So you want to make the switch to raw, but you're not sure if your cat will eat it.  

Maybe you offered raw food and your cat ate it with gusto once, then reverted back to pleading for kibble. "Nice little novel experience you offered me there, staffer, that was interesting, but let's get back to the status quo now." Like that. 

Or you've bent over backwards selecting a good pre-made raw food - or toiled in the kitchen making it yourself and you're so proud of your efforts and care and certain that no cat in their right mind would dare to turn down this remarkable offering of hand-crafted carnivorous love.   

Instead your cat gives you a hostile, hairy eyeball stare and won't have anything to do with the new food.  "Nice try you clueless biped.  You had your fun, now fill up my kibble bowl and be quick about it."  

What to do?  

Know that the speed at which you should switch your cat will depend a great deal on your cat's age, temperament, health, and the diet s/he has been eating up to this point.

Keep in mind the "three Ps":  patience, persistence, and pandering.  

1.  Patience. Devoted kibble addicts often have a difficult time accepting the new food, so you have to employ some tough love, and gather your own patience while honing your feline manipulation skills to get your cat eating healthier food.  Be realistic - not every cat is going to dive in to a new food with enthusiasm, so be prepared to take your time with the switch.  

Remember, if your cat has been eating dry food for a good while, s/he's become addicted to all those yummy and good-kind-of-stinky animal digests that are sprayed on the dry food.  (Remember - no cat would eat what's in most kibble without those flavoring additives). 

Don't be in a crazy and impatient rush to get your cat switched over. I hear an awful lot of stories of people who abandon the idea of a better food, whether quality canned or raw, when their cats don't instantly take to the new food. 

Remember - the idea is to make the transition. Not to make it overnight. Proceed steadily in the right direction and be willing to be at a plateau for a while. Don't rush things. When I first dove into raw feeding a gazillion years ago with two former kibble-addicted cats, I took three weeks to get them moved over to the new diet. Other people with more cats or older animals took two months or even longer to fully get their crew on all raw. Take the time you need and don't hurry.

The single biggest misstep I see people make time and again?  "My cat won't touch the new food, so I panicked and filled up the bowl with dry food."  Then, shock of shocks, kitty won't be hungry when the next raw meal is offered.  

There really is no easy one-size-fits-all answer here, but as a general rule of thumb, I suggest to people that unless they have a very young cat or kitten, it's best to go slowly. Take at least a week to ten days to fully transition an adult cat, and that's presuming the cat is at least already off of all dry food. Raw food is very different from commercial food in many ways, and it's best to give your adult cat's digestive system a bit of time to slowly adapt to the new food. 

Kittens? That's a different story altogether. They're magnificent at devouring raw food in remarkable quantities relative to their body weight.  And switching them over is usually fast and relatively painless.

2.  Persistence.  Paradoxically (oh my, look, another 'p' word), the problem is the dry food and simultaneously can be the key to making the switch.  Exploit dry food to your non-dry-food benefit.  It can be your temporary ally.  

Here's how that goes.  Dr. Lisa Pierson has a great tip on her website and that I discuss in a little more detail on my feline obesity page:

• Offer two or three meals a day of a very small amount of dry food (perhaps 1/8 to 1/4 of a cup) and, after 30 minutes, take up the food she hasn't eaten. Then do not give in if she pleads for a between-meal snack. You want your cat to get accustomed to eating on a schedule this way, at meal times.

Please stop free-feeding kibble. This is essential.  If you're still leaving dry food out all the time and allowing Mr. or Mrs. McStubborn Fluffybuns  to "free-feed" off that, then you're not letting hunger work in your favor. You already know, most likely, that you're not doing your cat any favors by feeding dry food. 

Having food available 24/7 is not a good idea for any cat, and if your cat has constant access to that food, you'll have a very hard time getting her weaned onto a healthier diet - whether it's raw food or a good quality canned food.  

