Natural Raw Cat Food

Mellow

Raw kitty food!

When we first got our kitten, my mom warned us that dry food was bad for cats, since it is so different from their natural diet. Nik & I both think canned food is gross, so after my mom's warning, based on advice from her veterinarian, I did some research into optimal cat diets. It turns out that they are suited for raw meat, which all wild cats eat. We ended up feeding the rest of the bag of kitty chow to the chickens, and making this tasty concoction instead for the kitty. 

We bought a high powered blender, something I had been wanting anyway, with two blender baskets: one for the cat, and one for our smoothies. We bought whole, organic chickens and would break them into pieces, blend them with enough water, plus a few eggs, shells included, some cloves of garlic (which I have since read is bad for cats), nutritional yeast, and some spirulina (that's the blue/green in the picture). Included with the chicken meat was the bones and skin.

When they're young you have to make sure there aren't any bone shards or they will throw up! When they get bigger they just crunch right through the bones.

This is how I made his food for almost a year. Kind of labor intensive, but I would do large batches and freeze portions in reclaimed peanut butter jars. We eventually just started buying chicken thighs because it was easier than taking apart a whole raw chicken. I also would add random vegetables to each batch, sometimes a carrot, sometimes a zucchini, carrot greens, or mushroom stems. Our cat is an outdoor cat, and he eats all kinds of stuff from our yard, from grass to "kitty mushrooms" (they grow all over our woodchips!) I read that wild cats do get a small amount of grains and veggies in their natural diet from consuming the contents of the stomachs of their prey. However, the cooked grain & soy based diet of commercial pet foods causes obesity, cavities, and feline diabetes!

Our cat, fully grown now, thrives on this diet. For the last month we've stopped blending his food, since he's able to crunch through the bones on his own. No more blending batches of cat food! Now I just freeze sections of bone-in chicken. It's very satisfying to hear him crunching through bones, for some reason. It must be something primal. It's also great for their dental hygiene. On a canned food diet, you're supposed to brush a pet cat's teeth daily (who does that?!) but when they eat raw meat and bones, chewing and crunching, their teeth stay healthy and clean. He NEVER has bad breath. He's very clean and super beautiful, the softest kitty ever.

We haven't kept track of how much we've really spent feeding our cat... The meat we buy is definitely expensive, because I feel like the quality is important since we use it raw, and I don't want to support CAFOs or factory meat plants, so we always buy the organic chicken. I remember when I was first doing research about feeding cats raw meat, others had posted that it is cheaper to make your own with organic meat than buy the expensive cans of quality pet food. I'm sure it's more expensive than the standard pet food, but if you go with that option you might end up with expensive vet bills from kitty health problems.

We buy a whole, organic chicken for the cat about once a month, and Nik cuts the meat up into about 1" chunks, breaking the bones into smaller pieces as well. The larger bones and most of the skin we use for making stock (for ourselves) and the smaller bones go into the cat food, which we freeze in individual glass jars (old peanut butter jars). One whole chicken fills about 7 jars, and it takes about 4 weeks to go through all those jars. So, basically, we're feeding our cat for the cost of one organic chicken each month. I don't mix it in the blender with other ingredients anymore; that was a process I only really needed to do when he was a kitten and couldn't chew the raw meat and bone on his own as well. 

When our cat shows interest in the food I make for the chickens (a blend of kitchen scraps with chopped veggies, old popcorn, and flaxseed) I let him have all he wants, thinking he may need something other than meat to round his diet out occasionally. He also eats random things throughout the yard, including grass & mushrooms. If you don't have chickens, you could just offer some of your healthy, veggie-based leftovers once in a while to supplement the meat. I love never having to buy pet food!

Below are Amazon Affiliate ads. Any purchases made through these links help support our family. Thanks in advance!