Hi, I have three 7 month old cats. We found a local store that makes raw food to each customer's specifications, so we had them make ours with raw bone-in chicken thighs, a few hearts, and a few carrots, plus their vitamin blend with taurine. The resulting mix is medium-fine, with visible bone bits, about the size of rice grains.
The cats love it, but can't seem to keep it down. We were originally giving them a tiny bit of chicken liver with the raw food, then I read that organ meat needs to be introduced later, so we stopped that, but they kept throwing up.
Then I thought perhaps we didn't give them enough time to acclimate to a raw diet, so we backed off the raw mix completely, put the custom blend into the freezer, and reintroduced Evo grain-free cat & kitten canned food, to which we add just a couple of pieces of raw chicken heart. That's pretty much their diet these days.
I also suspected maybe they weren't reacting well to big meals or cold meals, so now we feed them 4-5 times a day, giving them approximately 1 to 1.5 ounces of gently warmed food each time. They've been keeping the canned food+heart meals down with little problem for several weeks.
Tonight I tried to reintroduce the custom raw mix, by giving them each just about one teaspoon of the fridge-thawed blend, slightly warmed. Two are doing fine, but one just threw up, about an hour and a half after eating it.
Any ideas? Does it sound like the raw blend could be the culprit? I read that cats are not very susceptible to salmonella, but I also can't exactly vouch for the store's sanitation practices. Or could it be the bone bits?
I don't mind putting in effort for these guys, and I really want them to get the benefits of a raw diet, but I'm stumped! Any help is appreciated.
The cats love it, but can't seem to keep it down. We were originally giving them a tiny bit of chicken liver with the raw food, then I read that organ meat needs to be introduced later, so we stopped that, but they kept throwing up.
Then I thought perhaps we didn't give them enough time to acclimate to a raw diet, so we backed off the raw mix completely, put the custom blend into the freezer, and reintroduced Evo grain-free cat & kitten canned food, to which we add just a couple of pieces of raw chicken heart. That's pretty much their diet these days.
I also suspected maybe they weren't reacting well to big meals or cold meals, so now we feed them 4-5 times a day, giving them approximately 1 to 1.5 ounces of gently warmed food each time. They've been keeping the canned food+heart meals down with little problem for several weeks.
Tonight I tried to reintroduce the custom raw mix, by giving them each just about one teaspoon of the fridge-thawed blend, slightly warmed. Two are doing fine, but one just threw up, about an hour and a half after eating it.
Any ideas? Does it sound like the raw blend could be the culprit? I read that cats are not very susceptible to salmonella, but I also can't exactly vouch for the store's sanitation practices. Or could it be the bone bits?
I don't mind putting in effort for these guys, and I really want them to get the benefits of a raw diet, but I'm stumped! Any help is appreciated.