Next, after you've established set meal times for a few days or a week, begin setting out meals of only good canned food. If your cat refuses to touch it, take up the food and try again a few hours later.  (Patience factors in here again). Don't fret about it or throw in the towel.  Just pick up the food with a smile and tell your cat, "We'll try this again later, Monsieur Fluffybuns, when you're in the mood. Now go back to scratching sofa or whatever it is you do. I love you and please don't break another lamp." 

3. Pandering.  Yes, Señor Fluffybuns worships the flavors in the kibble.  So pander temporarily to that - use that to help your cat make the switch.  One way to get that flavoring on to the new food is to crush some of the kibble and sprinkle it on top of the new food.  

Another great trick that works miraculous wonders?  Buy some Purina Fortiflora - a probiotic powder. I'm unconcerned here about its alleged probiotic properties, but I am a super-big fan of how much cats love the flavor. This stuff is the Bribe of the Century.  It's made using animal digest - the same thing the pet food companies use to coat dry food and make it tasty to cats. Use just a teensy bit on top of the new food - as if you were very lightly salting your own food.  See if that doesn't help entice Mr. or Mrs. Stubborn Fluffybuns to dive in.  

Once the transition is moving in a successful direction, get the dry food out of your house. Your cat can probably smell it and will hold out stubbornly if s/he knows it's there.   Find a new home for the food or maybe use it on an icy sidewalk to get better traction in winter weather.  

A couple final l'il bites of wisdom: 

• Think it through and "see" the situation from your cat's perspective. If you have a fully grown cat that has been eating nothing but meat-flavored cereal (dry food) for several years, suddenly expecting her to be able to enjoy and easily digest a much richer food based on animal proteins, as opposed to all those plant-based proteins and carbohydrates, is often unrealistic.  Slow and steady is what usually wins the race.

• Do not 'starve' an obese cat into submission.  Ever.  For a cat that's been on a high-carbohydrate diet, the risk of a cat getting hepatic lipidosis (fatty liver disease) from going for too long without any food is too high for my tastes.
  

The protein that's in dry food is very frequently plant-based.  

Plant based proteins have a much lower biological value to obligate carnivores than meat proteins.  

For pet food manufacturers, obviously, plant proteins cost a whole lot less.  Corn, soy, rice, and wheat are much less expensive to source than meat.  

So when you're reading the label on a cat food, it's important not only to notice the percentage of protein, but to know the source of that protein.  The notion that the formulators of pet food have the wisdom to make up for what may be missing by using so many species-inappropriate ingredients in cat food is, 

Quoting Dr. Lisa Pierson of CatInfo.org:  

Veterinary nutritionists and pet food company representatives will argue that they are smart enough to know *exactly* what is missing from a plant in terms of nutrient forms and amounts - nutrients that would otherwise be in a meat-based diet.  They will then claim that these missing elements are added to their diets to make it complete and balanced to sustain life in an obligate carnivore.

The problem with this way of thinking is that Man is simply not that smart and has made fatal errors in the past when trying to guess how to compensate for such a drastic deviation from nature.  Not all that long ago (1980s) cats were going blind and dying from heart problems due to Man's arrogance.  It was discovered in the late 1980s that cats are exquisitely sensitive to taurine deficiency and our cats were paying dearly for Man straying so far from nature in order to increase the profit margin of the pet food manufacturers. 

There are several situations that can lead to a diet being deficient in taurine but one of them is using a diet that relies heavily on plants (grains, etc.) as its source of protein.  Instead of lowering their profit margin and going back to nature by adding more meat to the diets, the pet food companies simple started supplementing their diets with synthetic taurine.


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There is absolutely no need for "life stage" foods. Or for differently formulated foods for different breeds. As one of my vet friends likes to say, "there are no 'kitten mice,' 'tartar control lizards' or 'senior cat crickets' in the wild." 


A kitten eats more food (per pound of weight), but not different food. A kitten needs a high-protein, meat-based diet.  An adult cat needs a high-protein, meat-based diet.  A senior cat needs a high-protein, meat-based diet. Are there situations when it's appropriate to adjust the diet based on health issues?  Absolutely.  But kittens, adult cats, and senior cats all thrive on a large amount of animal-based proteins (meat, organs) and all get much less nutritional support from plant-based proteins. 



