Mar 11, 2008)

http://www.catinfo.org/makingcatfood.htm

This seems to be a pretty easy way to do things, though this writer is doing 25# and 50# of meat at a time. 

She didn't say how much to feed the cats either, not that I found. 

But it did put my mind at ease a lot.

Are any of you using fiber in your recipes? 

Now I'm worried about constipation. 

It's a good thing I never had any children because the way I worry about this cat, I'd probably have never let them start dating until they were 30.


----------



## chris10 (Feb 20, 2006)

Hopefully yours will have a few different grinding plates. Here is a pic of mine








I use the three prong for chunking up the meat, the next for chunking meat for foster kittens, next one is for organs and the smallest is for bones.

A lot of us use the recipes on these sites catnutrition.org catinfo.org (you posted before me)
The supplement info is also in these sites

You can let them eat as much as they want. I measure now since one of mine actually started gaining weight. For measuring its up to you. In the wild cats need about 140 grams of mice a day. Which is almost 5 ounces. I feed mine 8 ounces a day.


----------



## Pugzley (Mar 11, 2008)

Thank you! I'll have to call my sister back tomorrow and make sure all the correct parts are there. Glad you posted that.


----------



## chris10 (Feb 20, 2006)

Fiber is a debatable topic. Prey can consist of up to 9% of plant material which is in the stomach and intestines. Plant material is fiber so you can say this is the natural fiber that wild cats would get. 

I don't add fiber. I feel they don't need it and so far mine have done fine without it. But thats my opinion. fiber is used to get things moving. The kidneys extract almost all of the water turning the digested and unusable material into fairly hard and somewhat dry poop. While it might seem like they take more time to poop, it does come out.

Also for the grinding plates you can just get by with a very small one. You can chunk the meat and organs by hand


----------



## coaster (Dec 1, 2004)

nanook said:


> ... But I have a question; one thing I read was to always freeze the meat first as that will kill parasites? bacteria? I'm not sure now, but I know I read that you should freeze and defrost it before feeding. Any insight?


Everything you can buy from the usual sources has already been frozen, and it's been frozen to a lot colder temperature than you can get in a typical refrigerator freezer. I worked summers in a chicken processing plant during my college years and I know how cold it is in those blast freezers.* :lol: 

Nevertheless, I still wouldn't feed pork, because to kill trichinosis larvae, you not only need the cold temperature, you also need time duration -- two weeks, according to the experts, and I don't know how long the meat has been frozen since butchering. I suppose you could ask the butcher. But it probably varies.

* -40 F, whereas my top freezer can only get down to -20 F.


----------



## vernylynn (Mar 10, 2008)

nanook said:


> I only give my cats raw occasionally because I just don't feel confident enough (YET) to go all the way. But I have a question; one thing I read was to always freeze the meat first as that will kill parasites? bacteria? I'm not sure now, but I know I read that you should freeze and defrost it before feeding. Any insight?


You don't have to worry about killing the bacteria for cats, their stomachs are made to handle it. It seems weird to us b/c we're really careful about salmonella, etc. but the acids in their digestive system kills bacteria and parasites that ours can't.


----------



## coaster (Dec 1, 2004)

Bacteria, yes; not too sure about parasites. I'm pretty sure they're as at risk from parasites as we are. And it's not so much that the acid kills the bacteria (it doesn't; it's just not conducive to the bacteria flourishing) as that the internal temperature is too high for human-adapted bacteria to thrive and that the transit time is too fast for the bacteria to multiply enough to cause illness.


----------



## Smirkitty (Apr 19, 2008)

It just seems so weird to me that a cat's stomach is too delicate to handle a switch from one brand of cat food to another, but it's touch enough to eat raw, potentially bacteria-ridden things.

Cats are so weird.


----------



## coaster (Dec 1, 2004)

It's mostly a matter of what you get used to, I guess. You don't switch to raw overnight, either.


----------

