Curious- How Do You Raw Feed?

[EmersonandEvie]

Hi everyone!

I just joined recently and have been browsing the raw forum. Wow- I never knew there were so many way to feed a raw diet! I'm curious as to what "system" has worked for you and your cat/s.

I get ground chubs from hare-today and use the recipe from feline-nutrition(dot)org to make it a complete meal. Of course, most of the chubs aren't in the 80/10/10 ratio...this is where my real curiosity piques. How I make sure the cats don't get an out of whack Ca to P ratio is I feed them two meals a week (out of 14) of chicken chunks and pork heart. Does anyone else take this approach? My less than stellar math skills have me too scared to try and mix a grind...with boneless...with x amount of organs...so it makes sense (to me, anyway) to balance everything out with a few boneless meals. With this method, they also get the added benefit of a good jaw workout and teeth cleaning.

So...what works for you?

 

[lalagimp]

I had a Skype with Dr Pierson about lowering the bone ratio even further in my FLUTD cat by adding additional boneless meat. So, I use catinfo.org for the recipe but instead of doing 2:1 bone-in to bone-less, we do 1:1 now. I get ground rabbit from Hare-Today and my boneless are turkey thighs from the grocery store. Depending on pricing it's $2.49-2.99 per pound. I cut the bones out with shears. I do my slurry myself instead of using a premix. Tom eats 6.5 oz per day and Stewart eats 5 oz per day. I've been making batches 24 lbs meat plus water into ice cube trays.

 

[maureen brad]

Hi everyone!

I just joined recently and have been browsing the raw forum. Wow- I never knew there were so many way to feed a raw diet! I'm curious as to what "system" has worked for you and your cat/s.

I get ground chubs from hare-today and use the recipe from feline-nutrition(dot)org to make it a complete meal. Of course, most of the chubs aren't in the 80/10/10 ratio...this is where my real curiosity piques. How I make sure the cats don't get an out of whack Ca to P ratio is I feed them two meals a week (out of 14) of chicken chunks and pork heart. Does anyone else take this approach? My less than stellar math skills have me too scared to try and mix a grind...with boneless...with x amount of organs...so it makes sense (to me, anyway) to balance everything out with a few boneless meals. With this method, they also get the added benefit of a good jaw workout and teeth cleaning.

So...what works for you?

You can go to www.rawcalc.org this is a calculator you can use to figure out how much boneless and organ to add to HT chubs to meet the ideal 80/10/10 we all want for our cats. Just enter the amount of meat you are using and then the bone content ( HT shows that)organ and meat click and like magic it will tell you what to add. You can also enter in things like cornish game hen , whole chicken, you can find that in the drop down window. This calculator has made my life easier.

 

[orange&white]

I make raw mixes from scratch and rotate chicken, pork and beef most of the year. When turkey goes on sale for Thanksgiving, they get quite a bit of turkey in the mix from November - January. I buy whole meats on sale and stock a couple of extra freezers, so they eat for about 50 cents per cat per day. I cube meats and separate the bones and freeze separately, and portion organ meats in muffin tins, so when I'm ready to make a batch I have all the ingredients pre-cut and can pull out boneless meats, bones, and/or organs in quantities needed.

They eat all chunked meat, no grinds.

80% chunked boneless meat: base protein in rotation + hearts and gizzards
10% smashed bones: I always use chicken bones because I don't have a grinder and those are the ones I can smash
5% minced liver: Usually chicken, sometimes beef or pork
5% minced other secreting organ: Usually pork kidney or beef sweetbreads

Supplements from feline-nutrition.org recipe: Taurine, B-Complex, E, Lite Salt. Just recently started using fish oil. Before I was feeding oily fish once a week instead (sardines, salmon, or mackerel tinned in water).

It's very easy to balance a mix on scratch paper (once you get the hang of it) or a few cells in an Excel spreadsheet, by keying off the bone content. If you have a pre-ground product with 25% bone, then you have 2.5 ounces of bone per one pound of pre-ground. 2.5 ounces of bone makes 25 ounces of final food mix. (Simple multiplier - X10) Then you multiply your 80%, 10%, 10% by 25 to determine what you need to add per pound of pre-ground to balance (subtracting the boneless and organ quantities that you already have in the pre-ground mix).

I start by weighing bones for my homemade mixes and develop the recipe around that. So if I weigh out 8 ounces of bone to start, then I'll be making 80 ounces of final mix: 64 ounces boneless, 8 ounce bone, 4 ounces each liver and other organs.

If I'm hurrying, I can make a small batch in 20-30 minutes. If I have a lot of time, I can make a large batch, or several different protein recipes.

Once you get the rhythm of it, it becomes as easy as making your own dinner...easier since you don't have to cook!

 

[Sallysoo]

I use human grade raw boneless meat (chicken, pork and beef) and with Ez Complete Premixes for my 1-year old kitty (about 3.5kg). 50g raw meat daily for the evenings meal. Mornings meal is 1.5 Primal freeze dried nuggets or Feline Natural 3oz canned food. No kibbles. Hope I didn't missed out any impt factor?

 

[EmersonandEvie]

I know this is an older thread, and this may be a silly question, but how do you make sure that your cats are getting their supplements? Do you coat the meat chunks and hope for the best? Or do they lap it up from their food dish?

I think our next step is going to be entirely chunked meat. I just placed a Hare Today order but I am going to add boneless chunks to all of the grinds so they can get more used to eating them.

 

[orange&white]

Supplements stir into ground mixes with water easier than they do in chunked meat.

I make all-chunk mixes, no ground meats, for my cats. My youngest cat would not drink the "supplement gravy' when I was adding only a tiny bit of water. I stopped using water altogether in her mixes. I dissolve the supplements in the egg yolks and mix into the meat chunks. This makes a thicker "supplement gravy" that sticks much better to chunked meat. My senior is on a separate low-fat recipe and he loves "supplement soup" so his food has a lot of water added with supplements, which he laps up and licks the plate.

Short answer: Less water or no water will make a "stickier" supplement slurry.

 

[valentine319]

I use whole ground carcass rabbit from hare today. I package up one day in a quart bag. I put 7 in a gallon bag and then stick in the freezer. It makes it easier to know how much i have. I make 2 months at a time.

I'll be adding some meat variety in the future.