Long-Awaited - Starting Artemis and Apollo on Raw!

[mildlyironic]

Thanks again to this forum, and all of the advice I've gotten - both on this thread and others - about how to safely transition Apollo and Artemis onto raw food. 

The twins came to me on Monday, and have been eating the wet food their foster mom gave them to help ease settling into my apartment. I've been preparing for them for quite a while, and have the long-term plan of using Hare-Today, and cutting the bone percentage of the grinds with ground chicken or turkey, and some organ to keep the organ percentage up. I originally planned on starting them with meat I ground at home, and then transitioning to small chunks and larger chunks, but I also plan on buying Hare-Today in bulk, and scissoring up 32 lbs of chicken/turkey is starting to sound like a terrible idea. 

So that part is still being figured out (perhaps I'll grind part and scissor up part.)

However, it all depended on the kittens liking raw in the first place! And I'd rather not spend $150 on purchasing the minimum amount of Hare-Today and a grinder only to have them hate it. So today, I decided to scissor up a small amount of raw chicken to add to their wet food - less than 15% of their weekly intake, for sure - and mix it in with their wet food. Dun dun dun....

Success! Artemis gobbled her portion up, and Apollo's portion, and looked at me for more, so I mixed up a little more. (Apollo, unfortunately, got poop stuck to his butt so I think he wasn't in the mood for eating for a little bit, even after I cleaned it up.) She then ate most of the chicken bits in Apollo's bowl, and headed out to groom. I was curious about Apollo since he hadn't eaten yet, but when I came back he was licking his lips - and I knew there was some chicken in there too. Hooray! These were pretty small pieces, but they still weren't pate consistency like their wet food, so I was super glad to see that Artemis (and, presumably, Apollo) got a little chewing action in. 

Next step: start transitioning them to Instinct Raw for a week to see how they take to eating raw as a staple, and then - Hare-Today! I'll continue updating this thread as I trouble-shoot the transition. Hopefully, it'll help other newbies and the forum at large (so I don't end up spamming with a lot of small questions!)

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

Yay for the twins in knowing what's good for them

Don't worry about asking questions....we'd rather you ask than have you risk harming your new babies by feeding them nutritionally incomplete food (over the 15%)

 

[mildlyironic]

First question! For their afternoon meal, I mixed in some Instincts Raw Duck Bites into their normal wet food (Evo 95% Chicken & Turkey). I was a little nervous, since they hadn't had duck before, and I'd accidentally added in a little more than I expected - around 50% Instinct, 50% EVO. Artemis, for sure, gave the food a side-eye at first. They both ended up cleaning their plates, though, which made me relax a lot!

Well, almost cleaning their plates. They left behind some of the mini bone fragments - which leads to my first question. How do I teach kittens how to eat mini bone fragments?

Thanks!

EDIT: The twins are napping after their first semi-raw meal (minus the chicken thigh I gave them at lunch).

photo (1).JPG

• mildlyironic
• Jun 14, 2014

 

[ritz]

That's superb that they are some of the bone. To build up jaw muscles you can try feeding chicken giblets, usually sold with hearts. Another way is to buy chicken wings and give them the smallest part of the wing.
The only stupid question is the one not asked!

 

[monkeymom]

First, your babies are beautiful! When I switched our kittens to raw at about 7 months, I went pretty slow. I started with Primal Grind, which has very small bone fragments (<1mm). I let them develop their chewing capabilities by giving progressively larger meat chunks (boneless) then added in a grind with larger bone pieces (>4mm). We held our breath...and they ate it like champs! They seem to really enjoy crunching on the bone pieces and gnawing on the meat (never thought those sounds would bring me such joy). You can try cutting up chicken wings or dressed quail into smaller pieces and let them get the hang of it. Kittens are pretty curious about everything, so they should at least give it a shot.

 

[mildlyironic]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your advice and replies! Nature's Variety's bone pieces seem to be on the smaller side - seemingly ranging from 1mm to a couple millimeters. I don't know what's changed, but it seems like over the course of the day, the twins have learned how to chew them down and eat them! At first, I thought the nuggets I was giving just happened not to have much bone, but then I observed them for one of their mealtimes and they definitely were chomping on a bone fragment. Whee! I'll chop up a chicken wing end for them tomorrow and see how that goes

Also - I think my cats are being too kind to me - but this evening I tried them on their first 100% raw meal, with no wet mixed in. I held my breath, since I was worried I was pushing them too far too fast, but they went straight to the food and ate it all in a single sitting. I'm now defrosting a little more, actually, since they seem a little hungry still. It turns out, they don't like the chill the food gets when it comes from the freezer, but if I let it warm up/defrost in the refrigerator, they eat it up right quick. 

And with the success of their first raw meal (and the fact that I don't want to keep paying $16/lbs for commercial raw), I've taken the plunge and will be purchasing my first Hare-Today order, a grinder (to grind filler meat), Alnutrin, and a lot of mason jars! Let's hope the $200 investment doesn't sink like the Titanic. 

EDIT: So, it was more like a $250 investment. GULP. 

