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CB - thought of you when I saw this...

How to Make Cat Food – While We Have Good Access to Supplies

By Lynne Moquin

Here is a website authored by veterinarian Dr. Lisa Pierson. She discusses canned commercial foods and many issues related to cat food in a sensible and no nonsense way and is also sympathetic to pet owners with limitations to time and finances.

She also talks about many commercially made mixes and pre-made frozen cat foods that can be ordered or bought in stores.

And, she is a great advocate for us cooking for our cats, since we already cook for us, giving us a great recipe for homemade food with simple ingredients added to meat ground with its bones. While explaining there are many opinions out there about what should be in cat food, she offers great credibility for her own, and regularly updates her recipe and info as per her research.

Here is the recipe described at catinfo.org:

Homemade Cat Food Using Meat with Bones

2½ lb raw meat and bones (no skin) or 3 lb raw meat/bones/skin
1 cup water ( or more )
2 eggs – use the yolk raw but lightly cook the white
2000 mg wild salmon oil or small fish oil
400 IU Vitamin E
100 mg. Vitamin B complex (you might want to start with a smaller amount until they get used to the taste)
2000 mg. Taurine – powdered, capsule or loose
¾ teaspoon Lite Salt when using chicken parts, make sure it has iodine
Liver – if grinding a whole carcass with liver, not needed but add 3 or 4 ounces chicken livers per 2½ lb raw meat and bones (or 3 lb of meat/bones/skin)

What Meats

All the cat food making sites suggest meats that are close to what cats would eat in the wild: rabbit, mice and vole, and chicken, Cornish game hen, guinea fowl, quail.

One good company for buying frozen meat already ground, with or without bones, is Healthy Paws and there are others.

There are many options for cat food making around. Your main choice is using meat either with its uncooked bones or meat without any bone.

Powder Mix for a Home Made Recipe Using Meat without Bones

There is a great cat food making mix that can be shipped worldwide and there may be other similar products.

Add it to ground plain fresh meat, plus ground fresh liver or freeze dried liver powder.

Natascha's company has grown phenomenally and is very well endorsed. She also has a food mix for kidney problem cats.And, she kindly offers a recipe that does not use her product:

A Simple Homemade Cat Food Using Meat with Bones:

4 ½ (2 kg) whole fryer chicken/stewing hen, “dressed” carcass
7 oz. (200g) chicken liver
4 raw egg yolks
1 tsp. (4 gram) iodized “Half Salt” or “Light Salt”
4000 mg Salmon Oil or other fish body oil – added proportionately per day if you can, so it's fresh. NOTE: Omega 3 dies in the freezer
800 mg Taurine

Yields 18 x 130 gram (½ cup) daily rations. Feed divided into 2-3 meals.

About the ingredients:

Do not cut corners by using only chicken legs, or – heaven forbid – just chicken backs and necks to make this recipe. Use the whole, “dressed” bird
Chicken can be substituted by other edible birds. Don't cut anything away like skin or fat. The chicken meat itself will contain little fat, and the visible fat is important as a source of essential fatty acids. Of course, don't use a bird with guts, feathers, head, and legs. Use the SMALLest grinding setting for the bones.
You don't need to add Vitamin B or E because these are naturally occurring in both the raw egg yolk and raw liver.
Do not add whole egg, but only the egg yolk. Egg white contains an enzyme which will make the essential B Vitamin Biotin unavailable to your cat.
Instead of Kelp, we add “Half Salt” or “Light Salt” to this recipe, which is readily available at your grocery store. It is a mixture of iodized sodium chloride and potassium chloride.
It is easy to overdose iodine when using kelp on a small scale as in the do-it-yourself recipe.
Add 1 can of salmon, sardines, or mackerel packed in water as a source of Omega 3 fatty acids, instead of 4000mg Salmon Oil or an Omega 3 fish oil, if you wish.
Although chicken – especially the dark meat of chicken legs – contain Taurine, it is advisable to obtain Taurine (available as L-Taurine) from your health food store to assure optimal levels of this essential amino acid in this recipe.
If available, you can add 14 oz. (400g) of chicken hearts, but take 1/2 chicken breast away. In that case, you do not have to add supplemental Taurine.
Cats do not need fiber. There is no need to add Psyllium husk or any other source of soluble or insoluble fiber to this recipe.
This recipe has a naturally pleasing texture and does not require the addition of water.
If your store bought chicken contains the heart, liver, gizzard, and neck in the body cavity, remove these from the little bag and simply grind into the recipe.

Our three cats are loving Instincts powdered premix added to plain ground meat and liver with no bones.

We add a bit of cranberry powder and a bit of apple cider to their food for pH acidity and kidney toning. The powder keeps a year in the fridge, so it has its emergency prep limitations, though it might work to vacuum seal portions too.

Stores currently have lots of ground turkey and chicken, but we grind meat ourselves to save some money. We have an ordinary meat grinder that was $10 at a flea market and we buy meat chunks, usually dark turkey or chicken, that we scald with boiling water for surface bacteria, then grind along with the liver.

CAT FOOD FOR EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS

Thinking of a possible life with no fridge, we are trying to build a supply of good canned food, but also aim to pressure can some ground meat for people and pets.

And we're building a supply of ingredients to add to the pressure canned meat, or to small meats that may be hunted.

If the meat you give has bones, cats may enjoy chomping on those, but you might want to cut off just muscle meat, (then throw the bones in with the peoples' stew).

