Raw food in UK? Any tips or experience?

[mixedstripes]

I am just starting to research this subject, so have an open mind!

Am thinking of trying raw food diet for 6 month old kitten.

Don't know if I can do all the "grinding" every day though, some people say its quite a "faff".

Can you buy a good frozen product commercially?

 

[lalagimp]

I'm just googling and found Purrform but I think it looks a little costly
kiezebrink looks like you would have to supplement yourself along with rawpetsupplies
It seems as though those 2 sites would work like Hare-Today does on the east coast US. I buy whole ground rabbit from them and mix it with lightly chunked turkey thighs and a few supplements

I don't really like the ingredients I'm seeing on Natural Instinct. I can't tell if it's complete but they put brewer's yeast in some of their mixes.

 

[mixedstripes]

I'm just looking at Purrform!  Tempted to give it a try.  However it is expensive!  Especially with postage!

Thanks Lalagimp.

 

[Columbine]

I researched this not long ago. This is my list of suppliers

From Zooplus http://www.zooplus.co.uk

Fellini Complete } Supplement premixes for
Fortan Catfortan } balancing a raw diet.

Zooplus now offers pure raw minced meats in the Dog Food section (designed to be supplemented before feeding), so it looks like they'd be suitable for cats too, with one of the above premixes or for use in a balanced homemade recipe.


Nature’s Menu - www.naturesmenu.co.uk
Most widely available. Complete raw meals, pre ground meats (bone in), raw meaty bones,
freeze dried complete food sold as ‘Country Hunter Freeze Dried treats” (I have spoken to the
company, and they confirmed that these are a complete diet once rehydrated). Great starter
food as the meals come in small nuggets for easy defrosting.
Also available from Pets at Home stores and from Amazon UK

Natural Instinct - www.naturalinstinct.com
Complete meals, plain ground meats, raw meaty bones

Kiezebrink - www.kiezebrink.co.uk
Huge range of pre ground meats and supplies for PMR feeding. Also have their own range of
complete meals.

Purrform - www.purrform.co.uk
Complete meals (100% meat) and PMR supplies. Another good starter brand, as the
meal are available in 70g pouches as well as 450g tubs.

Nutriment - www.nutriment.co.uk
Complete meals and plain ground meats (listed under dog food)

Raw to go - www.rawtogo.co.uk
Huge range of plain minces, chunks and PMR supplies.

Barf-Rawfood - www.barf-rawfood.co.uk
Plain minces, complete meals and raw meaty bones.

 

[mixedstripes]

Amazing, thanks again Columbine!

I will be working my way through them one day soon ... 

 

 

[Columbine]

If you're just starting out with raw, Nature's Menu is probably the easiest to try. The joy of their free flow minces and their complete meals is that you can defrost one portion (or even one day's worth) at a time....and you can buy just the one pack to start (unlike Purrform, which is mail order only and has a minimum order). All the other brands, whether pure meat of complete meals, come in big blocks only. This means that you have to partially defrost, portion and re-freeze them before you start. Now that's just fine if you know your cat likes it, but a real pain in the early stages and during transitioning.

This article has great tips on the best way to transition to raw food (the same principles apply when switching from wet to raw food too ):-[article="31138"][/article]

 

[mixedstripes]

I will definitely try that.  Also the transitioning ideas interesting.  At the moment kitty just eats Felix.  

Have you personally noticed benefits in giving more raw food to your cat(s) Columbine?

 

[Columbine]

My girl really didn't take to it well, and my old boy didn't recognise it as food at all! I could have persevered with my girl, but she really wasn't keen (except for the Nature’s Menu freeze dried...she LOVES those, but they're way too expensive to be the bulk of her diet - they only come in 40g bags!). I might have persisted further, but a germ-phobic family member was really unhappy about raw feeding. In the end, it just wasn't worth it for me :slant:

I've gone back to feeding mostly high meat/low carb wet foods, with a little good quality kibble as a treat (she absolutely adores the stuff ). She's thriving on this combination

I do know that other UK members use various suppliers on that list -they're all pretty reliable, I think

Raw food done right can work very well indeed, but it's also very easy to get wrong. It's not for everyone, and not for every cat either (though the cats I know of from here are thriving on their raw/part raw diets).

