Let's talk about poop: Homemade and raw cat food poop vs store bought food poop.

[FeralHearts]

Okay need a little input from your wonderful kitty cat chefs!

One of our members is beginning to cook for her kitty due to some allergies she is suffering from. During our conversation today she talked about the poop. It's pale and small. It being pale and small concerned me because of what I know pale cat poop to be an indicator of - but then I realized that it might be normal with a home cooked meal.

So, please tell us about your cats poop and bowel habits on raw and cooked kitty meals.

What are the differences? What is normal when being fed raw / home made foods?

Many sites reference good cat poops and bad, what they looks like etc., but they are all based on wet / canned prefab and dry food diets. So that's not a good reference for this case.

Tell us all about the poop please :-)

P.S. mods if you don't think this thread belongs here please feel free to move it and my apologies if it is.

 

[Rylka]

Thanks F FeralHearts !
So I am the poop-inquisitive (?) member in question. The info I had been using is the photo on the catinfo.org site, and doing research today I found a photo on catnutrition.org (FAQs). Frida's poops look more like the one on cat nutrition, and I basically want to make sure she's okay and I'm not messing her up or missing something, especially since I didn't realize light colored poops could be a sign of a problem.
For reference, her poops started to be a mix of light and dark when I transitioned her to Dr. Elsey's canned food, so I figured it was just the veggies and other fillers that had made them dark in the first place. Today's clean out was the first one without any dark, and she is on about a 50/50 mix of homemade (ustew) and Dr Elsey's canned.

 

[Azazel]

Are you doing raw or cooked? Bone or boneless? Raw food poop from poultry and high in calcium will look lighter. Poop from raw food is also usually dry and crumbly.

Post a pic if you can.

 

[Rylka]

I'm doing boneless cooked. I'll take pics tonight when I get off work...never in my life did I think I'd be thinking and talking about poop this much.

 

[Azazel]

Are you using a premix?

 

[FeralHearts]

Oh oh I can answer that. She's using U-stew :-)

and lol Rylka yup - we've got to talks about the poops! ;-) (and you're very welcome. I hope one day to take this same path with Charlie - so I'm learning right with you!)

 

[BaileyCat]

I feed ground raw to several cats and dogs. Meat, bones, organs, and Alnutrin. Poops are a light tan in color. Sometimes a "swirly" mix.
A bright white color is usually due too much bone.
The real bonus for humans... practically odor free!

 

[furmonster mom]

I've been making my own ground and chunky for about 11 1/2 years now.
Poops can range from light, dry, and crumbly on chicken days (more bone), to dark and soft when they've had a bit too much organs.
Those are the extremes and when I see them I know to make adjustments. Sometimes just adding some egg slurry will fix things up. Sometimes I just trade a few meats out of the rotation for a few extra days.
Since I've been doing it so long, I've just kinda got a feel for it.
Also, each cat can be slightly different, as to what their digestive systems will do, and they don't necessarily poop every day.
Generally and ideally, poops are light/med brown, small, well formed, and not too stinky.

 

[Rylka]

Thanks for the responses, I feel better about it now! So this is from today, and it's pretty much the norm for these days. With the exception of one day (when she might have used my roommate's cat's box), she poops every day...i think about this amount, sometimes a little less.

 

[Azazel]

I don’t think I have seen poop that light colored from cooked chicken. If you were feeding raw I would say it’s normal, especially if there is bone, but cooked boneless chicken I would think would have brown poop, unless there is lots of calcium in the ustew. Each cat is also different and will react to different foods differently. SpecterOhPossum also uses ustew, maybe they can chime in on how their cat’s poop looks.

 

[SpecterOhPossum]

That's not normal imo. Was the poop always this way? It could be the system cleansing itself. (my cat did this transitioning from kibble to wet food, runny odd poop for a few days.)
I wish I saw that A Azazel tagged me before dumping the litterbox , otherwise I'd take a pic of my cats poop!

With doing home cooked u-stew and chicken thighs , her poop has gotten darker. Meat heavy diets result in darker poops; so to me, the paleness is NOT normal.
U-stew also has eggs in the recipe, which makes for easy excretion. So the small size is concerning as well. It should aid in full bowel movements rather than small amounts.

Specter's poop is always score 2 on the poop chart.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/09/fa/39/09fa39c290e60b6941e768dffa5b9be3.png
Dark, firm; but not dry. Long segments, not much of a smell.... Smells like uh, poop. Poop of someone who only eats chicken. About daily or nightly. Sometimes misses or skips a day (especially when our routine is changed) but not often. Never more than 2 days though, I have a poop tracker for this reason. No residue is left on her behind either; that or she cleans it up so well I can't tell.

But yeah, the color should be very very dark brown, in segmented firm shape; firm enough to pick up with a napkin successfully - yet loose enough to squish with little effort. (I know, ew. but that's the best I can describe it.)
It has never resulted in pale poops, or loose stools.

