raw catfood costs

[cimorene]

I've had to make a number of cat diet adjustments since Snookums was diagnosed with diabetes. I had a struggle getting Snookums and the BB onto a wet food diet at all, but it's essential for diabetic cats and, as it later turned out that the BB died of kidney disease (which is epidemic in domestic cats since the rise of dry petfood diets, as is diabetes), she was essentially killed by this cat-inappropriate diet and our prior ignorance about it. I tried a few years ago to get them to eat a raw diet simply because it would have been the easiest diabetic-friendly diet we could get; it didn't work because Snookums was always ambivalent about the raw food and the BB could never be convinced to eat it at all.

But! Tristana arrived this April, and she and her littermates had all been regularly fed both raw and commercial wet catfood. We bought the breeders' recommended raw food, which is store brand Maukas from Musti ja Mirri, a major Finnish petstore chain, and Snookums and Tristana both love it! We added it to their diet gradually at first, but I can now say confidently that Snookums's stomach is fine with it. I don't think it is upsetting his blood sugar much either, although I'd need a longer period of him eating just it to know for sure.

So for the first time now we have the option to potentially actually feed only or primarily raw food. Obviously we couldn't mail order it like we have been forced to do with the canned food, since it's frozen, but I suppose driving from Kaarina is a fair trade for the shipping costs and weights.

Anyway, we currently pay about 5.60€ per kilo of catfood (but this is dependent on the rate of 12 kg per month. If we bought six months at a time, for instance, like a friend does, it would end up around 4-5€/kg) and Maukas is 7€/kg. So the raw diet would cost about 1.40€/kg more, or an additional 17€ per month.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I am only cat adjacent, but why in the world does the dry catfood even exist if all this is known? Why aren't all vets telling their people to not use it? What is up with all that?

[cimorene]

I KNOW, RIGHT? It's an infuriating conspiracy!!

And the answer to that is a combination of how slowly scientific research moves through medical fields, customer service and self interest.

A bunch of these foods - "Science Diet" and "Royal Canin" etc - are sold direct from the vets and only from them, and they're overpriced and claim to be scientific/"veterinary" diets which is their main selling point and the vets, who are independent businesses, rake in the cash from that and probably couldn't afford to stay open without it. Telling the truth would be disassociating themselves from a major source of income, sort of like medical people being paid by the pharmaceutical industry.

But it's also like... this research mostly seems to date from the 1990s and later, so anybody who doesn't keep up on research and already had gone to vet school before, or was taught by old fogeys set in their ways teaching the old stuff they were taught etc etc... the lack of thirst drive in cats, sure, this was known, and so you would think the dry food being inappropriate is basic logic there but it wasn't really; but the actual strong links to kidney disease and diabetes, etc, that came later.

This information is sort of... it's available from vets and more ethical/just well-informed/modern ?? vets will recommend wet food only for cats in general sometimes, or specifically for cats with diabetes and kidney and UTI problems at least because these are the conditions where they need to take in more moisture the most. Not all vets! But the vets I've talked to at least, which have been from I guess... 4 different practices since his diagnosis.

But they say the wet diet is the best or whatever, or that limiting carbohydrates is good in th case of the diabetic cats; they don't link all those pieces and say "DRY DIETS ESSENTIALLY KILL, CARBOHYDRATES KILL," which is probably something you should get in the welcome packet every time you get a cat. The dry diet only kills indirectly - it's the lack of moisture that kills as you CAN make a dry diet entirely out of cat-appropriate ingredients (Tristana was fed some as a kitten); it's just that a cat can only get a small portion of its food that way because of their lack of thirst drive. They need to get moisture in their food in order to stay adequately hydrated; you can always put water on the kibble and mix it up into a soup thing (which is also a recommendation that goes out with increasing frequency in recent years).

I tend to start ranting about it periodically now, especially since losing the BB to kidney disease. Learning that there's been a kidney disease (and urinary issues) epidemic specifically since the very recent invention of industrially-produced dry kibble when cats have been domesticated for thousands of years without incident, well. I get a bit FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE. Even cats that don't die of kidney disease - repeated UTIs and urinary stones are even more common effects of the dry diet - those can be incredibly painful for cats!

Of course their customers are owners and they can't prevent them from feeding stuff that's going to kill their cats, and I'm sure a lot of people are kind of at "I just can't afford it" (although the cheapest canned foods available are actually often better in terms of their nutritional makeup and animal-based content than expensive petstore foods - they're made with cheap animal byproducts from meat processing that people can't eat, but they're actually much better for cats than plants are).

