Photo by Gabriel N. Wardwell
Finding healthy, well-balanced recipes for homemade cat food and online support are just the first steps in pampering your pet with a home prepared diet. Follow these safety tips for home cooking cat food to help ensure your finicky feline will reap the rewards of your hard work:
• Consult your veterinarian before making changes to the diet or switching to a new recipe.
• Weigh your cat regularly (at least every two weeks) while on a home made diet and keep track of any changes. Ounces of weight gain or loss can be difficult to detect visually on cats, but can be a significant clue about overall health.
• Please note that cats cannot be vegetarians. They require protein from animal sources to meet their amino acid requirements.
• Follow the guidelines on how to safely introduce new foods to your pet. (Refer to Monday's article on including farm fresh produce on your pet's menu.)
Are you apprehensive about providing all the required nutrients to your cat, but would still like her to benefit from fresh, wholesome ingredients that you tenderly prepare? Consider home cooking for one or two meals a week at first. Then, supplement with a high quality, complete and balanced commercial food the rest of the week.
How do you select a high quality, complete and balanced commercial cat food? Where in the Hudson Valley can you purchase these foods? Excellent questions. More to come. Click on the subscribe button above if you would like to be notified about new Albany Holistic Pet Health articles.
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Comments
For the owner of just one or two cats, kits like those produced by WildKittyCatFood.com are a great way to introduce home cooking. The base mix costs about $12/bag, then you add water and 4 lbs. of cooked ground turkey or chicken that you can buy at the grocery store. Each kit can feed one cat for 24 days, and the cats seem to take to this food quite well. Wild Kitty makes a kit for adding ground raw meat and bones, too (uncooked), but it's more time-consuming if you need to grind the meat yourself. A grinder that will do a good job on chicken bones costs at least $200, and grinding one 4 lb. whole chicken will take about 30 minutes.
I run a cat sanctuary, and always fed Wild Kitty until it became cost-prohibitive because I have so many mouths to feed. Now I use the recipe at CatInfo.org. It's designed by a vet, and costs me about $6 per month for each cat. Can't beat that price!
Thank you, Leigh-Ann, for your contributions to cats in need of sanctuary. It is helpful to hear about a holistic approach to feline wellness on a large scale. I look forward to future comments from your perspective.
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