home-cooked: Alnutrin or BalanceIt?

lisamarie12

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Trader Joe's has freeze-dried beef liver in the pet treats section. I keep a bag at home in case I have trouble finding non-chicken liver at the grocery store.

Remember to look in the frozen "weird" meat section of your grocery store. I have found that even the smallest stores have beef or calf liver there.

International markets and halal meat stores invariably have lamb liver.

My cat had a chicken allergy for months. It was probably caused by the fact that I fed him chicken almost exclusively. I cut out all chicken for a few months, then gradually introduced it back as part of a rotation. He is fine with it now.
Oh! This is actually a much older thread, I should have mentioned this when commenting, likely AbbyNTim worked this out already, sorry for the confusion!

I just wanted to comment re: the premix Balance IT.
 
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abbyntim

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We are still on the fence about chicken! Tim definitely cannot seem to eat any canned chicken. The coincidence with coughing and other issues and chicken consumption is just too strong. We've tried Rad Cat chicken a couple of times, but we're not sure. Need to do some more trials to see. I would really like to work chicken into his rotation, as it is very available and much cheaper than what he eats now.
 
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abbyntim

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Was Tim ever able to tolerate chicken?
I am really not sure.

I know it sounds like we are terrible cat guardians, but Tim always had digestive issues. He had super frequent hairballs, he had alternating bouts of constipation and diarrhea, he vomited on occasion. We'd seen the vet about this over a period of a couple of years and all medical tests checked out. When these things became even more frequent in late 2013, early 2014, Tim had also developed what sounded like an asthma cough, he had struvite crystals, and his heart appeared enlarged. Other than prescribing drugs for the asthma, antibiotics for the suspected UTI, and cisapride because he'd had a couple of bad constipation episodes, the vets didn't know what to do about the digestive stuff.

Feeling very alone and desperate, after Tim had thrown up every meal for a couple of days, I began to suspect something in the canned food we had switched the cats to a few months prior to deal with the constipation and dehydration. I dug the cans out of the recycling container and examined ingredients. Three emerged in every one of his vomit episodes, and one of them was chicken. I stopped chicken, the vomiting stopped. I tried feeding chicken, he vomited. So we stopped canned chicken entirely, but want to see how he does on Rad Cat chicken. To this day, I avoid the other two completely: carrageenan and xantham gum. I suspect guar gum, but the evidence is not as strong. Now that we feed mostly raw, it's very easy to avoid guar gum, but it was very difficult when feeding canned. On our new vet's advice, we weaned Tim off cisapride before starting raw.

So I really don't know if Tim was ever able to tolerate chicken. Maybe. Maybe I overfed, because chicken was an ingredient in just about every food he ate for the first 4.5 years of his life. Or maybe he never really could tolerate chicken, and constant feeding of it just made him worse.
 

silverpersian

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You sound like very careful guardians.

I had a similar problem - chicken allergy caused by feeding chicken too often. I know how frustrating it can be. It's nice that my cat can tolerate chicken again now (as part of a rotation).
 

ivory

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We are still on the fence about chicken! Tim definitely cannot seem to eat any canned chicken. The coincidence with coughing and other issues and chicken consumption is just too strong. We've tried Rad Cat chicken a couple of times, but we're not sure. Need to do some more trials to see. I would really like to work chicken into his rotation, as it is very available and much cheaper than what he eats now.
I am just seeing this thread because I am beginning to use Balance It too. My cat sometimes will have a hacking cough like he is trying to get a hairball up? He also only eats chicken either from First Mate canned or cooked chicken from Balance It receipe. I am thinking of introducing pork or lamb. What other proteins does your cat tolerate? I don’t know what New to introduce to him using cooked meat, not another canned product.
 
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