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

The way I look at it, you'll save money in the long run in Vet bills

Do you already have a freezer?  That's what held most of us back in the beginning.  I can't believe how many of us were hunting for freezers on Craigs List, and seems like we all got great deals, and somewhere on this site, we posted pictures of them as we hauled them home and plugged them in

.   Hmmm, I never thought about mason jars.  I just bought a bunch of glad or ziploc plastic containers that stacked nicely and filled them up with the ground concoctions after mixing in the Alnutrin, then labeled them with post-its before stacking them in the freezer.   Once we moved on to strips of meat, I started using snack size ziploc baggies, and just put those inside freezer bags, each protein going into it's separate labeled  freezer bag so I knew which ones were pork, beef, chicken breasts, turkey thighs, liver  etc. 

 

[roguethecat]

And with the success of their first raw meal (and the fact that I don't want to keep paying $16/lbs for commercial raw), I've taken the plunge and will be purchasing my first Hare-Today order, a grinder (to grind filler meat), Alnutrin, and a lot of mason jars! Let's hope the $200 investment doesn't sink like the Titanic. 

EDIT: So, it was more like a $250 investment. GULP. 

to save the Titanic: go for a stroll into PetFoodExpress or just look up prices of high-end canned food online, calculate how much you would have to lay down to fill your freezer and compare that to the $250.

then go stick your nose into your litter box... to me (especially with my parents coming to visit soon), a non-smelling litter box is absolutely priceless.

 

[mildlyironic]

The Hare-Today order comes tomorrow! EEK. Right now, I have a pretty large freezer - it's one of those fridges where one entire side is a fridge, and the entire other side is a freezer - so hopefully it'll fit everything. Regardless, I think the cats will also eat everything really quickly. We got them weighed today, and Artemis is 3.5 lbs, while Apollo is a little shy of 4 lbs. However, they both eat....probably about 8-10oz each a day. which is still blowing my mind. I thought that cats ate less on raw food, but it seems like that's offset by ravenous kitten appetites!

Also, now that it's been almost a week since they've been on raw - their poops are tiny and dry and YAY. (They pee quite a bunch too, which is surprising since I never see them actually drinking water, but I always add water to their food.)

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

That amount sounds about right to me.  Growing kittens eat about twice as much as adult cats.  My 9 lb very active male sometimes ate up to 6 oz of raw, depending on the day and how excited he was about what was being served.  (however, his norm was about 4.5 oz per day)  But, conversely, his 15 lb brother only ate about 3.65 oz per day, but he was on a perpetual diet

Yes, there is nothing better than raw poops

.  I so miss that about mine going off raw.  Just last night I walked into the bathroom just as one of mine finished up pooping, and what a stench

   I immediately reminded them that they needed to get off their raw strike

. 

Oh, never seeing them drink is pretty normal on raw...you still need to provide fresh water, just in case, but there should be plenty of moisture in their food that they probably won't need those water bowls. 

 

[roguethecat]

 
(They pee quite a bunch too, which is surprising since I never see them actually drinking water, but I always add water to their food.)

I've read somewhere that in the wild, a cat drinks about twice a week because anything they eat is about 80% water anyway... so I was still worried about mine not drinking enough because they weren't, actually, in the wild (they sure seem to think so). Bought them a very nice fountain to help matters. They don't drink more, but I still like the fountain 

 

[monkeymom]

I second the non-smelly cat boxes! I had a gap between raw batches and had to resort to canned, which the kitties were NOT happy about (they refuse commercial raw). Even feeding high end grain-free canned resulted in some awful smelling stool, which I think may have been due to the guar gum. It's virtually impossible to find canned without the crazy fillers/thickeners, and when you do it's really expensive..like $7-8/lb. So yeah, great investment in their health and your wallet!

 

[mildlyironic]

TRUE FACT about the not smelly poop! Especially in comparison to my puppy/puppies right now - pheeeeeeeew. (Now to just figure out how to put enough litter in the litter box so my kitten who loves to dig to China doesn't have pee-clumps stuck to the bottom of the box - but that's for another thread, another day!)

UPDATE: I finally mixed up about 20 lbs of Hare-Today, and it's sitting in my fridge waiting for the last bits of Hare-Today meat to finish defrosting in the fridge before I can it up and stick it in the freezer. However - partially because patience is not my middle name, and partially because I'm running out of commercial raw - I mixed in a little bit of the Hare-Today duck (which I cut with turkey) into their normal raw rabbit medallions. 

Aaaaand my kitties went for the Hare-Today portion of their meal before their Nature's Variety Instinct! Yay! It might be because they're super hungry (we just moved to our house in the country, which was probably a little stressful for them so they didn't eat much the past 12 hours), because they love duck (true fact), or because they were just happy to have something new, but it seems like Hare-Today works for my kitties!

Now to just hope I didn't mess up anything in the making of it. I'm nervous, since I heard kittens are slightly more prone to getting sick than adult cats due to a less robust immune system, and because if I mess anything up here, I'm not in a raw-friendly environment, so my mistake will likely be generalized to a "raw feeding problem" by my family and my vet. Gulp. I ended up taking a leaf out of Dr. Pierson's webpage and parbaking all of the cutlets - I figure, better to be super safe now and then reduce the parbaking when I'm in a more raw-friendly environment in August than to risk messing up now. Off topic: me learning how to use a grinder was HI-LAR-I-OUS.

Thanks you guys for all of the support and advice!