NORWEGIAN FOREST ESA New to raw feeding

[ESAkibble]

Hello,

I’m new to the raw food diet lifestyle for my ESA. He’s a Norwegian Forest. I really only stumbled upon it by accident and it really only made sense that my ESA would prefer it.

Does anyone have experience with raw chicken? That’s his first consistent craving.

Does anyone with similar breed have other suggestions of easily accessible raw meats of choice?

 

[daftcat75]

Meat is not complete.

You are going to have to add a completer, a supplement mix, to the raw meat to get a nutritionally balanced and complete food.

The easiest is EZ Complete which contains a freeze-dried liver source. But EZ Complete comes with pork pancreas and green-lipped mussels. Both ingredients have the potential to upset your cat's butt or gut. If EZ Complete doesn't work for your kitty, there are other powders like Alnutrin and TC Feline. These require the addition of liver to the meat and powder. But they don't include those two iffy ingredients that don't agree with many cats (pork pancreas and green-lipped mussels.) All three have samples programs--you can buy a sample pack enough to make a batch or two for $1 (or something cheaper than a full purchase.)

I also strongly recommend keeping a canned food in his diet as a backup. You will make mistakes with raw food. You may not have a new batch ready when the current batch runs out. You may have issues or delays getting the ingredients. Keeping a canned food in his rotation helps you weather out any mistakes or shortages. It will also make it that much easier for another to care for your baby if he has to stay overnight at the vet or you leave him in the care of a sitter.

I would make certain you have your recipe and production down and your canned backup before you branch to other proteins.

EZcomplete fur Cats - Chicken Liver - Analysis
Alnutrin with EggShell Calcium (Regular)
Home (TC Feline)

 

[ESAkibble]

Meat is not complete.

You are going to have to add a completer, a supplement mix, to the raw meat to get a nutritionally balanced and complete food.

The easiest is EZ Complete which contains a freeze-dried liver source. But EZ Complete comes with pork pancreas and green-lipped mussels. Both ingredients have the potential to upset your cat's butt or gut. If EZ Complete doesn't work for your kitty, there are other powders like Alnutrin and TC Feline. These require the addition of liver to the meat and powder. But they don't include those two iffy ingredients that don't agree with many cats (pork pancreas and green-lipped mussels.) All three have samples programs--you can buy a sample pack enough to make a batch or two for $1 (or something cheaper than a full purchase.)

I also strongly recommend keeping a canned food in his diet as a backup. You will make mistakes with raw food. You may not have a new batch ready when the current batch runs out. You may have issues or delays getting the ingredients. Keeping a canned food in his rotation helps you weather out any mistakes or shortages. It will also make it that much easier for another to care for your baby if he has to stay overnight at the vet or you leave him in the care of a sitter.

I would make certain you have your recipe and production down and your canned backup before you branch to other proteins.

EZcomplete fur Cats - Chicken Liver - Analysis
Alnutrin with EggShell Calcium (Regular)
Home (TC Feline)

Thank you. I was concerned about the vitamins etc. I was just reading that his dry food actually has no fillers and all necessary balanced vitamins so I won’t be excluding that any time soon.

 

[Feste]

When I first started feeding Feste raw, I followed Dr. Karen Becker’s recipe and supplemented the calcium with raw. She also ate Primal frozen nuggets for her evening meal as I was scared I wasn’t balancing the homemade raw well enough.

Four years and an additional cat later, they both eat B.A.R.F. based diets with taurine, egg yolk, nutritional yeast, mussels, and kelp to supplement the gaps. The key is variety. They eat a variety of meat: chicken thighs, wings (bone-in), hearts, liver, and backs; Cornish hens (bone-in); beef (boneless); lamb (boneless); frog legs (weirdly my younger cat likes them), turkey wings and thighs (boneless); giblets (when I can find them); sardines; anchovies; and salmon. They also get a tiny bit of pumpkin, kefir, spinach, blueberries, and bonito flakes (treats).

Never feed raw pork or game meat. Be careful with certain kinds of fish because of thiamine depletion. And I always freeze the meat for a week first.