Despite my intentions to try to help cats stay healthy or regain their health, I began to see many cats with chronic problems that I could not “fix”. More and more of my feline patients were on one or more prescription drugs and/or diets to try to help them with the diseases I encountered day-to-day in feline practice: recurrent bladder (lower urinary) problems, obesity, diabetes, chronic vomiting and/or diarrhea, chronic constipation, asthma, skin and ear problems, to name a few. As I prescribed more and more drugs to try to help these cats, I ran into complications and side effects from the drugs themselves, or they often stopped working after awhile. Prescription diets served me no better: often the cats wouldn’t eat them and, even if they did, I did not see uniformly positive results.

One day, a client of mine who had a lovely old cat named Max, told me that she had switched Max’s diet to raw food and all his chronic skin and ear problems went away within several weeks. Poor Max had been on cortisone-type drugs and prescription diets (prescribed by me!) for years, to no avail. My interest was sparked! I began to read about cat nutrition and cat diets and talk to people (veterinarians and pet owners) who had been feeding raw foods. I was amazed at what I was hearing, so decided to try a raw diet with my (then) new kitten, Bug. I had adopted Bug as a sickly (actually near death) and underweight 6 month old. I watched him blossom on the raw food diet, gaining healthy muscle mass weight but not becoming fat, developing a beautiful coat and clearing many of his chronic health problems without the need of conventional drugs. I am convinced that his raw diet was the foundation for his wonderful recovery.

I now recommend raw diets to virtually all my clients, and have seen wonderful improvements in my patients’ health. I will never go back to recommending or using processed pet foods.

Grain based dry foods are the worst possible thing to feed a cat. Carnivorous predators were designed to eat a meat/whole prey (bones, organs, etc) diet, simple as that! Grain-free dry foods, while perhaps a bit “better” than “regular” dry foods, are extremely high in calories and do not have the water content of a flesh-based diet. Many cats, when on a dry food diet, do not drink enough water to keep their bodies optimally hydrated.

Canned foods are better than dry, but all canned foods are high heat processed resulting in breakdown of many natural nutrients. These then need to be replaced with added supplements (all the chemical sounding ingredients on your canned food label tend to be these replaced nutrients). Many, but not all, canned foods also contain grain based ingredients, which can be triggers for a variety of health issues.

Second, we can look at the reality of how a cat’s anatomy and physiology were designed to eat and digest raw meat. Cats have a more acid stomach pH and a shorter gastrointestinal tract, making them less vulnerable to many types of food-borne bacteria. I remind my clients that cats lick their bottoms every day, and do just fine! Third, it is not difficult to create balanced diets that are safe from a nutritional perspective. Using a variety of recipes and meat sources is the best way to ensure that your cat gets all the nutrition she needs.

Isn’t It Very Complicated to Feed Raw Food?

Veterinarians actually receive very little training in nutrition. In my 4 years of veterinary school, I had one class, one semester long, on nutrition. Most of this course focused on which prescription diet to recommend for which disease and why. For well pets, I was taught to recommend “Pick one dry food and stick with it.” A major pet food manufacturer supplied free pet food to veterinary students, and free prescription diets to the university’s veterinary hospital for use with hospitalized animals. Is it any wonder that most vets come out of school recommending that manufacturer’s products? We were cautioned that it was “complicated” and “risky” for owners to make their own pet food, and that raw meat was full of harmful bacteria and parasites and would sicken animals, and possibly their owners. As I began to become interested in raw foods and spoke with veterinarians who had been recommending them for years, I was happily surprised to find that raw-food related health problems were few and far between, but that the benefits were amazing!

What Cat Diseases May Be Helped With Raw Food Diets?

What Do I Feed My Own Cats?

Who Should Not Use Raw Diets?