Perhaps they're not using the correct measurements, I use a gram+oz+lb scale for superior accuracy when weighing the meat and powder.

 

[lisahe]

Thanks for the responses, I feel better about it now! So this is from today, and it's pretty much the norm for these days. With the exception of one day (when she might have used my roommate's cat's box), she poops every day...i think about this amount, sometimes a little less.

That photo doesn't look very different from what I scoop out of our cats' box: they eat a combination of commercial raw, homemade cooked, and canned.

And what furmonster mom says about colors ranging also fits, as does this:

Also, each cat can be slightly different, as to what their digestive systems will do, and they don't necessarily poop every day.

We have two cats, but some days there's no poop at all in their boxes. Or just a little... For our cats, anyway, a very high-protein diet (even though it's not all raw) results in very little, er, solid waste.

 

[Rylka]

I should be clear that I'm using beef for her meals, she's on a food allergy trial and can't have chicken. I realize beef is not ideal but it was the only novel protein I could easily obtain for this first 12 weeks.
I always use a kitchen scale and measured out the ustew in grams before adding. (Triple checked *everything* because I didn't want to mess it up.)
Frida's poops have never been much bigger than that. She just doesn't drop massive ones. Also scale may be an issue, my litter scoop is massive.

 

[Azazel]

I don't think the size of the poop is abnormal at all. I wouldn't expect that light colored of a poop with cooked beef, but then again every cat is different. I wonder if maybe beef is higher in calcium than chicken and that's why you get the lighter color? I'm just guessing here.

 

[Talien]

I feed ground raw to several cats and dogs. Meat, bones, organs, and Alnutrin. Poops are a light tan in color. Sometimes a "swirly" mix.
A bright white color is usually due too much bone.
The real bonus for humans... practically odor free!

The lack of odor is the biggest difference I've noticed. Though yes, since I switched my Cats over to raw their poop was smaller, drier, and there was less of it.

There's an actual reason for that too. Cats are both predator and prey, and having larger predators be unable to track them by scent is how they stay alive in areas with Coyotes, Mountain Lions, Wolves, and other alpha predators. When they eat a proper diet they process the food much more efficiently and there's less waste, when they eat commercial food there's a lot of filler and other junk that gets passed through and left in the box.

Something to do for anyone who feeds their Cat commercial food is smell fresh poop and compare it to the smell of the food.

 

[BaileyCat]

I totally agree! Less carp in, less carp out.

The lack of odor is the biggest difference I've noticed. Though yes, since I switched my Cats over to raw their poop was smaller, drier, and there was less of it.

There's an actual reason for that too. Cats are both predator and prey, and having larger predators be unable to track them by scent is how they stay alive in areas with Coyotes, Mountain Lions, Wolves, and other alpha predators. When they eat a proper diet they process the food much more efficiently and there's less waste, when they eat commercial food there's a lot of filler and other junk that gets passed through and left in the box.

Something to do for anyone who feeds their Cat commercial food is smell fresh poop and compare it to the smell of the food.

 

[She's a witch]

my guys have pale-ish poops after raw lamb (boneless), maybe it's the red meat effect? Rylka Do you give Frida probiotics? I noticed they also affect the colour&texture.

 

[Rylka]

No, I haven't given her any probiotics. I hadn't thought of that being one of the "side effects" of probiotics, but I guess it's not surprising either!
Interesting idea about a red meat effect...but then she had dark poops on another brand of beef food. That one had peas and carrots though, which I've cut out of her diet now. So maybe the veggie factor is more dominant than the red meat factor? I'm just wildly guessing now, lol

 

[FeralHearts]

If I'm understanding the pattern correctly.

So far we have:

Raw diets: poop are normally far drier, lighter in color and pretty much smell-less.
Homemade cooked: A bit more liked canned. Darker, a bit moist and less smelly too.

Color in both cases is type of meat and at times calcium content.

I did look up beef. Beef has slightly more calcium than chicken, but pretty negligible.

 

[daftcat75]

Krista eats a combination of homemade turkey raw, Rawz turkey, and Rawz Rabbit with Pumpkin. You know the poop problems she’s been having. Pretty sure they are caused by Rawz turkey and Stella and Chewys Selects.

Pictured below is what I refer to in her thread as pumpkin perfect.

It’s well-formed and low odor but plumper than her formally all-raw poops. (Her, her gut, her butt, the litterbox—we all miss Rad Cat!) I never knew the true color of her Rad Cat turkey poops. She was eating it with a probiotic that made her poops dark as the soil the spores were trapped within. In Krista’s thread, I frequently refer to this probiotic as “the dirt.”

I’d suggest that you’d know when your cat’s poop is a problem. She’ll either strain, possibly with vomiting, or she’ll go too often or it won’t be formed. Or it will smell something foul. But those nuggets you posted earlier? As long as the odor isn’t something awful, I think those look great! I’d take those from Krista every time.