If you feed your cats raw

[GibsonGirl128]

I'm getting ready to start a raw diet for my 2 cats, but I'm uncertain on how to proceed with something.

Usually one night a week, sometimes two on occasion, I'll go straight from work to my BF's apartment and spend the night, and go to work from there the next day. This means I'm gone from 8:00am until 6:30pm the following day. I've never had a problem with leaving extra dry food and water before I leave, but now that I'm doing raw, it's a different story.

I think I recall someone saying that if they needed to be gone overnight, they could leave a frozen portion of the raw food and it would thaw out for the following morning's meal. They said that this was fine because cats in the wild eat warm and room temperature food that's been left out for days, and that their stomachs are designed to be tough for things like that.

Is that a general concensus that it's OK, or is whoever I heard that from (I can't remember) taking too many liberties with the raw diet thing?

[Brie]

We don't feed raw anymore, but I wouldn't do that. When we fed raw, the animals loved it so much that they would have tried to eat it frozen or partially frozen. Frozen or cold raw always led to major puking in our house.

We never had trouble with doing the occasional dry food meal. We'd never mix raw and dry food in one meal, but if we gave them raw for breakfast, and then went out of town and left dry food with whoever was watching them, there wasn't a problem.

[Brie]

May 18, 2012 15:58:22 GMT -5 v said:

Brie -- why don't you feed raw anymore, and what kind of raw did you feed when you fed raw? (I think I remember that you used a premixed one?)

We were very happy with raw, but quit largely due to convenience and not having enough freezer space in our new house. We could only keep about a week or two's supply at a time, and the store we bought raw from was out of our way. Plus, one of our cats never took to it, so we were still giving him dry food, which didn't really make much sense. I'd like to do it again, at least for our dog, so we're looking into getting a chest freezer for our garage.

We fed pre-mixed Bravo! raw. It's good stuff. Our cat who liked raw had expensive tastes and would only eat the lamb and beef organs. Our dog would eat everything, so we fed him primarily the chicken and turkey since it was cheapest.

[welder'swife]

13andcounting on Pets is a really good resource for raw feeding. She's helped me start my dogs on raw, and all of her dogs and cats are on raw. IIRC, you can't mix dry and raw food because of how quickly the raw digests, and you don't want it stuck behind the kibble, which digests slowly.