I'll gladly post my wet and dry food lists too if you'd like :winkblue:

If you're investigating different feeding options, here's some reading material [article="29707"][/article][article="31127"][/article]
[article="31167"][/article][article="32669"][/article][article="22501"][/article][article="31796"][/article][article="31801"][/article][article="30205"][/article][article="31120"][/article][article="31141"][/article][article="31658"][/article][article="33544"][/article][article="31673"][/article][article="31714"][/article][article="32321"][/article][article="32321"][/article][article="30756"][/article]

 

[mixedstripes]

Its a tricky one, Columbine.

It sounds wonderful in theory, and I kinda "believe in it" IFKWIM.  Raw food diet makes alot of sense.

However I have some health problems which limit my energy (ME/CFS) and live in a very small space (typical UK).  Its not like I have a bit outstore where I can stock freezers full of raw food like I'd imagine in some farmland in Arizona outback (bliss)!

I'll read back more on the subject when I have some time.  Maybe I could find a compromise.

P.S. People say "kibble" alot, pertaining to cat food.  Would you or somebody else mind in clarifying what this is and how it should be given to cats?

Thanks.

 

[LTS3]

KIbble = dry food = biscuits.

Dry food comes in a bag and you just pour or scoop out the food into your cat's bowl. The food is in little shaped kind of hard and crunchy pieces, kind of like cereals many people eat for breakfast. Sometimes the pieces are colored, sometimes brown depending on the brand.

dry-cat-food-mix-18308835.jpg

• LTS3
• Mar 12, 2017

dry-cat-food-background-texture-3623851.jpg

• LTS3
• Mar 12, 2017

One brand available in the UK you may have heard of is Applaws.

 

[Columbine]

I have fibromyalgia (among other things), so I really feel for you with ME

Kibble is another term for cat biscuits Saying kibble causes less confusion here, as we have so many US members, and biscuits means something totally different to them

I really believed in raw feeding too, but as I learned more I realised that there's no scientific proof that it's better than a good quality wet diet. There are so many great wet foods available that you certainly don't have to feel bad if raw isn't for you...and it's almost impossible to screw up a commercial diet (whereas a homemade diet needs careful preparation and handling to get right). Certainly, raw done badly can be disastrous! [thread="328247"][/thread]

 

[mixedstripes]

Understood!  Kibble means kinda dry food then.  Yes, we have that, Kitty eats a bit of it most days, Applaws dry etc., but prefers wet mostly.  

Thank you for your nice pictures LST3

!  

Very interesting to hear of your experience with different foods Columbine and sorry to hear about your fibromalgia

.

 

[Saf]

I am just starting to research this subject, so have an open mind!

Am thinking of trying raw food diet for 6 month old kitten.

Don't know if I can do all the "grinding" every day though, some people say its quite a "faff".

Can you buy a good frozen product commercially?

Someone linked to this thread from a post I made and I was wondering how you were getting on. If you're still thinking about it, I couldn't recommend Natural Instinct highly enough. I had four 12 week old kittens in my home for a couple of days before deciding which two to keep and all 4 couldn't get enough. The wild venison in particular goes down a treat. It looks and smells appetising as well. The only other raw food brand I tried breifly for my previous cats was Purrform and I couldn't recommend that all. It didn't look appealing and hadn't been ground very much. Seems like a bit of a one man band company as well.

We share the same health issue and I can definitely say feeding raw, when bought from a source you trust, isn't anymore time consuming than feeding supermarket garbage, and I'm less likely to experience the nightmare of both my cats getting ill and having to devote all my limited time and energy to trying to keep them going as long as possible and then having the horrible despair of seeing them die before their time because of bad food choices I made.

 

[mixedstripes]

Thank you Saf, I'll look into that. At the moment my cat gets a mixture of food -

- some raw chicken bits fed by hand (!)
- some commercial cat food i.e. Felix he quite likes
- Legend Almo Nature which I believe is high meat quality cat food (which I get from Zooplus) which he loves
- plus occasionally some quality dry cat food (called kibbles in the States I believe). I do this in case I am away overnight and need to be able to leave some food that can stay out for a while.

I have tried lots of good quality cat/kitten foods with high natural meat/fat content e.g Bozita and Applaws over the last few months and he turns his nose up to nearly all of it, which has been a little frustrating. It has also cost me a small fortune!

Glad to see you are getting so well on with your cat foods, Saf. I will take a look at Natural Instinct, thank you for recommendation.

 

[scraggles]

I just had a bit of a silly realisation while reading this. I’ve been thinking of trying to include more raw into my cat’s diet but the pet shops I’ve tried here have told me they stock raw for dogs but not for cats – but sure raw is raw! – lol I just never thought that, obviously, you can feed raw food that’s for “dogs” to cats also – so thanks for helping me with that!

