Feeding percentages and water

[dreamraider]

I know the percentages vary on what to feed with raw.. 2% or 3% seaming to be common and it sais you should watch their weight etc and tweak it until its right for the individual cat. that's fine. But what about water? Im going to be doing Hare today ground with alnutrin, fish oil, and water (should I add egg and/or taurine?) and so I wonder if I am suppost to be feeding the percent of just the meat? Because 2% of 1lb of meat is very different from 2% of .5lb of meat mixed with .5lb of water I would figure. Maybe I am over thinking this..

 

[peaches08]

I'm not much help, but I add at least twice as much water than Dr. Pierson's chicken thighs recipe calls for because one of my cats can get heavy and fast. So I go by how they look and this seems to work for me. I can always add a snack or extra meals if they are thin, but it's impossible with individually frozen portioning to cut back.

 

[ldg]

No, actually, it's a good point, and one I've considered. I feed a mostly PMR type diet now, and when the meat is frozen more slowly, more of the juices leak out when it is THAWED slowly. I package up enough meat that I have the choice: Do I portion out the 1.5 ounces of meat to everyone (well, they don't all get that same amount, but it makes the point), and then drizzle back the leftover meat juice evenly between them? Or do I include that meat juice in the total weight of the meal? When there's a lot of juice, it can change the weight of the meal by 3/8ths of an ounce!

When I first used Hare Today grinds, I used Alnutrin only to balance the meals. To mix it in, you're supposed to add 1/4 to 1/2 cup of water per pound of meat (if I remember correctly). Some people add more than is required, because they worry about the hydration issue.

Now I don't use the Alnutrin for those ground mixes any longer, but I do add six egg yolks and some water to each 2 pound chub - and I have substantially more mix to bag up than before I did that.

I personally don't worry about it at this point, because I feed so many different styles, I figure it all works out. My cats' weights are stable (or they lost weight safely as needed) for 1.5 years now, so whatever I'm doing, works. :lol3:

What I would do is use the Hare Today with the Alnutrin for meat/bones/organs supplement, and add the water as necessary. You'll see whether a meat is more moist than another. I only use goat, rabbit, and llama right now from HT. The llama is drier than the rabbit, for instance. I add little water to rabbit, and the 1/2 cup per pound for the llama.

If you want your cats to have additional moisture, I would weigh out their foods based on the amount of the food made with the recommended amount of water, and then add the extra at meal time. :nod:

I would also suggest adding the salmon oil at the time of the meal, because of the risk of oxidation. If you're going to add it when you make the batches, you should add vitamin E to preserve it. You can follow Dr. Pierson's recipe for supplements with the Hare Today meat/organ/bone if you like. :nod:

Or you can use the Alnutrin, and use the relative amount of fish oil and vitamin E per amount of food you're making (as per Dr. P) if you want to freeze the fish oil in the batch of food.

 

[dreamraider]

No, actually, it's a good point, and one I've considered. I feed a mostly PMR type diet now, and when the meat is frozen more slowly, more of the juices leak out when it is THAWED slowly.

I package up enough meat that I have the choice: Do I portion out the 1.5 ounces of meat to everyone (well, they don't all get that same amount, but it makes the point), and then drizzle back the leftover meat juice evenly between them? Or do I include that meat juice in the total weight of the meal? When there's a lot of juice, it can change the weight of the meal by 3/8ths of an ounce!

When I first used Hare Today grinds, I used Alnutrin only to balance the meals. To mix it in, you're supposed to add 1/4 to 1/2 cup of water per pound of meat (if I remember correctly). Some people add more than is required, because they worry about the hydration issue.

Now I don't use the Alnutrin for those ground mixes any longer, but I do add six egg yolks and some water to each 2 pound chub - and I have substantially more mix to bag up than before I did that.

I personally don't worry about it at this point, because I feed so many different styles, I figure it all works out. My cats' weights are stable (or they lost weight safely as needed) for 1.5 years now, so whatever I'm doing, works.

What I would do is use the Hare Today with the Alnutrin for meat/bones/organs supplement, and add the water as necessary. You'll see whether a meat is more moist than another. I only use goat, rabbit, and llama right now from HT. The llama is drier than the rabbit, for instance. I add little water to rabbit, and the 1/2 cup per pound for the llama.

