Utter Shit

Per Shu’s comment on a post yesterday -

I have two devon rex cats that are supposed to be allergy free – for me. Too bad the little guys are allergic to everything out there.

The older one had skin allergies and the younger was a super picky eater with IBS. I was at my wits end getting up 3 or 4 times a night to wipe cat ass. I had spent $600 in vet bills on the IBS and the next step was to confirm he has IBS with another $600 procedure. My thinking was that we had ruled out everything else, why spend $600 to confirm what we all seemed to know. My cat has a defective ass. We tried the steroids, but they made him so lazy he was not enjoying his little life. And they were curing about 50% of the problem, not the whole thing.

I asked the Devon Rex group on Yahoo Groups for some help and they suggested a raw diet. Essentially, the thinking is that in the wild they do not eat processed foods (and we really shouldn’t either!) and the mix of the store brands are high carb, crappy meat, etc. A cat (so I hear) will not get the food poisoning we would from eating raw meat.

Anyway, there are ones you can make at home (google BARF…no really, I swear!) but you need all sorts of items and a grinder and products and nothing comes in the same size, which seemed like such a headache. Not to mention the thought of grinding a whole chicken? Hell no.

In desperation I went to Whole Foods to get a raw dog food (in their pet section, they usually have a freezer, at least the ones in the Bay Area do). I started calling the higher end pet stores to find out if they had any frozen products. Turns out the place attached to the vet I went to at the time has a product called Primal Pet Foods. The cat food is in nugget form and you defrost 2-3 days worth at a time and feed twice a day.

Fixed them right up. FAST! I did have some problems with bloody stool so I added a sprinkle of probiotics (from Whole Foods, cheap ones, and I break open the capsules and sprinkle the food as if I was salting it).

For a year I fed nothing but raw. The got snacks of meat, fish (cooked or raw) when I felt like it, but I am not a big treat parent. They can have something that might be extra from my dinner plate…they love asparagus….weird cats. For 2 cats under 10 pounds, I figured I was spending about $20 a week on food. I would go through just less than a full bag.

Now we are working in a dry food that is supposedly as good as the raw foods, but there is some difference because every so often, the dry creates dirty butt. I think it is the grains, I think he has some sensitivity to something that will be in every dry food. Now they get half the raw amount they used to get more because I do not want to feel guilty if I am gone all day. The free feeding of the dry allows me some flexibilty and I am no longer attacked for dinner when I come home and hour or two late.

My cats used to get colds – neither has been sick since we started. Their coats are prettier, they have TONS of energy, and they are happy. I can tell. They are on no meds. When I was strictly on the raw, they only peed once a day and pooped very little – it was efficient. They also drank almost no water since the food gave them enough moisture.

The challenges -

Metal bowls only for the raw food. I am lazy, and not half the tree hugger that this post makes me out to be, so I feed them out of paper bowls. I am thinking of going to Ikea to buy 10 small metal bowls so I can stop with the trips to costco for the paper bowls.

I wash my hands after I even come near their food. When I started I also wiped the counter down all the time, I have relaxed a bit on that.

Freezer room

They quickly learn their feeding schedule, so be careful if you do not get up at the same time every day.

My system was to bag up each day in a plastic bag. So I would have 3 or 4 bags of 4 nuggets in a metal bowl in the fridge. Now, since I am feeding less, I bag up 8 nuggets and that will last 2 days.

Happy to answer any questions!