 

[orange&white]

I just had a bit of a silly realisation while reading this. I’ve been thinking of trying to include more raw into my cat’s diet but the pet shops I’ve tried here have told me they stock raw for dogs but not for cats – but sure raw is raw! – lol I just never thought that, obviously, you can feed raw food that’s for “dogs” to cats also – so thanks for helping me with that!

Both my dog and my cats eat a ratio of 80% boneless meat, 10% bone, and 10% organs (half liver and half some other organ), plus some Omega-3's. Same meat. The cats get a few additional supplements (taurine, E, B-complex, and lite salt).

 

[scraggles]

Same meat.

Why this didn't click with me before I will never know - anyway - good to know now and it's something I will be looking in to!

 

[Saf]

Thank you Saf, I'll look into that. At the moment my cat gets a mixture of food -

- some raw chicken bits fed by hand (!)
- some commercial cat food i.e. Felix he quite likes
- Legend Almo Nature which I believe is high meat quality cat food (which I get from Zooplus) which he loves
- plus occasionally some quality dry cat food (called kibbles in the States I believe). I do this in case I am away overnight and need to be able to leave some food that can stay out for a while.

I have tried lots of good quality cat/kitten foods with high natural meat/fat content e.g Bozita and Applaws over the last few months and he turns his nose up to nearly all of it, which has been a little frustrating. It has also cost me a small fortune!

Glad to see you are getting so well on with your cat foods, Saf. I will take a look at Natural Instinct, thank you for recommendation.

I went through the whole zooplus thing with my previous two cats without ever finding a complete wet food they enjoyed consistently. And I realise now that what I was serving to them was not what their instinct told them was food. It was garbage dressed up to look to a human eye as though it's meat when it isn't really at all and they saw straight through it. Cats have to go through a re-education process when they enter the world and learn what pet food companies deem they should be eating. I think many end up liking dry food because it instinctly reminds them of crushing a mouse's a skull. The trouble with things like encore/applaws and almo nature is that they are generally not complete balanced diets and don't have all nutrients they need and should only be given three times a week maybe, but people often give them more than that because they have trouble finding something they like. And I remember this thing about Almo nature that there's some ambiguity about whether their food is complete or complimentary so I'd avoid that personally.

I actually don't acknowledge any dry food as being "quality" because it lacks the most important ingredient of all: water. "The stuff of life" to quote one of the characters from Interstellar.

If you're gonna try raw I think now's the time to do it before your cat becomes too institutionalised to commercial garbage. I have no connection to natural instinct but at this moment they're the standard bearer's in the UK raw pet food industry in my opinion but it's an expanding industry so that might not always be the case (for anyone who's stumbled across this thread 5 years from now!)

If you buy some from them and your cat doesn't show any interest I'll donate the amount you spent to a charity of your choice. I've become quite evangelical about raw food after seeing what commercial cat food did to my first two cats and have a desire pass on what I learn from that so other people don't go through what I did and other cats don't go through what they did.

 

[Columbine]

There ARE decent commercial wet foods out there (Thrive, Catz Finefood, Animonda Carny, Nature's Menu pouches, Aatu pouches etc etc). As far as dry food goes, the reason so many cats like it is because it's coated in 'digest' (highly processed meat, often liver) of some sort or another. This is incredibly appealing to cats - it's designed to be! I have never seen or heard any evidence that it's because it reminds cats of 'crushing a mouse's skull'! That argument doesn't make any sense when talking about housemate that have never hunted a day in their lives I agree that dry food can be the most problematic of the commercial foods, but that doesn't meant that all dry food is an issue if fed correctly (and with extra measures taken to ensure good water intake). It's certainly a little extreme to write all commercial food off as garbage!

Many cats thrive on commercial foods, mine included, and raw food isn't appropriate for all cats or all situations...indeed, some cats just don't recognise it as food! There is, as yet, no scientific proof that raw is superior to commercially available foods - the studies just haven't been done. Don't get me wrong - I'm not against raw feeding at all, and it's great that it's working for you and your kitties It just isn't the ONLY good option out there.
A Scientific Take On Cat Nutrition By Dr. Rachel Boltz
Raw Food For Cats - Interview With Pet Nutritionist Dr. Martha Cline

Fwiw, Almo Nature and Applaws get confusing because each brand has several ranges, some of which are complete and others which are complementary. You just have to check the product information