Cat Nutrition Blog

A note of gratitude to all of you who are helping me and spurring me on to keep this website alive and kicking. 

When I started the website over ten years ago, it was out of exasperation.  I see now, looking back, that exasperation has slowly morphed into inspiration - a much more joy-affirming motivator.  

The brief history:  Shortly after I was celebrating the success of curing my cat's IBD in 2002 with a home-prepared raw diet I'd learned about thanks to a Yahoo e-group, Natascha Wille, Michelle Bernard, Lee Ellis, and my own panic-stricken desperation for an answer for my beloved Dukie-boy, an odd turn of events led to an interview in a veterinary publication for clients about my experience. 

I was thrilled at the chance to share my story and spent hours on the phone with an interviewer sharing what I'd learned along the way - the many false starts I'd had trying several recipes that included grains, attempting a cooked diet, struggling with bewilderment about my choice given all the admonitions against raw feeding, and my inability to secure advice from a trusted veterinary source on how best to evaluate the balance and safety of the raw diet recipes online.   

When the article was published and arrived in the mail, I saw that all my deliberate references to "raw diet" were expunged, and replaced (without running the copy by me beforehand) with "veterinary supervised home prepared diet."  

I was livid.  Veterinary supervised?  Not so much!  The point of my story was that I could not - as many others could not - find a veterinarian to help with something so very important. That the gap between vets and clients on such a fundamental aspect of cat health was not a good thing. That there were sick cats who could be made well again if only we could rely on vets to help us understand what it means to feed well. In my subsequent exchanges with the author, she offered sympathy for my frustration but explained that a veterinary publication could not 'in good conscience' implicitly or explicitly endorse a raw diet.  And that the editorial board thus determined the safest decision would be to share my story but substitute "home prepared" and "veterinary supervised" for all references to a raw diet.  

Harumph.   

In commiserating with a colleague and friend - a scholar in another field altogether who had, over the course of his very long career, published many important books uncovering injustices and travesties in 20th century history - I said, "The deck is stacked too high against those of us trying to share this message.  There's no way to make any kind of a dent in the dominant paradigm that the pet food industry has the answers to help sick animals."  

His reply:  "Don't go there.  Why give up so easily?  It may not happen overnight, but don't underestimate the power over time of sharing a message that needs to be heard. It may be cliche, but one person can make a difference.  Two can make an even bigger difference. Add a few more and pretty soon a few folks will take notice." 

Point taken, but what to do?  Ooh ooh ooh!  I know.  Write letters.  

With help from my then new friend and ally in the healthy feeding world, Dr. Lisa Pierson, I launched a one-woman letter-writing campaign to all the veterinary universities with nutrition departments in North America. It was quite an undertaking. I put together the original sources I'd assembled on my own, wrote a cover letter to each with an entreaty to please help all of us learn to feed our cats better, and snail-mailed off scores of information packages to each.  I recall the day I'd finally gotten all the separate parts of the package edited, printed off, collated, and sitting in neat little piles on the dining room table ready to assemble. I stared at all that paper wondering if I was nuts to even spend postage on all this. But I mailed them off anyway. Maybe in some way I'd spur some veterinary nutrition teacher to start shortening the too-long learning curve on this question.  

I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  For some replies, that is.  Days. Weeks. 

The silence was deafening. The solitary response received came on fancy letterhead from a nutrition department professor who politely opined that my cat's recovery from IBD was almost certainly coincidental, had nothing whatsoever to do with the raw diet, and that my cat most likely would have gotten better on the right commercial diet. He also warned me to about the dangers of handling raw meat for my own health.   

Okay, so writing to veterinary universities wasn't the way to go.  Lesson learned. Time for Plan B.  

So I started the website. I questioned the wisdom taking time I didn't have to spare on a venture that would not only would never make a dime and was unlikely to ever to reach more than a few people.  I knew nothing about building a website.  But I did it anyway.  It was a pretty sorry site, design-wise, but you gotta start somewhere, right?  Fools rush in, especially with fightin' words like "coincidental cure" ringing in the head.  Coincidental my a**.  

What if just one sick cat got better?  Would that be worth the trouble? I looked at Duke's amber eyes and thought of the many other sick cats out there suffering needlessly from a malady that was so easily turned around with the right diet and thought, "Yeah, Duke, we gotta give this a shot."

One of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, wrote a fantastic book in 1994 about writing called "Bird by Bird" that I finally had the good sense to read a few months ago.  In the author's own words, the story behind the book's title goes like this:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.'" 

I wondered then how I would ever possibly be an effective little cog in the then small wheel that made up the chorus of voices sharing the word about truly healthy nutrition for these feline creatures?  I see now that my answer was the same. 

Cat by cat.  

Today, Google Analytics stats claim that the website averages about 2,000 unique visitors each day.  I don't know if that's good or not by today's web standards, but I know that in 2002 the very idea of that kind of reach seemed ludicrous and unimaginable. 

When I tentatively dipped my toes to move this message out a little further into the social media world, I remember thinking I'd be pretty content if the Facebook page for the website ever reached 100 "Likes."  Today the page is edging up on 2,000, which, simply put, blows me away. 

