I have three healthy young cats who mostly eat dry Iams on an ad-lib basis. Every morning at 5am (no, I don’t need an artificial alarm clock, why do you ask?) they each get 1/3 a small can of Friskies pate. My vet approves this regime.
The problem with this is that it results in an awful lot of cans, which unfortunately cannot be recycled on my island. Plus, there is no trash pick-up and the dump is a long drive away. So I’m highly motivated to stop generating so many tin cans. However, I want to keep feeding the cats a bit of wet food as I’d like them to be used to eating a variety of food types, should they ever require a special diet.
I had the brilliant idea that I could make wet cat food from scratch, eliminating all those cans. But I want to take a reasonably nutritionally sound approach - keeping in mind that most of their nutrients are sourced from the Iams kibble, so I probably have a bit of leeway and don’t need to be too precise.
So, I’m thinking that a basic recipe might be to slow-cook the hell out of a whole chicken and giblets, and turn everything but the bones (organs, skin, meat, a bit of the broth, any soft collagen bits that naturally fall off the bone) into pate along with some raw egg, a little bit of cooked red rice, some brewer’s yeast (because every cat I’ve ever owned is insanely fond of it) and some cat vitamins.
Does this sound okay to our resident feline science types? Once concern I have is that using both cat vitamins and brewer’s yeast may create a food that is too high in vitamin A. Should I skip one or the other?
And given that this is only going to be a small part of the cats’ food intake - basically 1 large spoonful a day - do I have a little leeway in what I throw into each batch? For example, I have a one leftover piece of raw boneless hake in the freezer that is reaching its expiration date; perhaps I’d cook it and add it to the pate.
I would guess that as long as the cat vitamins include taurine, your recipe would be just fine for them. I’ve never been inspired to make cat food, but have run across recipes online and yours looks pretty familiar. Be sure and let us know how it works!
Taurine is destroyed by heat so you might want to consider adding supplemental taurine powder to the finished product to make sure they’re getting what they need. They can’t overdose on taurine so this should be just fine. Adding fish should always be welcome, judging by any cat I’ve ever met. I do something similar for my dogs, I get chopped meat of various kinds from the local Asian butcher, package it up in 1kg bags and freeze it, then it gets cooked and crumbled with four eggs cooked into it. I drain off most of the fat and add the crumbles to their dry food. This is very well received by all.
I didn’t know that! The cat vitamins I’m looking at do include the all-important taurine so I won’t worry about it, but if you hadn’t told me that I would have assumed they were getting taurine from the cooked chicken. Live and learn!
Just google cat food recipes. They are out there, as is supplemental taurine for cats. I have fed my cats poached fish as well as chicken and cooked liver of various sorts. I stay away from commercial foods for humans if possible because they are overloaded with salt. But their main food source is dry kibble with a small amount of wet food each day. I, too, don’t like to waste the cans or plastic pouches.
If you do handle fish, beware the cleanliness of the source as cats are much smaller than humans so toxins are always a risk.
I got a crash course in “Taurine 101” when my middle doggo tested as a mild positive for dilated cardiomyopathy, with taurine supplements strongly recommended. Now 1gm capsules go into every meal the dogs get and the cats more on an ad hoc basis when it occurs to me. Less of an issue since they eat nothing but wet pate style food with taurine included.
Cats are obligate carnivores; they need to eat meat.
Adding rice to your home-brew cat food is pointless at best. The rice, corn, wheat, and soy in commercial cat food is only there as cheap filler to make the dry food easy to transport and store – it adds nothing in the line of nutrition for a cat.
My friend would stop by the butcher’s every day on the way home and purchase a quantity of fresh raw turkey for the cat.
Yes, you can also buy refrigerated/frozen/lyophilized food for cats and dogs but, you need to live somewhere where they will deliver it and need a big freezer (except for the freeze-dried stuff).
I haven’t seen refrigerated or frozen cat food here - I’ll keep an eye out but we don’t get as wide a range of products on our shelves in the remote Pacific as people do in metro mainland areas.
I do have a large freezer - my plan is to make a large quantity and freeze it in small batches.
Next time you’re in a pet store, or a bigger grocery store, look for a refrigerator. The contents usually look like those plastic wrappers at the meat counter that contain hamburger, sausage, or other ground meat.
