How much fat and how to control for that?

[daftcat75]

I'm trying to keep my senior cat eating. Since she can't have bone because of her IBD, I can't buy any raw rabbit foods for her as they are all whole animal grinds. I bought a frozen rabbit and a manual grinder. I learned how to butcher the rabbit off YouTube and ran its meat and organs through the grinder to make her food. But there was a lot of fat on that rabbit. I held back most of it because there was a LOT. But some fat is necessary, right? How do I know how much to use? Should I just put the lean meat through? Does the lean meat itself have enough fat or do I still need to put some of those fat bits into the grind?

For next time, I think I'll go back to turkey leg and thigh meat since I do have turkey livers now. I thought I'd go with the frozen whole rabbit this time since it came with organs. But until I can figure out how much fat to include, I should probably stick to turkey. I do have rabbit grind from HT. I wonder if she would eat a batch of rabbit meat with turkey liver....

 

[Azazel]

I think you can probably only get a guesstimate by looking it up on the USDA database or something.

I think what most people do is just monitor their cats. If they seem to be gaining too much weight they decrease the amount of fat.

Rabbit meat is quite lean in general so I don’t think you need to worry too much about fat with it.

If you’re using a whole grind (including bones), Dr. P has a rabbit with chicken recipe on catinfo.

Kudos to you for being able to butcher that rabbit by the way... I think I would cry.

 

[daftcat75]

I think you can probably only get a guesstimate by looking it up on the USDA database or something.

I think what most people do is just monitor their cats. If they seem to be gaining too much weight they decrease the amount of fat.

Rabbit meat is quite lean in general so I don’t think you need to worry too much about fat with it.

If you’re using a whole grind (including bones), Dr. P has a rabbit with chicken recipe on catinfo.

Kudos to you for being able to butcher that rabbit by the way... I think I would cry.

She has IBD. Can't do chicken. Can't do bone.

There is a lot of visceral fat that I'm thinking a butcher doesn't include when selling the meat. I probably added a few too many chunks of that fat thinking that some fat is needed. Also, I do need to stop my cat's weight loss. I think it's more important that she eats and keeps it down. For that much, I think I will stick to just the lean meat.

The frozen fryer rabbit doesn't look much like a rabbit and that's why I'm able to separate my soft spot for bunnies and the need to feed my cat anything that she will eat enough of.