Should You Feed Your Cat a Raw Food Diet?

As the melamine-tainted pet food scandal was unfolding, I decided to forgo commercial cat food entirely and start preparing my cats' food at home. I read many, many books on the subject of feline nutrition, some of them veterinary texts. Basically, my choices boiled down to two: Raw food or cooked. After much research, I finally came up with the cooked diet my cats have been eating for the past 3 years. Before that, however, I tried raw food.

The biggest problem with the raw food is that my cats didn't like it. One problem is that there really isn't any "aroma" to it. Think about a cat eating its prey. There's the excitement and physical activity associated with the hunt. The prey definitely has its own smell, exciting the senses further. The flesh is warm and fresh. A much different scenario than a bowl of raw stuff being plopped down in front of you in the kitchen! Personally, I think a cat raised on raw food will accept it better than one who has not, but that's my opinion.

Another problem I had was the actual ingredients. In order to mimic the prey scenario, most texts proposed buying a whole bird and grinding it all up (bones and all) and then adding something like 20% vegetables and 10-20% carbohydrates (rice and/or grains). The grains have to be cooked, and the veggies are better off being blanched. You need a pretty brawny meat grinder to grind up a whole chicken! In lieu of that technique, you could buy already-ground poultry and add bone meal. Most bone meal is made from beef bones, though, and is contaminated with lead since bones tend to be the repository of ingested heavy metals. Alternately, you can use ground up eggshells (which I do).

The problem with buying ground poultry is that contamination can occur through this process. Almost all the meat that is recalled for this reason is ground up, and the machinery spreads the pathogens to each successive batch. Cats are more resistant to E. Coli and Salmonellae than we are, but you are still putting them and yourself at risk. Since you won't be cooking it, problem batches can become deadly very quickly. Even under normal circumstances, you must always freeze what you are not using, only leaving enough in the fridge for a day or two of feeding. If you forget to thaw it, well, you wind up cooking it, or the cats go hungry!

As you can see, a raw diet is about as much work as a cooked diet. If you are considering this change for your cats, I suggest doing lots and lots of research first. One book I found very helpful (and full of the cutest cat photos) is Whole Health for Happy Cats by Sandy Arora. You will need to consult more books than this, but this one is a good start.
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Is Raw Food the Best Diet for Cats?

If you have done any research into alternatives to commercially prepared cat food, then you have probably heard of the BARF diet. Alternately described as "biologically appropriate raw food" or "bones and raw food", this diet has been touted as the most natural diet for cats. The idea is based upon the notion that in the wild, cats (and dogs) tend to eat live prey, i.e., mostly meat. Any grains or vegetables they consume are incidental, for the most part comprising the contents of the prey's digestive tract. Since much of this type of diet consists of eating small bones or actively gnawing meat off of larger ones, bones are prominently featured, unlike in other diets.

Dr. Ian Billinghurst, an Australian, is credited with first promoting this type of diet. He claimed that the wild ancestors of domesticated dogs ate raw prey and therefore this was the most natural and healthful diet for dogs. According to Wikipedia, the BARF acronym was not coined by Billinghurst, but by Debra Tripp. It originally meant,"born again raw feeders". After meeting Billinghurst at a seminar, she supposedly gave him permission to use the acronym as he saw fit. He thanked her, and the rest is history, as they say.

Naturally, this regimen has proponents and detractors. Those who favor its positive effect on animals point to the well-known Pottenger studies on cats. Between 1932 and 1942, Dr. Francis Pottenger fed one group of cats cooked food, and another raw food. Those in the first group showed signs of decreased immune function and various diseases that the raw food group did not. It took three generations of raw-food dining to bring that group's immune systems back up to snuff.

Pottenger's study was a long one, and involved nearly one thousand cats. Lest you think him an admirer of felines, know that these were lab cats that he was using for other, unrelated research. He wanted them to live longer and healthier in order to validate his results. Also, despite the claim often made that the cooked diet was well-balanced, this time frame was long before commercial cat diets and therefore any real research on feline nutrition, particularly the roles of proteins and the amino acid taurine. Despite these caveats, it does seem to show that raw food is beneficial to cats.

Tomorrow we'll take a look at the pros and cons of the bones and raw food diet.
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