Cats are a little different to dogs in that they are designed to get their nutrition exclusively from raw meat alone. Cats lack the digestive enzymes that allows them to metabolise vegetables and carbohydrates. So diets high in vegetable and carbohydrate matter provide little nutrition to cats.
A Guide to a Raw Food Diet
A cat raw food diet would look like this:
Animal protein – chicken, turkey, lamb, beef, pork, kangaroo, fish, heart meat, tongue and eggs. Cheaper cuts of meat also include important connective tissue and fats and are better than lean fillet steak. (80% of the diet). It is also important that the meat is in chunks and not minced. Mincing adds oxygen which denatures the taurine in the protein leading to a nutritional deficiency.
Unfortunately cats can be picky when it comes to chunks of meat. So if your cat will not eat chunks or strips of meat, then feeding a commercial preparation of raw minced meat that has taurine added to it after processing is a great alternative.
Edible bones – chicken necks, wings, frames (10% of the diet) and this can be where the stubborn nature of cats makes a completely ancestral raw diet tricky. Until your cat will eat and digest chicken necks or wings, you will need to feed some commercially prepared food with added calcium to ensure a balanced diet.
Organ meat – chicken, lamb or beef liver (5%), kidney, pancreas, tripe, lung (5%).
As mentioned above there are a couple of personality traits of cats that can make feeding an ancestral diet difficult. Because of this commercially prepared raw food preparations are a great alternative. They tick all of the nutritional boxes required by cats in a minced form that cats take to readily. You could feed these while slowly encouraging them to eat meat chunks and bones. We stock a frozen fresh kangaroo mince that cats love and is completely balanced.
What Can We Provide?
Please ask us at Bentons Road Vet Clinic for more advice on this complicated topic. There are simple ways that you can make a profound difference to your pet’s health through better nutrition. However it is critical that it is done correctly to avoid nutritional deficiencies. We have the information and the solutions for your pet.
If you would like to know more about pet nutrition and diets, we strongly recommend that you drop into the clinic, give us a call or make an appointment with one of our friendly vets.