Mystery Solved! Breathless Public Finds Out What I Feed My Cats!So I've bitched on and on and on about what's appropriate and what's not appropriate for cats to eat. You might be wondering "Damn, what does this bossy ho feed her cats anyway?" Gentle reader, you are about to find out. After about a year of fucking around with various diet styles and finding out what worked and what didn't work for my kitties, I think I've finally settled on a decent feeding method. I do constantly tweak the diet, of course, but I do a lot less fucking around than I used to. I basically feed three very distinct types of meals: chunks of meat, whole prey including bones (mostly ground, though I'm currently working on including more truly whole prey into their diet), and chicken necks mixed with canned food. Please note: If you want to feed your cats this way, feel free to use these as guidelines, but for the love of God consult a vet first and don't omit something because you think it's "inconvenient" or "unimportant" like the calcium supplement when feeding boneless meats, or do something really boneheaded like replace 50% of the meat with liver 'cause liver was on sale at WinCo, mmkay? I use the ratios and ingredients I do for very good reasons. If you want to feed your cats using this method but need to make some drastic substitutions and you can't find a good vet to talk to, at the very least talk to me about it. I'm a hack, but at least I'm a hack who's done a lot of reading on this subject. I make everything in big batches, and I don't mix the food until right before I serve it. It's less convenient, but I believe there's a greatly decreased chance of nutrient loss that way--many nutrients aren't just sensitive to heat, they're sensitive to oxygen and light too, and some like vitamin E can actually be destroyed by freezing. The less I need to completely defrost something, mix it around with a bunch of other stuff, re-freeze it and re-thaw it, the better. Meal Type 1: Assorted Meat Chunks About once a month or once every couple of months, I'll go meat shopping in a big, big way. My typical shopping list goes thusly:
The constants are the lamb shanks and organs. The cats will soundly reject any batch of food without all those particular items in it. Trust me, I've tried. One time I had a hard time finding shanks and bought a lamb leg roast instead because I thought hey, the shank's part of the leg, right? The bitches ate the food, but only after letting me know how thoroughly disgusted they were with me. Apparently leg is only a borderline acceptable substitute for shanks. Anyway, I de-bone anything that needs de-boning, chop all the big bits of meat into smaller bits of meat (most of the meat chunks are about twice as big as my thumb to ensure they chew, while the liver gets sliced into fairly thin pieces and the kidneys are cut into 3 or 4 pieces, depending on how large they are), dump the lamb organs into a couple of large glass bowls and all the other meat chunks into a HUGE MOTHERFUCKING steel bowl. I open up a bunch of ziploc baggies and grab two measuring cups: One that holds 2/3 cup, the other 1/3 cup. I fill the 1/3 cup measure with two pieces of lamb kidneys, two pieces of liver, and top it off with lamb hearts. The 2/3 measure gets packed with the other meats--I try to make sure there's at least one piece of each type of meat in there--and it's also topped off with a few pieces of lamb heart. I put these pieces of meat into a sandwich bag. Once all the meat is bagged, I wash my hands, seal the bags and then flatten and stack them. Saves a lot of space in the freezer. I've weighed these bags, and they come to about 8.8 ounces each. Prep time: About 3-4 hours, plus a few more minutes for cleanup. This occurs every month or two, and obviously the bigger the batch is, the longer it takes to cut all that shit up. Meal Time: I split one bag of meat between the two cats. I try to make sure they get an equal amount of variety on their plate. Most days of the week, I wait for about 10-20 minutes after they're done eating, then I cut a 500 mg softgel of calcium carbonate in half (I get some from Puritan's Pride that contains 50 IU of vitamin D in addition to the CaCO3) and squeeze the contents out into a small dish containing teaspoon or two of nutritional yeast. I shake-a shake-a the contents gently to coat the dabs of calcium with nutritional yeast and feed one dab each to the cats. About twice a week (sometimes just once) I don't give them their calcium after their meals because I'm going to feed them chicken necks, which leads us to... Meal Type 2: Chicken Necks with Canned Food Chicken necks are a great source of calcium. Once every couple of months or so I'll get whole chicken necks from New Seasons, a wonderful "natural foods" store that allows me special-order them. I typically get between 