If you want your cats to have additional moisture, I would weigh out their foods based on the amount of the food made with the recommended amount of water, and then add the extra at meal time.

I would also suggest adding the salmon oil at the time of the meal, because of the risk of oxidation. If you're going to add it when you make the batches, you should add vitamin E to preserve it. You can follow Dr. Pierson's recipe for supplements with the Hare Today meat/organ/bone if you like.

Or you can use the Alnutrin, and use the relative amount of fish oil and vitamin E per amount of food you're making (as per Dr. P) if you want to freeze the fish oil in the batch of food.

Okay this is what I was thinking too (Weighing according to the recipe and then adding more water if I want to). Mine like it watery and I was going to just add warm water to the fridge cool *No, not avoiding the word- I swear!* food to warm it a little since id have to add water anyways. As for juice worries .. I think im going to follow what I read someone else here does and do icecube tray servings and use pickle jars with lids in the fridge.. have a couple for each cat and put a days worth of cubes for each cat in the jar to thaw.. I can eye ball the meals as long as the daily amount is right I figure. On that topic.. someone said a icecube of raw is about 1 oz.. mine need to eat 1.8 oz and 2.2 oz I think( 206.4kcal and 226.6kcal by another calculator) ..so about 2 cubes a day each? Doesn't seam like much food..Mine don't do well on rabbit (commercial) but I may give it another try.. otherwise ill do something like chicken beef and turkey.. and I am going to get the pump oil and just pump it on when I put it in the fridge I think.. or if that's no good on at each meal. is the taurine in alnutrin anough to survive the freezing or should I be thinking about adding more do you think? and eggs, did you do that with the supplement or only now that you don't use it any longer?Wow, sorry for so many questions but you seem to be a fantastic resource for me, and im the kind of person that needs to feel 10000% ready before I begin lol.

 

[dreamraider]

Ok I'm a dummy. Its .18 and .22 of a pound lol...2.88 and 3.52 oz

 

[ldg]

Trust me, we all know how you feel. It's hard to switch from commercial food to homemade. It's been SO drilled into our heads that cats need EXACTLY this and that, and that they're so fragile.... it's easier to feed a baby, for goodness sake! :lol3:

But I think we ALL understand the "sweating the switch."

OK. I don't use ice cube trays. Yes, it is greener. But I'm feeding 8 cats, and I can't be bothered to portion individual meals for each cat. I use plastic baggies, and I freeze the amount needed for one meal for ALL the cats. So I can't give you advice on that one.

...though actually, you can probably make different sized cubes if you find you need to tweak the amount they eat. That's the beauty of making your own - you can adjust the portions prior to freezing them. Just weigh them before you put them into the cube thingies.

I add the salmon oil to each meal. I use salmon oil pills, not a pump. I measured out how many drops I get out of one pill based on the size of hole I make with the knife I use, and I figured out how many drops is needed at each meal. Some people provide 500mg at one meal. Whatever works for you and your cats is the best way to do it.

I give krill oil to one of my cats. She hates it. So I just pill her with it. Obviously she gets her 500mg of fish oil at one go, not spread over her meals. :lol3: (She does not get salmon oil as well).

FYI, mine hated commercial rabbit. They LOVED the commercial frozen raw Nature's Variety rabbit food. Turns out it was the pork fat in it, because most of them hate ground rabbit. But they all love rabbit meat, or bone-in meals, and rabbit hearts. My only point is... there is NO way to compare what they like in canned food with raw food. And even with raw food, what they do or don't like ground, they may or may not like if it is NOT ground.

Also - go easy on the red meat introductions. Many cats love canned beef, but can't tolerate the red meat raw - or have to work up to it. Sheldon, 1.5 years into eating raw food, can STILL only eat a meal of red meat (lamb, venison, beef) that is only 50% red meat. If he even eats one BITE of freeze dried beef liver, he throws up. Some cats are fine with red meat right off the bat - but if you don't want to clean up raw puke, it's really best to go slowly with it, just to be sure. :lol3:

Taurine is not degraded by freezing. But taurine IS water soluble. So basically to ensure they get their taurine, just make sure that they get all the juice that leaks out when you THAW the meat. :lol3: This is one of the reasons I like bagging up their meals in one shot. With the ground food, the water does separate. I mix it up in the baggie before portioning it out to the cats. I'm sure you'll figure it out. :nod: Just make sure they get that juice, and they're getting their taurine.

