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My Journey to Raw: Mitzy’s Meltdown — 1 Comment

  1. I have transitioned two cats to raw meat diets.
    – With the first I just stopped feeding canned “cold turkey” and started feeding raw. Sure, she would not eat sometimes, but given some time she would come back and eat. Skipping a meal or two brought on enough hunger to get the cat to eat. But this one was already indoor/outdoor and sometimes capturing her own natural food which comprised less than 5% of her diet.
    – With the second the transition took about 5 weeks, and getting off the dry food was the most challenging. After that I just went through steps similar to what is laid out in some website about transitioning a cat from kibble to raw.
    – There are tricks. Cats like cooked meat better than raw, so I would just let a piece of meat sit for 4 – 6 minutes in a wide-mouthed thermos into which boiling water had been poured. This would cook just the outside, and cat would eat something mostly raw. Within a week the cat would eat the meat without any cooking.
    – Cats LOVE rabbit. This can start out with expensive rabbit legs, then graduate to rabbit ribs as cat’s jaws become stronger and can handle bones. I feed rabbit liver at the same time as rabbit ribs.
    – Cats will eat too fast and throw up. This usually does not mean that the food is wrong. It may mean that the portion needs to be larger so that the cat cannot eat fast, but must work to eat, thus allowing digestive system to prepare.
    – Sometimes a cat will throw up, but re-consume, leaving a tile floor spotless. Do a search on this one and you will find it very well explained. It’s just that if a cat has thrown up it does not necessarily mean that a certain raw meat is bad for the cat. Suppose a cat in the wild encounters a meal twice what it can digest – it can cut with teeth and swallow, then go to a hiding place and regurgitate only to re-consume later when more food is needed.
    – Transitioning a cat to raw and continuing raw requires attention to what is going on with the cat – there will always be puzzles to solve as to why the cat reacted to a certain food a certain way. An example would be an organic, raw chicken drumstick. Cat may take a brief sniff, then go away for awhile, and I guess develop a plan as to how to consume it. Then return 5 – 20 minutes later to consume as much of it as she can. A too-busy cat staffer/owner might well have concluded that the cat simply does not like chicken.
    – Variety is supposed to be key. The cat I have now, and have been fostering since Feb 20 2016 is special needs primarily in the sense that she came to the shelter with both eyes damaged, lost one eye and needed for the other to heal up. I read this as an emergency in which the cat must go organic raw ASAP in order to maximize healing speed. She also had worms in her stools and blood at the ends of her stools. All of that cleared up within a few weeks on the raw meat diet, and the eye is healing nicely. She now eats raw: chicken, turkey, beef, rabbit, rabbit liver, goat mountain oysters, lamb heart, ground bones with organs and meat from chicken, pork.
    – There is another special needs cat at the shelter I seek to foster, but cannot until I find a home for Lucy-Cat, who I believe now is ready for adoption. I feel that there is special value to a cat for whose future staffer will not have to do the dietary transitioning work, so I hope that this idea will help to get her adopted. There should be a niche of adopters who would prefer a cat transitioned to raw meat.

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