An essential for your library - Michelle Bernard's groundbreaking book: "Raising Cats Naturally"
A "must read" book by Dr. Elizabeth Hodgkins: "Your Cat - Simple Secrets to a Longer, Stronger Life"
Paying it Forward
This website was, for years, an advertising-free-zone.
That had to change so I could keep this site a totally free resource to anyone with an Internet connection and some curiousity. So yes, there are now a few ads on this site. But I can still use your help.
This website has been a labor of love (mostly). I was determined in 2000 to create a site that had the kind of one-stop information-shopping that I longed for when I first started getting my own education in feline nutrition and began making my own cat food. My success with the diet was so conspicuous and welcome that I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. But the Internet would work well too, I figured, and probably reach more people. Also, it would keep my neighbors from calling the men in white suits to take me away for standing on my roof all the time yapping loudly about the mainstream pet food industry and the virtues of feeding cats like the carnivores that they are.
My goal is solely to help people to help their animals live healthier lives and to shed light on the folly of feeding dry cereal to carnivores. The greatest way you can repay me is to feed your cats well. And to make some noise with your vet about getting smart on feline nutrition from unbiased sources, rather than relying on the pet food industry to act as a proxy for something as important as nutritional decisionmaking in health care. If you do that? I'm more than compensated for the effort.
But if you want to do more than that . . . here's the deal.
In the spring of 2007, visits to this site grew astronomically as news of the massive pet food recall sparked fresh interest in the idea of making cat food. I was delighted. And overwhelmed with emails. My web hosting service notified me that I'd begun exceeding web traffic limits and the time to purchase more bandwidth was upon me. Around the same time, my own efforts to upgrade and improve the site on my own backfired, and so I hired a wonderful, professional web designer to transform what had been a reasonable, if clunky, site into something that was much more visually appealing, user-friendly, and navigable. Thank you, Epiphanio.
This has all been an out-of-pocket venture. And totally worth it. But there is, realistically, a limit to how much I can spend out of pocket to keep this site up to date and paid for. Do I feel conflicted about accepting advertising? You bet your sweet patootie I do. But since the only choice becomes shutting down the site? Then I need to make an acceptable compromise.
So? If you've found this site particularly helpful and want to help to financially support the maintenance of this website, you can make a donation of any size through PayPal (just click on the button below) If you do that? Wow! Thank you.
Since people ask me this question all the time, here are the names of a handful of my favorite charities and nonprofits where you might also choose to make a donation:
Feline Outreach, a charitable organization formed to promote the routine and medical care of companion animals, particularly cats.
TLC Adoptions, a magnificent all-volunteer cat rescue and adoption organization founded in 1991 that has placed over 3,000 cats and kittens into loving homes. They educate the need to spay and neuter and work extremely hard on 'street rescue' of injured and abandoned cats and kittens.
So Others Might Eat (SOME), a community organization to help the poor and homeless population in Washington, DC
Tibetan Children's Education Foundation, founded in 1995 and dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan culture by supporting Tibetan schools and school children-in-exile from their homeland.
Thank you.
Anne