Poppy on Raw

[raintyger]

I made my raw food as planned. I put a dollop of it out as a snack last night. Even though she was very intent on the making of it, Poppy sniffed at it, gave me strange looks, and went back to sleep.

This morning I replaced 25% of her normal food with raw. She gets wet with additional water normally. So I plopped the raw down right alongside the wet. She ate about 2/3 of the raw right off the bat. Five minutes later her dish was licked clean. It's been less than an hour, but no vomiting or anything.

So I've been wondering--Poppy had a bladder stone last spring, but we haven't seen any signs of recurrence. She doesn't have any large health issues which affect her behavior currently. She did have hairballs, but we started her on 100% wet in June. Her last hairball was in mid-July. Not sure if the hairballs have gone away temporarily due to summer/less shedding. Her coat is already glossy and rabbit soft (literally, it's soft like rabbit fur). She's got a pretty sweet and laid back personality. So how will I know if the raw diet is helping her?

 

[ldg]

First of all, GREAT news she ate it up like that! :bigthumb:

If you don't notice her getting even softer (!!!), you'll see more energy, and you'll see her body shape change. :nod: She'll become more muscular. None of my kitties had any health issues that would have been directly visibly either (like IBD kitties, or not needing insulin for diabetic kitties, etc.), but we see the difference. :nod:

For us, the most noticeable difference is something you won't necessarily see because you have just one kitty. But we have 8 in a small space, and the first thing we saw was behavior changes. They became... "nicer," more tolerant of each other. Kind of like... they must have been a little grumpy because they didn't feel as well as they started to feel. :dk: (And ours were on all canned, high protein, low carb, no grain foods, simple ingredient lists prior to the switch to raw).

But inside of a few days to a week or so, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to report that you do see a difference!

 

[ldg]

Oh - and one thing you'll see right away is in the litter box. The volume of poop drops a LOT (and in our kitties, the volume of pee went up, even though I mixed water into their canned. :dk: ). They USE everything in the raw food!

 

[raintyger]

So how fast can I move to 100% raw? I had previously heard replace 25% of food for one week, then 50% for another week, and so on for switching from one brand of commercial dry/canned to another. But it seems that there are some posts in this forum in which other kitties got switch over much faster.
 

 

[ldg]

Basically just go at her pace. :nod: It's a good idea to start with the 25%, and give it a couple of meals to make sure it's agreeing with her (no vomiting, no litter box issues). If those are a "go," then bump it to 50%, &etc. I think most of the transitions here saw the move to 100% raw in 5 - 10 days or so if the kitties liked the food.

 

[raintyger]

Update

So Poppy's been eating 25% raw for almost a week now, everything's gone smoothly. (Mommy's actually the hold up, as Mommy thinks raw  is disgusting and wants to watch Poppy as the increments increase, so that means increasing over the weekend.) The only visible difference is that her poop has gotten smaller and looks a bit shriveled. She still eats her canned food first, picking around the raw, and then the raw. Except for tonight--I got held up 1.5 hours in traffic, so when Mommy got home, the canned plus water portion of her meal came out a bit soupy, and she ate the raw first. Can't tell if that was because she liked the firmness of the raw more, or if she's actually changing her mind.

Questions

I've been thinking, though, that making the raw with the premix is going to take a lot of time, so I came up with some alternatives. The first is to pay the bucks and get Nature's Variety at the local pet shop.  Their website says to thaw the medallions in the fridge and then serve cold. I thought kitty food was supposed to be room temperature?

The other alternative is to buy boneless skinless chicken thighs and at least remove the chore of deboning. I've asked the store, and a few of the smaller ones will save and sell me chicken fat if I call ahead of time. I don't know how much chicken fat to add back in, though. Does anybody know what percent of chicken thigh is fat?

Thanks for any replies.