Cats are obligate carnivores - which means they need little more than meat. In the wild they eat poultry and rodents (including most of the bones.) Commercial cat food contains fillers and ingredients that are hard for cats to digest. Cats do not have the digestive enzymes to process vegetables, fruits or grains. The very small amount of grains they get from eating mice, rabbits, or poultry are already digested by the prey's enzymes.
The BEST food you can feed your cat is what you can easily make at home. I prefer a partially cooked homemade diet for your cat because the partial cooking eliminates any bacteria on the surface and, as an added bonus, you'll discover your cat's feces have less odor!
Most cats eat 4-6 ounces a day. The recipe below makes food for one cat for approximately 10-14 days.
Ingredients:
3 Pounds of Poultry Thighs
3 oz. Chicken Liver
7 tsp. NOW Brand Bone Meal
1 Cup Water
2 Raw Egg Yolks
5,000 – 10,000 mg Fish Oil (Do not use cod liver oil) Poke with a pin and squeeze into mixture or dissolve in the water.
2,000 mg Taurine (powdered – either in capsules or loose)
400 IU Vitamin E (powdered capsules is the easiest to use) Use the d-tocopherol (natural) form not the dl-tocopherol (synthetic) form of vitamin E. The d- form is better absorbed and utilized than the dl- form.
1 Capsule Vitamin B Complex 50 (ground up with mortar and pestle)
1 tsp. Morton Lite salt with iodine. The thyroid gland of a cat’s natural prey is a good source of iodine but when using chicken or turkey thighs – and, therefore, no thyroid gland – we need to add Morton’s iodized Lite salt as a source of iodine. Use Lite salt instead of regular table salt because Lite salt is a mixture of sodium and potassium versus table salt which is all sodium.
Directions:
Remove about 50% of the skin (unless your cat is obese, then remove 80% of the skin) and bake the chicken thighs at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes – leaving about 50% of the thigh meat raw.
Cook the liver for about 20 minutes. About half way through, stir/break up the liver to ensure even cooking throughout. You cook the liver more than the thighs because bacteria does not reside in the depths of the thigh meat but, instead, lives on the surface. The liver, on the other hand, has a higher chance of having bacterial contamination throughout.
Cut the meat into 1/2 inch chunks for dental health. Raw meat is more tenacious (and better for teeth) than cooked meat.
Add all of the fat drippings from the meat baking and egg yolks to the cubed meats and stir.
Make a supplement slurry out of the rest of the ingredients, stir with a whisk, and pour into the meat/skin/liver/egg mixture. Mix together very well.
Portion into containers and freeze. Leave at least 3/4″ of head space to allow for expansion. Using ice cube containers works well for single-sized portions – pop and store in zip lock bag when frozen.
Notes:
This recipe is not recommended for Chronic Kidney Diseas cats.
Thawed food should only be kept in the refrigerator for 48-72 hours. Frozen food should only be kept for 6 months.Raw fish should never be fed in large amounts because it contains thiaminase which could lead to a thiamine deficiency in your cat. Some other reasons not to feed fish to cats is” possible link to hyperthyroidism, hyperallergenic properties for some cats, phosphorus content, and possible heavy metal contamination.
If your cat it a picky eater and does not like this diet, try adding a bit of bacon fat to the meal or coating the chunks of meat in Parmesan cheese or FortiFlora or crushed Temptations treats.
This recipe is from CatInfo.org - more information can be found here: https://catinfo.org/making-cat-food/