Best of all, I realize that while there are still moments of exasperation at how much resistance many of us face in questioning the dominant paradigm on healthy feeding for cats - the collective of voices, honest companies, and brave vets has made a dent in that paradigm. Exasperation yielded to inspiration.  I cannot even tell you how very much I still learn from website and social media visitors - if I could purr in gratitude, I would.

In truth, I was ready to let the site fall by the wayside a couple of years ago. Like everyone, I have a busy life and plenty of competing claims on my time and energy. And while cat nutrition was a passion, it wasn't the only one that I wanted to feed. I wasn't sure that there was any need for it any more or if I could muster the motivation to keep it going. I figured that anyone who was going to get the message already had and that by now all this was old news.  

But you all inspire me. And so do your cats. 

I love especially the proliferation of more and more good sources of information on feeding cats. Is there still far too much misinformation out there?  Heck yes you bet there is. From vets and lay people alike. But? It's not nearly as difficult as it was a decade ago to find a vet that supports raw feeding. There was no "Feline Nutrition Education Society" a decade ago. It was rare then to find a pet food store selling really decent raw food. 

Running an Internet search on "raw feeding cats" today doesn't only bring up a first page of results with dire, fear-mongering, and outright misleading warnings from pet food companies. 

Who made that happen? You did. You and your commitment to and compassion for these creatures.  
  
So?  Thank you for taking the time to look at the www.catnutrition.org website. I know it's not the only site out there with (hopefully) useful information feeding cats.  

Thank you all for your many helpful suggestions. 

Thank you for sharing your own compelling stories and questions and for being part of our virtual Team Feed-Cats-Way-Better.  We should all get snazzy t-shirts and hold a flash mob in Times Square or something. 

I'm so honored to be on the team with you. Thank you. 

More than a decade of running this crazy little website has brought in thousands of questions and comments from many smart, concerned, and discerning site visitors.  Since I began using social media as another way of getting the word out, however, the volume of questions has skyrocketed. I can often refer folks to an exist FAQ or page on the website. But I'm seeing that even that sometimes doesn't get at the real heart of the matter or answer the more fundamental questions that underpin the messages filling up my inbox each day. 

I think I must have the most generous website visitors on the planet. 

Eunyoung Lee and Eunsoo Lee, who have been translating so many pages of this website, just finished a full translation into Korean of the page on periodontal disease.  A big heaping plate of thanks to them both for making more and more of this website accessible worldwide.  

Halo is now putting carrageenan in their Liv'a Little treats - the product that was the "bribe of choice" I'd recommended to site visitors for years.  It was a tasty, simple, unadulterated treat that cats loved - it helped persuade a lot of reluctant cats to dive into healthier food. 

I don't know when they started adding this ingredient to their treats; clearly, I've been lazy about following my own advice to always read labels for any foods or treats. I focused on this the other day when a website visitor emailed me to let me know that when she looked at the Halo treats she's heard me rave about, she noticed carrageenan on the ingredient label.  Deep mournful sigh.  I'm grateful to her for the heads up, and I'm reminded formulations can change often.  Blink and next thing you know your favorite food or treat contains some additive that not only adds no nutritional value but is linked with causing or aggravating intestinal disorders. 

Ironically, only last month, I wrote a little missive about why carrageenan may be worth trying to avoid in one of my "L'il Bites" - a super spiffy new feature on this site, by the way, so check it out!  

Feel free to read it if you like, but the Cliff's Notes version is that this is a highly controversial food additive (a "texture enhancer") directly associated in scores of peer-reviewed medical studies as an agent that induces gastrointestinal inflammation - and has been identified as a possible carcinogen to boot. 

I'm disappointed in Halo on this one - though they're definitely not a lone wolf in adding this ingredient to a food product.  It's all over the darn place in pet food and human food.  

Wilson and Sidney-Beans' days of enjoying those treats are behind them.  The good news?  There are still healthy treat choices out there.  I just stocked up today at my favorite store, Petsage, on a bunch of Bravo's Bonus Bites - and a taste test here gave them four dew-claws up.  

Cheers and hoorays and bravos for Bravo.  

And a wag of my finger at Halo.  Pains me to do that, as they're generally a pretty cool company:  they've done some great stuff promoting animal welfare and rescue just for starters.  And I'm grateful that Halo treats helped to transition scores of cats from dry food to wet or homemade food.  

But when it comes to nutrition for the cats, I'm just not willing to compromise when I don't have to - and when I have a choice.  I wrote them today to ask what on earth they were thinking by using this very questionable, and, arguably harmful, ingredient to what was a fantastically popular and otherwise great choice for a cat treat.  We'll see what they say. I'm an optimist at heart - and like to think that good people looking squarely at facts will come to a reasonable conclusion.  

• I only hope they don't offer the weak (and since discredited) defense that other food manufacturers are using - about how only "degraded" carrageenan is a problem: the latest science shows that both degraded and undegraded carraggeenan "inevitably co-exist in food products." (References: here, see bottom of page 2 and top of page 3; and here.) 
  