To plain meat, add the recipe ingredients such as Dr. Lisa's recipe at catinfo.org, AND ALSO calcium in proportion to the phosphorous in the meat.

This feels a bit annoying to deal with, but it's important to be a bit more precise – add calcium to phosphorous at the ratio of between 1.2 – 1.4 Calcium to 1 Phosphorous.

For example, goat mince (like a one pound pack from Healthy Paws) has 800 mg phosphorous per lb. so we grind up in a mortar and pestle about 1000 mg calcium carbonate (or whatever calcium you have).

How you find out what the phosphorous content of different meats is this: go to the USDA website and type in the meat to look up, hit return.

Oh, you can also use powdered egg shell for calcium supplementation, finely ground, which gives about 700 mg usable calcium per teaspoon.

If pressure canning meat for people, you could can some jars as well for cat or dog food but you would NOT include bone in pressure canning (cats can choke on cooked bone).

The Feline Instincts or some other powder mix, or, the ingredients in Dr. Lisa's recipe plus calcium, may be added to the ground meat and then canned.

And add a bit of fish oil when serving, if you have it, or a bit of canned sardines or fish.

WHAT TO STORE FOR CATS

Thankfully much of what we'd need for cats is very useful to people too, so we can share it. These items are easily found in stores and all have a long to indefinite (like alcohol tinctures) shelf life.

Possibilities for cat food making:

Plain calcium powder or tablets (or use eggshells if you have poultry)
Fish oil capsules salmon, or smaller fish (less mercury) (and a push pin to squeeze it out)
Vitamin E capsules
Egg yolk powder
Vitamin B caps (50mg of all a good size then break it)
Taurine powder capsules
Lite salt with iodine
Freeze dried liver (1oz = 4 oz fresh)

Possibilities for Calming Cats in Crisis and Travel (tried, true and famous):

Homemade tincture of catnip and skullcap These are easy-to-grow plants and will spread readily.
Put in a mason jar 1 part leaves to 2 parts triple distilled vodka. Let stand for 2 to several weeks
Alpha Omega E-Z Rest (great flavor, can go into food)
Dr. Goodpet Calm Stress, homeopathic drops, use an eye dropper
Valerian tincture – sold at health food stores – 1 to 3 drops works great for several hours (also good for pain and for people)
Boiron brand homeopathic pellets, Motion Sickness [cocculus indicus] (for people too)
Feliway spray for cat carrier and rooms (way cheaper at Petsmart than at a vet) or get the generic cheaper version Nutri-Vet Pet Ease Rescue Remedy (for people too)
Gravol brand ginger -or- ginger powder put into a small gel cap (for people too)

Possibilities for Health Issues and Preventive Medicine:

If prone to crystals: (and add water to each meal)

Hydrangea tincture (several drops a day prevents and dissolves struvite crystals)
Cranberry capsules – Swiss Herbal makes a tiny gel cap, drop right into throat
L-Methianine (if blocked, can lower ph and dissolve crystals)
Horsetail herb (URI's) or Boiron homeopathic pellets Equisetum arvens
Metacam (for pain, if you can buy some from a vet)

Digestive & Inflammatory anything:

Slippery Elm powder (simmered with some water) (great for people too)

Asthma, Respiratory, strengthens lungs and expels stuff:

Lobelia herb, Elecampane herb, as tinctures, 2 drops a day or so

Parasites (lots in mice?):

2 drops a day of Wormwood tincture for about 10 days; or try Alpha Omega's parasite cleanse (which like their E-Z Rest tastes great to cats). The company also has lung, arthritis and kidney tonics. The bottles' best before date is 2012. hmmm.

Tons of other herbs are super useful, will store indefinitely if alcohol tincture.

One of our cats that had an entrenched cough was healed with herbs, after several vets could only offer steroids as if it was asthma.

The book, Herbs for Pets by Mary L. Wulff-Tilford & Gregory L. Tilford, has lots of info on cat and dog food, other pets' food, health issues as well as info on each herb out there that is great for pets and people too.

Method of giving a cat tincture drops, herbs or a pill:
Eye droppers are very useful to have for pets and us, and keep a couple of tiny jars handy and a bottle of water.

Put the couple drops of tincture into the jar and add another few drops of water.
Use the eye dropper to drizzle this inside the cat's cheek. Don't drop water into the throat, will cause a cough.
If you like to put dried herbs in empty gel caps, the #2 is small and great for cats, just moisten to make it slippery first then proceed like giving a pill.
Lift the chin and a drop pill straight into the throat, they won't choke; follow with a few drops of water from an eye dropper.

Healthy Treats:
beef jerky, freeze dried meat and liver, dried catnip, dried anchovies or other fish.

A couple of books we like:
Herbs for Pets by Mary L. Wulff-Tilford & Gregory L. Tilford
The Nature of Animal Healing by Martin Goldstein, DVM (has the best anti vaccine info out there)
New Choices in Natural Healing for Dogs and Cats by Amy D. Shojai

Here is a a good website and forum for cat food and health issues and another website with a widely sourced bunch of recipes for cats with renal failure kidney problems because the melamine issue may be more widespread than we heard)

Info provided by Lynne, CatnipMusic.ca (not a cat food site !) and is just a sampling of ideas for your possible use and exploration, I'm not a vet but believe this is reliable info, and I have no commercial interest in anything here.

http://www.millennium-ark.net/News_Files/Pets/make.cat.food.html