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.
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.
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