Too risky for my taste, carrageenan.  An abundance of caution seems a sensible approach when it comes to additives to foods, especially those like carrageenan which add no nutritional value.  I don't know what their calculus or rationale was for adding this to their product - but I cast my vote against anything that might put our critters at risk with no discernible benefit to outweigh the possible dangers to their long-term health.  

Perhaps Halo improved the texture of their product with carrageenan.  But they've lost two previously enthusiastic cat customers for now - at least until the carrageenan is gone. 

Big thanks to Melike Uzun for translating the first main recipe on the website into Turkish!  What a great thing to share.  Much appreciated, Melike.  Quick link to the translation is here, and also on the recipe page at the bottom with other translations. 

My deep gratitude to all the many generous folks who have translated portions of the website into other languages so that others can have access to more information to help make wise decisions on what's best for cats.  

Calling all tweeters (twitterers?)!  CatNutrition.org is now on Twitter.  I hope that's a good idea.  Follow us here if you're into the Tweetin' thing.  We'd love to hook up!  

And here's a picture of a cat.  

Dr. Lisa Pierson of catinfo.org - who is much more of a numbers person than I am - has on her website an awesome, detailed breakout of what it costs to make homemade raw cat food. 

Many folks are understandably dubious about the price of doing it themselves and, to be sure, if you go down the path of making cat food yourself there can be an initial outlay for a grinder and a supply of the dry vitamins and other ingredients.  The grinder, however, will last you for years and years (mine's been going strong for over a decade). 

I finally did some calculations this morning on what it costs me to make a supply of cat food for my two furry shamans.  I bought free-range chicken (on sale at Whole Foods) and when I added up the total cost of the meat, eggs, organs and other ingredients - and divided the cost by the number of days it will feed Wilson and Sidney-Beans, I came up with a cost of about 90 cents a day per cat.  

As a benchmark, I looked at the cost of buying - on sale - a premium canned cat food.  That came to  $1.50 a day per cat.  

A few other snippets to inform your thinking about cost:  

• Our friends at the One Stop Jerky Shop are selling the Tasin grinder for $150. I've been using the same grinder for over 10 years - amortized, it's cost me $15 a year to have that grinder.     

• If you use this link to order the other ingredients (vitamins, salmon oil, etc.) from iHerb, you can get $5 off your first order.  

• Diet is the brick and mortar of health - as Dr. Pierson reminds readers, you can pay now or pay later.  Paying later can come in the form of high vet bills from nutritionally-linked ailments like IBD, diabetes, obesity, and urinary tract disorders. 
  

Methinks homemade raw feeding really is a bargain.    

I love what feeding a balanced, raw diet does for cats.  But everything we do that isn't exactly what Mother Nature intended has consequences.  Like, for instance, the act of grinding the food.  I don't see a way around that - in order to feed a nice balance of meat, organs, and bones, we have to grind those bones up so they're of a safe size.  

But in grinding it all, our cats lose the benefit they'd get from shearing at large chunks of muscle meat.  Benefits to their teeth and their gums.  But since we're usually feeding animals that have bones that are much larger than what a cat would eat as her natural prey, we're left to grind up the bones and the meat along with it.

If your cat is game and has a healthy mouth?  Then you might consider feeding some meals now and again of big chunks of just muscle meat.  I like to cut up chicken thighs (minus the bone) into sizable pieces - a couple of inches for each piece - and feed those.  

Not every cat is up to the task.  My previous cats couldn't be bribed, cajoled, or begged into eating chunks.  But the two boy-cats I live with now are game, and they do a pretty good job.  Even Wilson, who's missing more than a few teeth, does an admirable job if the chunks aren't too big - though he takes longer than he would if he had all his premolars.  

Sidney-Beans, on the other hand (knock wood) has all his chompers in place and tears through big chunks of muscle meat like a pro.  We're so proud. 

Have a look at the video - Sidney-Beans shows how it's done.  

Throw in some regular checkups to assess and take care of your cat's dental health - and add in some tooth-brushing?  You've done a lot to help ensure your cat has the best shot at good dental health.  

A special appeal to all you animal-loving people out there, especially if you are in Utah or have a network there that may be of help.  

A very dear friend of mine and her husband opened their hearts to offer a forever home to a beautiful dog named Hudson.  In the course of transporting him from his foster home in California to his new home in Montana yesterday, Hudson bolted.  He is now missing and was last seen in the Red Cliff Recreation area of Utah, just outside of St George, Utah.

If you or anyone you know can help with your contacts or resources to help bring this very special boy home, please contact the St. George rescue organization - H.A.R.T. (Homeless Animal Rescue Team) that is coordinating the search for this extraordinary animal  - at 435-668-2655.  You can also contact Susan, at shewhosmiles (at) hotmail.com if you have other ideas for helping.  

Thank you so very much.  This means a lot.  

Big meows of gratitude go out to Eunyoung Lee and Eunsoo Lee, who very generously donated their time and incredible talents to translate another page on cat nutrition.org - the home page!  Many many thanks!