8-10 lbs. When I get them home, I cut away the skin (because the cats refuse to have anything to do with chicken skin), bag them in serving-size portions (2-3 necks a bag, depending on size) and freeze them. Those little snack-size bags work great for the necks. Prep time: About 20-30 minutes to snip away the skins and bag those bastards. This occurs once every 2 months or so. Meal Time: I snip up the necks into pieces that range from 1/4" to 1/2". The cats don't like chewing on chicken neck pieces much bigger than that. I've tried and tried, and decided this was one battle that wasn't worth fighting. Then I pop open a can of cat food and smear the contents over the necks. If I use a 5.5 oz. can, I only use half of it per meal; I put the leftovers in a small plastic container, refrigerate and feed them within the same day. If using one of those overpriced 3 oz. cans, I split the whole thing between the two cats. This isn't exactly the healthiest meal, but the kitties really enjoy it. And since I get take-out at least once a week (usually burritos from El Burrito Loco, mmmmm), I don't see why the cats can't have their once- or twice-a-week treats. The brands I use most often are Wellness, Newman's Own Organics, Precise (just the kitten formula) and PetGuard, in that order. Other brands I've used include Solid Gold, California Naturals, Pinnacle, Avoderm, Evolve and Nature's Variety. Meal Type 3: Ground Prey/Whole Prey I get ground whole prey, mostly rabbit, from Wholefoods4pets.com. The stuff I get from there includes everything except the fur, feet and intestines and comes in 2-lb. vacuum-sealed packages. The cats like it OK. It ain't lamb, but at least it ain't chicken. I also order ground rabbit giblets that come in 1-lb. packages. Lately I've been getting ground turkey and ground duck from A Dog's Day Doggy Daycare, which also come in 2-lb. vacuum-sealed packages. I've been feeding a 50-50 mix of that with the rabbit. Rabbit is great cat food, but it's very, very lean--too lean, actually--and low in taurine as well as low in almost all the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D and E). The last makes sense because fat-soluble vitamins need, well, fat in order to be present. So once every three weeks or so I partially defrost one package of rabbit, one package of turkey/duck and one package of giblets. The packages are easiest to cut into (and are least messy) when still pretty hard. I divide them into 16 sections each. I bust out 16 small plastic containers and drop one section of turkey, rabbit and giblets in. So that's about 5 ounces per container, assuming I cut the sections evenly. Prep time for Prey: About 15 minutes, if that. This occurs about once every 3 weeks or so. I also include some veggies in my cats' diet. Not much--they get maybe 1 tablespoon mixed in with the ground whole prey. Maybe. So once every few months I'll pulverize a lb. of steamed butternut squash and about 8-16 ounces of assorted veggies (I rotate between zucchinni, baby salad mixes that don't include spinach, celery, carrots and baby romaine). I put them in those tiny containers meant for condiments and dressings and freeze them. Each container lasts a few days, and the veggies keep fairly fresh this way. Prep time for Veggies: about 30 minutes if I have to chop a bunch of veggies and cook the squash. This occurs once every 2-3 months or so. Meal Time: I mix everything up freshy-freshy like right before I give the food to da bastards. Here's how it goes:
I mash everything up real good and split the mush evenly between the cats. Sometimes I skip the egg yolk. Sometimes I skip the EFAs. Sometimes I skip the veggies (or I get very lazy and don't make a new batch after I run out) so I use a pinch of psyllium soaked in the water as a substitute. It sounds like a lot of stuff and trouble, but seriously it takes maybe three minutes to mix everything together, unless I'm a dumbass and forget to defrost the meat, which means the container has to on the kitchen counter for a few hours and the cats get a REALLY late dinner. And as you can see, the prep times for everything (except the meat chunk preparation) are just about neglible. I spend more time driving to the pet store to buy cat litter, toys and canned food. Recently I got some frozen newborn rabbits from Wholefoods4pets.com. They went over really well, though I needed to cut them in half before the cats twigged on that this was actually food and not just some nifty new toy to bat around and lick. I'm going to get several dozen in my next rabbit order, and when I muster up the motivation, I'll look into getting them mice, rats and chicks. Whole prey is really the best way to go, though since I can't provide them with enough variety this way, the meat chunks and ground shit are here to stay.
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