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Homemade food can be one of the best things you can do for your cat.  It can also be one of the worst.  

Compared to well over a decade ago when I first began looking into this whole "raw feeding" thing, there are now plenty of good recipes available from different sources online and elsewhere to use as a foundation for building a nutritional program for cats.  (There are also some really stinky recipes out there! Those haven't disappeared.)  

What the good recipes share is an honest effort to re-create and approximate - to the best of a human's limited ability - the nutritional composition of a cat's natural prey, which, just for starters, comes with sufficient calcium (bone) to balance out the phosphorus in the meat.  They include biologically available sources of Essential Fatty Acids, ample taurine and other amino acids, and organ meats (or a decent substitute) to supply ingredients that mimic the content profile of, for example, a mouse.  

As Dr. Jean Hofve says, however, once a cat caregiver has started feeding a home-prepared raw diet, there is a risk they become tempted to simplify or change the recipe - skipping ingredients altogether because they're not on hand.  

Over time, "recipe drift" can create serious downstream health problems for cats.  

It's not necessary to have a degree in veterinary nutrition to educate yourself on the WHYs of some of the ingredients that are necessary in a balanced and complete diet for cats.  

One of the most heartbreaking stories I've heard came from a woman who was mystified by why her cat had become so fragile and sick despite years and years of feeding a homemade raw diet. When I asked her to share the recipe she'd been working with, it sure seemed to me like an adequate one.  

After a few more emails she mentioned, almost in passing, that she had read an article once that said that bone matter in raw cat food was potentially irritating to a cat's digestive system and she also thought it was a hassle cleaning up bone bits from her grinder.  So for ease of food preparation and to simplify matters she began removing all the bone from the meat.  To make matters worse, she didn't seek out an alternate source of calcium to include in the diet.  For more than four years, her cat had been eating a home-prepared raw meat-based diet that had dangerously low levels of calcium - and without a dietary source of sufficient calcium, her cat's body began to rob calcium from the cat's own bones (osteoporosis).  

Her vet, on learning she'd been making her own cat food for years, chastised her for doing something so "dangerous and silly" and, I'm guessing, saw this case as another piece of damning evidence against homemade diets for cats.  

* * * 

This is not to say that any of us know with 100 percent certainty that a particular recipe is truly perfect for our cat.  As much faith I have in the recipe I've been using for nearly 12 years and the research on which it's based, I doubt that it's as good as what Mother Nature herself created for a cat.  Ironically, or not, the more years I have under my belt of successfully feeding a homemade diet, the more I'm wary of human hubris.  

The more I know, the more I appreciate how much I still don't know.  

Who really knows what's lost - nutritionally and otherwise - when a cat doesn't kill and eat fresh prey?  Can we be absolutely certain that there isn't some valuable micronutrient, some mineral, some missing piece of the puzzle from an ingredient that isn't measured by or included in the roadmaps used to create a recipe?  

I've wondered lately, for example, whether the relatively "bloodless" meats many people buy from the grocery store aren't depriving our cats of sufficient iron in their diets.  Two people using the exact same recipe but using meats from entirely different sources that raise and feed the animals wildly different diets really are not feeding the 'same' food at all.  You "can" skip adding liver to the diet and, theoretically, substitute the missing Vitamin A and D with store-bought Vitamin supplements, but who really knows what else is in liver that's nourishing for cats?  

We do the best that we can - and keep our minds and eyes open to new bits of science or other evidence to suggest that it may be prudent to adjust a recipe, to add or subtract the amount of a particular ingredient.  

• Personally, I continue to have much more confidence in the thought, care, and wisdom that goes into preparing the food I make for and serve to my furry fellows than I do in the rationale behind the mass-produced output from so many of the mainstream brands of commercially prepared cat foods. 
• But?  As much as we know, we really do not know everything about what makes a truly perfect diet for cats.  What we can and ought to do, however, is avoid getting sloppy about applying the knowledge that we do have.  

