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. A decent, however, will last you for years and years. Mine has been going strong for coming up on 20 years now.
I finally did some calculations some years back on what it costs me to make a supply of cat food for my two furry shamans. I used to buy 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 my two cats, I came up with a cost of about 90 cents a day per cat. This was in 2013.
As a benchmark, I looked at the cost of buying – on sale – a premium canned cat food. That came to around $1.50 a day per cat. A few other notions to inform your thinking about cost:
- I’ve been using the same grinder for well over 18 years – amortized, it’s cost me about $10 a year to have that grinder. The wonderful place that sold the grinder I like is closing its doors, but this one is quite close to the one I have.
- 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.
I think homemade raw feeding is a bargain.