Oh - the eggs. I initially fed the egg yolks as a treat. But too many of my cats don't like it. Initially it was a novelty, so they ate it. Then I had to add a little water to it for some of them, because they clearly didn't enjoy all that "sticky" egg yolk. Then I had to use toppers to get them to eat it... and then it just became a huge hassle to get them to finish it. So I introduced ground back into their diet. I had no intention of feeding prey model raw, but long story short, several of mine stopped eating ground.

But it's easier to get them to eat ground than to eat egg yolks. That's why I add 6 egg yolks to each 2 pound chub. One meal, for my 8, is about 1/3 of a chub (2 yolks). So by feeding 4 meals of ground food a week, each cat eats one egg yolk. :lol3: Mine really HATE ground poultry; thus the rabbit, llama, and goat. Shel can't keep down the goat, so he gets 2 meals of llama per week. The four that really don't like ground rabbit get a lot of toppers on their meal. :lol3:

FYI, I make a homemade supplement. That's why I don't use the Alnutrin any longer. To balance each individual PMR meal would require 5/64 of a teaspoon of Alnutrin (and that's the one WITHOUT calcium added), and it's more than they really wanted to eat on their food. The supplement I make only requires a little less than 1/32 teaspoon. And they already get eggshell added AND a probiotic in the morning meal. So that morning meal is meat hidden by a fair amount of powder as it is. :lol3:

mschauer helped me adapt the vitamin mix recommended by Dr. Becker in her Real Food for Dogs and Cats book (or whatever the title is). It's adapted to balance the diet I feed the cats. (I add more manganese than she recommends; I use taurine, and... no iron or copper? I don't remember exactly, what she recommends in her book). If you're interested, I can look up her recipe, and post it along with the adjustments I make. Her recipes don't include kidney or other organs apart from liver, and I feed kidney (to most of the cats)... and I think her diets include no beef or red meats or something? Sorry, I'd have to get the book out.

 

[ldg]

Ok I'm a dummy. Its .18 and .22 of a pound lol...2.88 and 3.52 oz

How old and how big are your cats?

I do remember when I first started feeding raw, it looked like a very pitiful amount of food in the bowls at meal time. :lol3: Yet their first full day on raw was the first night I slept all the way through to the alarm ringing, without someone waking me up early to feed them breakfast.

My 7 1/4 pound cat gets 1 ounce of food per meal.
My 8 pound cat gets 7/8ths of food per meal.
My 13.5 pound cat gets 1.2 ounces of food per meal.
Everyone else - ranging in size from 11 pounds to a little over 14 pounds gets 1.5 ounces of food per meal.

Chumley, the fatty (over 14 pounds) needs to lose weight, so I'm starting to bring his portions down. (He loves food SO much, and I like to spoil him. :anon: ).

 

[dreamraider]

Okay well I feel a lot better about a lot of the things I am unsure about and thankyou very much for the red meat warning! Ill take it easy...your experiance with eggs sounds like mine with misty and anything she ever eats lol. I woukd love to hear the recipe because I do have a long term plans of at least chunks with suppliment..I would love to do bone and all but I'm just aiming for chunjs for now..for dental health. I will stick to ground for a while though and when ready add small chunks that get bigger in time. Right now they won't touch meat chunks..including in canned food. Lol. I'd live to do my own vitamin mix when I'm ready but I am wanting to take it slow for me also lol. I'm trying to keep costs down so I want to use resuable containers ans such as much as possible too..hence the ice cube trays..maybe I could make patties..lol wow.

Diago is 11.5 lb and in good shape..I woyld say 11 is his ideal

Misty is 7.5 and I would like to see her at at least 8 lb.. she is visably skinny. I think mist has high metabolism and diago low as he doesn't eat much and excersizes but still is a tiny bit over weight..I feed mist as much as she wants (she is off food kinda lately but I'm talking about before) and she doesnt play as much as diago but was always skinny.