[cesy]

Thanks, it's good to get reminders and reinforcement on this

[anatsuno]

Your posts on this are always interesting and the guilt is making its way through my system - I'm too cash-poor to switch to a wet diet only right now but I'm considering it more and more. I'm intrigued by "raw food" as I have no idea what it is and I don't think it exists here (France) but I will look into it! And I guess I should have a look, based on your comment above, at the nutritional composition of the cheap wet cat food and see if I can make the switch...

[cimorene]

My sister did this recently! Actually her cats still eat dry food, but they're now majority wet food using I think cheap Friskies, which is quite decent actually. But like I said in the comment above, it isn't harmful in itself, it's the lack of water that's harmful. If you google about it, you'll find pictures and instructions about making soup out of dry food kibble, but it's basically just putting warm or hot water over the kibble and mixing it up until it sort of starts to form a broth. That can also potentially help transfer a cat from dry food, as adult cats can be quite hard to switch to new textures/types of food!

Actually Fancy Feast/Gourmet Gold and Sheba both have some fairly low-vegetable-content foods that are pretty good too! The Gourmet Gold patés are pretty much all pretty good if I remember right, and I've fed a lot of those to my cats (they have a BIT higher sugar than desirable for Snookums, but they're used by lots of people for diabetic cats). With Sheba, they have a lot of other flavors that aren't as good - I think it's the basic patés as well there.

But the main thing I wanted to say is that if you want to look into it I would recommend the website resource that I mostly used (and was directed to by the main networking site for feline diabetes) - it's catinfo.org owned by Lisa Pierson DVM. That main page contains an introduction to the concepts involved and there are pages about the basics of raw feeding, making your own catfood, and choosing commercial catfoods - the last of these is the most complicated because of the math involved in reading the labels.

When you start reading down the Commercial Cat Food page, you quickly reach the link to her database (< this link is a pdf download) of information on the nutritional composition of catfoods on the US market. My sister shopped around for a brand she could order online in bulk locally with under 15% carbs as her cats aren't diabetic. A lot of it s food that's not available here though, so I mostly refer to this much shorter google doc of UK-available catfood nutrition composition which I got the link to from felinediabetes.com. A lot of the stuff there is generally available in the EU.

[anatsuno]

Thank you for this, that is SO USEFUL!
I found two different sources for a raw food diet (the whole movement is called the barf diet, apparently? ugh) but wow, even the cheapest stuff I can find in France (where most customer reviews are that it spoiled bc it arrived half-thawed, ugh) is still twice as expensive as the good quality high protein kibble I buy them now. The other source looked *amazing* but it was 30€/week per cat for mine (who are big) and there's no way I can afford that unless I suddenly start making triple my average revenue or something.
I wish I had a bigger freezer and an industrial strength robot where I could drop chicken and other meats with the bones in; I remember a page from a woman who explained how she made her own raw cat food with appropriate taurine supplements and all that and it was tempting! But I don't have the setup or the dough to make it happen right now.

Still, much to consider! Thank you.

[cimorene]

There's a popular raw food brand called MUSH and BARF for dogs and cats respectively I think. I do see a lot of stuff about making homemade food, but cats' taurine needs and so on make that sound a bit tricky to me. I read about people ordering bunches of frozen stuff from butchers and grinding their own as well, or cooking their own, that's never completely gone out of fashion in Finland, I gather.

I imagine taking delivery of stuff that's meant to be kept frozen could be quite dangerous since you want to minimize the time it's not frozen! They have refrigerated trucks, so it SHOULD be okay in theory, but then that's only if you can receive it and put it in the freezer on time, and presumes the other end of shipping all going well. It sounded too dicey to us. We're just going to keep buying it in person. Wax thinks we should aim for around 50% of their diet since it is still more expensive, though it seems to be shockingly affordable here in comparison to other places.

[anatsuno]

It's supposed to be shipped w/ refrigerated trucks and dry-ice packaging but yeah, I'd much rather buy it in person if I could. And indeed it seems it's much cheaper where you are!
I just noticed I can find stuff (using the UK spreadsheet) that would be good for them for about the same price per kg as the kibble I buy... But of course because you're also paying for the price of the water in the wet food, it automatically doubles or triples the amount of money that represents (mine are on 75g of kibble a day each, thereabouts, and apparently they'd need 210g or thereabouts of wet food to replace those). So yeah, that ups the bill quite a bit.
I'll continue shopping around and start trying to add in more daily wet food. :))

[cimorene]

I think Snookums and Tristana together maybe eat somewhere around 600g of wet food in 24 hours. I mash the canned food in a bowl and add hot water and stir it until it's a bit like a... meat milkshake or something. Gross. But they do like it better that way and more water is always better etc. The food itself has a lot more smell, but switching first to grain-free food, then to wet food substantially decreased how stinky their poop was. Apparently a raw food diet that doesn't have any plant matter in it is supposed to be even less smelly than wet food.