This post is the first in our “Journey to Raw” series, published every Wednesday, and describes CatCentric founder Tracy Dion’s long journey from the horrific 2007 pet food poisoning to the day she finally gave up processed pet food products for good.

One of the most important but difficult mission objectives for the CatCentric team is helping cat owners make the transition off of commercial cat food products and onto fresh whole foods. It’s a tough sell for many reasons, including fears of pathogens (read why such fears are needless), but primarily because the very breadth and complexity of those reasons throws up such a fog of confusion that it shuts people down. They spin from one confusing question to another to another and become so tangled in information – some of it even contradictory – they become frustrated, throw their hands up, and return to feeding what they’ve been feeding all along out of sheer self defense.

This post kicks off a new and thought provoking series that we hope will help cut through that fog by bringing you along as, one case at a time, we explore the journeys of cat owners as they move from their first encounter with the raw feeding concept to becoming staunch raw feeding advocates. The “My Journey to Raw” series may touch on transitioning the cats, but the focus will be on each author’s unique cognitive journey from fear and (in many instances) desperation, to questioning, learning, experiencing and finally, to comprehension, acceptance and advocacy.

The series is open-ended with an undefined number of entries, each written by a different person – many of them members of the public just like you. It is our fervent hope you see yourself or your cats in one of these stories and in so doing, become better empowered to start your own transition to feeding a fresh diet… and, not incidentally, watching your beloved kitties begin to bloom with true good health.

Since I’m introducing the series, I’ve also been elected by the team to kick it off (‘though you likely know much of it already), so here goes!

Back in 2006, I pulled my first litter of feral kittens off the street. Lucinda, the mother cat, was an abandoned housecat, but her 8 week old kittens had never been handled and were quite the little spitfires. Although it took only a few weeks to socialize Allen, Oliver, Rachel and Meghan, the experience was AMAZING and I became, for the first time, a failed foster mom. Lucinda was adopted out and all four kittens found their forever home with me.

I’m a little bit OCD. Ok, maybe more than a little! I research everything, exhaustively, before I make most decisions. And the feeding and care of my newest family members was no different. One of the first things I learned was the complete inappropriateness of kibble products in a feline diet, closely followed by the craziness of feeding grains to carnivores. This was back when “grain-free” meant “starch-free” (which is not the case today) and I put the quartet on healthy, nutritious, grain-free canned products of the highest quality.

Or so I thought.

In early 2007, one of the “awesome” foods I was so lovingly feeding my furkids killed Ollie and sickened the other three.

There aren’t any words for the devastation I felt, but I’ve written about that before.

I’ve also written about the subsequent transition of my kitties to a prey model raw diet, with all the questions and learning experiences that accompanied it.

What you won’t find written anywhere and what I will confess to you here is this… it took me a whopping 22 months – almost two full years – to start feeding my babies fresh foods. I’m a smart chick, I was betrayed in the worst way by the pet food industry and yet it still took me nearly two years to overcome that awful doubt with which we’ve all been trained to view taking control of our pets’ diets and feeding raw.

So when I say it’s perfectly natural to feel reluctance, you can be sure I know what I’m talking about, and I know exactly how you feel.

I wasn’t working at the time and was able to devote all day to researching, and that’s exactly what I spent all that time doing (CatCentric and many of today’s other feline nutrition resources didn’t exist back then). It was ALL about research. I had data and facts and figures and examples at my fingertips; I was all but buried in information. I relentlessly investigated commercially packaged foods: the history, the practices, the behind-the-scenes info, and eventually turned my attention to feline nutrition – talking to experts, reading books, digging up reports and studies and examining them in detail. And finally, I reached a point at which it became obvious that a fresh diet was – is! – exactly as common sense right for cats as it is for us. And it was at that point that I finally made the transition.

It wasn’t long after the switch to raw that I saw the most shocking behavior change in my cats. Of course, I also saw all the usual changes people talk about – softer fur, cleaner smelling bodies, near-odorless poops – but the most remarkable change was in their temperament and activity level. The amount of time they spent sleeping dropped noticeably, and the amount of time they began to spend playing, with each other, with me, and even on their own, shot way up.

Clearly, beyond any doubt whatever, these cats felt a substantial improvement in their physical and emotional condition. In a way, it broke my heart to recognize how poorly they must have been feeling all along.

And that, my friends, is how I came to feed fresh foods to my cats (and why I’ll feed nothing less). 🙂

P.S. While writing this, I got a little heavy on promoting the benefits of raw feeding. Easy to do since it’s such a large part of my life, but not, as my team subsequently pointed out to me, what this series is about. So I’ve made some edits to tone down the rah!, rah!, raw! and put the focus back on my actual journey to raw feeding. My apologies for the post-publishing edits, and I hope they clarify rather than confuse the reading for you! 

If you feed a home-prepared raw menu to your kitties and would like to see your story featured here, please contact us via Facebook private message through our page or our group, or leave a comment below!

And if you’re interested in giving raw a try for yourself, check out our extensive Raw Feeding and Transitioning Your Cat to Raw sections!

 

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