 

[ldg]

They sound (food volume and metabolism) just like Flowerbelle and Billy. Billy can eat almost nothing and gain weight (he weighs 13.5 pounds) - and he's my most active kitty (!), and Flowerbelle ( 7 1/4 pounds) can eat as much as she wants and not gain weight - though she is pretty active.

When we moved to just canned food from kibble & canned, mine didn't like chunks either. They only liked the gravy. So I bought pate, and turned it all into gravy with extra water. I think they started eating bite sized pieces of raw meat about 1.5 months into raw feeding? However long it took a couple of the cats to get constipated on the Nature's Variety commercial raw food. :lol3: The suggested solution was to cut down the bone content by giving them a meal of fresh meat. That was when three of the boys decided they weren't going to eat ground food any longer.

I was still scared of bones, and Carolina was looking into how to feed prey model raw without bone, because two of her cats have IBD, and there is reason to believe some cats with IBD do better with eggshell than with bone. So because of her, TCS "invented" "boneless PMR." :lol3: My cats don't have IBD... and I now give them some bone-in meals. At least once a week. Well - for the kitties that will eat bone-in.

My cats were eating bite-sized pieces (or smaller) of meat with eggshell powder sprinkled on, and I worked on introducing liver, and then kidney...

And really, with the help of TCS members, we just got creative about balancing the meals when the cats wouldn't eat what they "should" without driving ourselves insane.

Lazlo won't eat fresh OR freeze dried organs reliably: he gets meat with Call of the Wild. He won't eat bone-in meals.

Spooky won't eat fresh or freeze dried organs pretty much at all, and she doesn't like Call of the Wild. I haven't tried another premix, and probably should. She won't eat bone-in meals. She gets meat with eggshell powder, a cod liver oil pill with the right amount of vitamin A, and the only organ she eats is freeze dried pancreas. She won't eat hearts, either, so when the other cats eat hearts (three meals a week), she gets chicken thigh or something.

Tuxedo LOVES fresh kidney, but hates fresh liver. So he gets meat, kidney, and freeze dried liver.

Sheldon hates kidney, and loves liver, but can't keep fresh liver down. So he gets freeze dried liver.

Flowerbelle hates kidney - fresh or freeze dried - but LOVES fresh liver. So she gets 10% fresh liver instead of a second secreting organ. Oh - she won't eat bone-in meals either. Flowerbelle hates sardines - so she gets a vitamin D supplement.

And because so many of them won't eat either liver or kidney, I actually use glandular supplements by Nutricology. They're freeze dried organs in capsule form. I sprinkle one capsule of something on one meal a day, and just rotate what organ it is they're getting. I figure it actually works out to be about a 5% equivalent over the course of a week. They all eat these: FD pancreas, FD thymus, FD beef brain, and FD spleen. This is the pancreas Spooky gets every day (just one capsule).

(The guideline for PMR is 80% meat, 10% bone, 5% liver, and 5% other secreting organ. I just make it 90% meat, 5% liver, 5% other secreting organ - with adjustments based on what the cats will and won't eat. :lol3: ).

Chumley, Ming Loy, and Billy love and eat everything (and anything. :lol3: ). So I have 3 cats that didn't require some creativity. (Though even Billy won't eat egg yolks!)

Sorry for blathering on.... but my point is, in the end I wanted them eating healthy. And instead of driving myself crazy getting them to eat what they didn't want to (after the initial transition to raw) - or couldn't keep down - I sought TCS help in figuring out how to get around what they wouldn't eat, yet still ensure they get what they need.

If they all liked ground, I would likely be feeding them only Hare Today mixes with Alnutrin, along with the salmon or krill oil and probiotics. Those ground mixes include the entire animal sans the guts. I want them to be eating all that stuff. And if they would chew on things (like they do now), I'd probably include some chunks, and possibly a few bone-in meals for their teeth. But I think Hare Today with some supplementation is a great diet. :nod:

 

[dreamraider]

They sound (food volume and metabolism) just like Flowerbelle and Billy. Billy can eat almost nothing and gain weight (he weighs 13.5 pounds) - and he's my most active kitty (!), and Flowerbelle ( 7 1/4 pounds) can eat as much as she wants and not gain weight - though she is pretty active.