Long-term feeding of a diet that is missing a conspicuous and known ingredient in a cat diet can put our beloved carnivores at risk.  So please mindful of the folly of recipe drift.  

And?  Never forget the most critical ingredients in your cat's well-being: at least a few moments each day acknowledging their sheer awesomeness and showering them with some unabashed love.   



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For diabetic cats, it's critical to lower their carbohydrate consumption to less than 7 to ten percent of their daily calorie intake - and to know that as dietary carbohydrates go down, so will their insulin requirements.  


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There are lots of smart, wonderful, and yes - sane - people out there feeding raw meat-based diets to their cats. Some are vets. I learned from many of them, vets and lay people alike, and continue to benefit from feedback on raw feeding from site visitors and from those I've come to trust on the issue. 

I strongly encourage you to think twice about any recipe that contains grains or vegetables or relies on plant-based sources to supply vitamins, minerals, amino acids, or other essentials. 

The range of passionate opinions on whether to feed raw -- and how to feed it if you do -- is vast. It's also sometimes snarky, personal, and downright weird. But ultimately, any civil and informed debate about how to properly feed a cat is one I welcome. 

Check them out, do your own reading, make up your own mind. My suggestion is to remember the scientific facts concerning nutrition for carnivores and consider the wisdom of using any recipe that contains grains or vegetables or that relies on plant-based sources to supply vitamins, minerals, amino acids, or other essentials.

A great scientific source to learn the fundamentals about a cat's carnivore status is Dr. Debra Zoran's JAVMA article.



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"Isn't making cat food time-consuming?"

Once you get a groove going and your supplies organized, not really.  You'll also likely spend a whole lot less time (and money) in veterinary clinics.  If you can get a helper, go for it.  

Maybe hook up with a local friend and savor some special time together hacking up meat parts and grinding them while singing show tunes.  It beats cleaning your garage, right?  

Time spent making cat food is less than I used to spend fretting about my sick cat and trekking him to the vet when he had a digestive disorder. 

So yes, while it is definitely some work, it's very manageable. Think of it as a labor of love. That's exactly what it is. 


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"My cat won't eat this new raw food; what should I do?"

Give up immediately and fill a gravity feeder with cheap kibble.

(I'm kidding.) 

There are so many different factors involved in how quickly and enthusiastically a cat will accept a new diet. If you're still leaving dry food out all and allowing her to "free-feed" off that, then you're not letting hunger work in your favor. You're not doing your cat any favors by feeding dry food. Perhaps begin by limiting meal times with dry food, then switch over to a quality canned food. 

When kitty's eating canned food, ditch the kibble and start sneaking very small amounts of the raw food into that food and slowly increasing the amount over time until the transition is complete. 

Get the dry food OUT of your house. Your cat can probably smell it and will hold out stubbornly if she knows it's there. 

Devoted kibble addicts often have a difficult time accepting the new food, so you have to employ some tough love, and gather your own patience while honing your feline manipulation skills to get your cat eating healthier food.



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It's wise to think twice about any homemade cat food recipe that contains grains or vegetables - or relies on plant-based sources to supply vitamins, minerals, amino acids, or other essentials. 

My invitation to you is to embrace the key scientific principles (http://bit.ly/19jF9OY) concerning nutrition for carnivores - specifically a cat's biology and inability to derive meaningful nutrition from plant matter - and consider the wisdom of using any recipe that contains grains or vegetables or that relies on plant-based sources to supply vitamins, minerals, amino acids, or other essentials.



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Dry foods and many canned foods are packed with ingredients that are wholly inappropriate for carnivores and contribute to disease. 

Plant matter, carbohydrates, vegetables, and fillers are not health-building ingredients for cats. 

A mouse, on the other hand, offers a perfect and complete nutrition package for a cat. Meat, bone, organs, Essential Fatty Acids, ample Taurine, vitamins, and key minerals are all there in the mouse.

So why not 'build a mouse' and feed it to a cat? Or take a second look at the food you're feeding and see how close to mouse-ness it is? 

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