I understand you so very well. I've been feeding commercial raw for more than a year now, it's more than a half of their diet at the moment (other being many brands of canned - I always focus on variety), they've been thriving on it but my goal has always been homemade raw; I've been researching for so long and I still don't feel ready and I'm afraid I will mess things up. Never in my life I've prepared meat for any animal, humans included, and I think that's what makes it so difficult. But I've tried the meat with premade supplements and it's good alternative and super easy even for inexperienced people and you don't need full equipment: I used food processor for some parts of meat and I cut the majority, I want them to bite the chunks as much as possible. But ground might appeal much more to meat eaters that never practiced how to bite, as weird as it sounds.
If you live anywhere close to Seattle or Olympia, and you consider commercial frozen raw just to see if they like it, I highly recommend brands that I buy: Natural Pet Pantry and Wild Coast Raw. My cats go crazy for this food and after a year I can say I trust their recipes (I do have trust issues when it comes to pet food manufacturers...). I'd totally keep feeding this food and stop thinking about homemade if it was cheaper - right now cost is my biggest motivator to start preparing on my own. Anyway I think you can buy their food in smaller pet shops anywhere in WA (not sure about other PNW states), they should be able to order it even if they don't stock it.
ALso, Darwin's is local to our region, I'm not sure if they still have introductory package but that was excellent deal. The problem with Darwin's though is that Chicken and Turkey flavours are not boneless, only Lamb is, so I feed it occasionally only.
And just to mention, my girl was not excited at all when I first started to feed them commercial raw. I think the texture or some organs bothered her, and it took me several weeks (months?) to transition her to it. It's hard to imagine that now when I see how extremely happy she is when she's about to get raw. By far it's her favourite type of food. The transition effort is so worth it.
My boy used to be a kibble addict when I got him (luckily he was very young and I managed to make him eat wet with pleasure) and to this day he's extremely happy when he sees anything crunchy. They get freeze dried snacks and to experiment, I fed them freeze dried that I didn't rehydrate as a full meal and I don't recommend this solution mainly because of one observation that I had: it didn't make them drink more. As bad as regular dry is, it used to make my cats drink, even my sworn not drinker drunk a bit when he got it. I'm guessing it's because of salt or any other additive, I don't even want to know what they add. But after dry freeze dried, nothing, they didn't go near the water at all, which worried me a lot and I decided to stop experimenting with that. I think your best bet on transitioning him from kibble is stop giving it to him
and even stop having it at your house so that he can't smell it. That's the only way that worked with my boy.
If you live anywhere close to Seattle or Olympia, and you consider commercial frozen raw just to see if they like it, I highly recommend brands that I buy: Natural Pet Pantry and Wild Coast Raw. My cats go crazy for this food and after a year I can say I trust their recipes (I do have trust issues when it comes to pet food manufacturers...). I'd totally keep feeding this food and stop thinking about homemade if it was cheaper - right now cost is my biggest motivator to start preparing on my own. Anyway I think you can buy their food in smaller pet shops anywhere in WA (not sure about other PNW states), they should be able to order it even if they don't stock it.
ALso, Darwin's is local to our region, I'm not sure if they still have introductory package but that was excellent deal. The problem with Darwin's though is that Chicken and Turkey flavours are not boneless, only Lamb is, so I feed it occasionally only.
And just to mention, my girl was not excited at all when I first started to feed them commercial raw. I think the texture or some organs bothered her, and it took me several weeks (months?) to transition her to it. It's hard to imagine that now when I see how extremely happy she is when she's about to get raw. By far it's her favourite type of food. The transition effort is so worth it.
My boy used to be a kibble addict when I got him (luckily he was very young and I managed to make him eat wet with pleasure) and to this day he's extremely happy when he sees anything crunchy. They get freeze dried snacks and to experiment, I fed them freeze dried that I didn't rehydrate as a full meal and I don't recommend this solution mainly because of one observation that I had: it didn't make them drink more. As bad as regular dry is, it used to make my cats drink, even my sworn not drinker drunk a bit when he got it. I'm guessing it's because of salt or any other additive, I don't even want to know what they add. But after dry freeze dried, nothing, they didn't go near the water at all, which worried me a lot and I decided to stop experimenting with that. I think your best bet on transitioning him from kibble is stop giving it to him
and even stop having it at your house so that he can't smell it. That's the only way that worked with my boy.
Thing with canned is that a lot of them have high phosphorus too. It's also definitely possible for dry food have too much phosphorus as well. But with dry food you're really risking the kidneys of the cat because they really need moisture in their food.
