Gizzards and Dry Food

[alicianoogles]

Some background information first:

I have an  out door cat, he's a little less than one year old.

We started feeding him raw food when he was maybe 4 months old ( this was premade food that had everything he needed in it). and he ate it for a while. Now he doesn't like food thats been through a mincer.

For a while now we've been feeding him gizzards without doing much calculations on what we feed him. We feed him some almost every day, but only once.

Dry food is his main food source (Pronature for kittens). We also occasionally feed him sour cream and raw eggs.

It's recently been brought to my attention that the way we feed him is actually detrimental to his health, and I was wondering if anyone here could help me with tips or an alternative? We can't prepare franken-prey ourselves because of the money and time that it would take..

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[ldg]

I'm not sure I understand why you can't prepare frankenprey? It takes very little time, and is usually less expensive than pretty much everything else.

Where are you located? Do you have access to liver and kidney? Because feeding your outdoor kitty whole prey model raw just means providing him with some chunks of meat, several bone-in meals, and a couple of meals with liver and a couple of meals with kidney (or another secreting organ). Having 3-5 proteins in rotation is important, and I don't know what's available where you are, but chicken or other poultry, pork, lamb or beef are usually fairly easy to source.

Gizzards are good to include as a "meat" in the rotation - but by themselves, they have very little nutritional value to feed exclusively. And milk or milk products are not an appropriate source of calcium for a cat. The raw eggs are great, and I'd keep doing that.

To feed him a nutritionally balanced diet, he needs 80% meat, roughly 10% bone (chicken wings fed 3-4x a week is probably good), about 5% liver, and 5% "other secreting organ," (like kidney, spleen, or pancreas). So, for instance, if he needs about 200g per day of food, he'd need about 10g per week of liver and kidney (usually best to split each one into two meals, and feed along with meat).

The only real time required is cutting up and freezing the portions - which if you have freezer space, can be done every couple of weeks, or once a month. Then all you have to do is take out what he needs tomorrow and let it dethaw in the fridge the day before....

If you have an Asian market you can get to, these things are usually all available, and at very reasonable prices (even in the UK or Europe, which is where I'm guessing you're located from the use of the word "mincer.").

Perhaps there's a misunderstanding about what frankenprey is? :dk: Here is a helpful resource: http://www.CatCentric.org

 

[alicianoogles]

I live in  Canada, Ontario. I'm pretty sure that we feed him kidney and liver as part of the gizzards ( or am i  mistaking that name for something else?), and also heart. All of t his was chicken I think. The real problem for us would be the bones since we have no way to crush them. And the problem for me would be convincing my parents to actually go out of their way to get all the ingredients needed.

I understand about the dairy products, and I'll stop feeding him that.

Is it ok that I also feed him dry food? It's always available to him

Does he need any supplements?

Thanks for replying so fast! :3

 

[ldg]

Well in some places gizzards are sold with other things. There's another member that buys a gizzards/heart combo thing. But yes, gizzards are unique to poultry. So whether or not it comes with liver, I don't know. But to my knowledge, they're not usually sold with kidney.

And you wouldn't need to grind up his bone. He's most likely hunting if he lives outdoors, and knows how to eat small bones. That's why the chicken wings - they're the only small bones appropriate for a cat. But they can be fed whole, he most likely knows what to do with them!

Otherwise you can just put out the dry food for him, and assume it's just supplementing a whole prey diet that he's hunting on his own. Many people do that for feral colonies. I feed my feral cats canned food, but I see them eating birds and mice quite frequently. Well - birds not so frequently, but they eat mice all the time (thus we treat them for parasites regularly).

 

[ldg]

So if you want to continue to give him the gizzards/whatever-comes-with-it as a treat several times a week, there's nothing wrong with that.

And the raw eggs several times a week as a snack are very good for him too.

Dry food isn't really very good for cats. But as your parents are responsible for his diet, and assuming he's hunting, I wouldn't overly fret about the dry food.

 

[alicianoogles]

Ok. Thank you so much!

chicken wings are easy to get, and if I dont need to do much with the bones or worry about him choking on them, then great!

Im not sure that this cat actually hunts and eats animals yet though, he's really just bringing them in and letting them fly around the house haha

again, thanks a lot!
 

 

[tobytyler]

Alicia,

I just started giving my 13yo raw chicken wings for the first time this week and he went crazy for them!  It's almost what turned the corner for him into making the full raw transition.  What's amazing is he is missing several teeth, which doesn't seem to stop him, although it slows him down somewhat.  I am giving him one wing every afternoon on top of his daily meals, kind of as a treat.  Right now they are on a commercial diet, but I am going to start adding prey and likely end up doing frankenprey.  I am new at raw so I still need to look at all the options.

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