5 months - November 19, 2008

Here we are at the beginning of 5 months into the raw feeding and we are currently waiting for the birth of our first born "raw fed" litter who are due to enter the world at this very moment. As you can imagine I am very interested to see how these forthcoming children progress throughout the first 13 weeks or so of their lives. It will probably be a very anxious 13 weeks as I will be hoping and praying that I have gotten the balance right with regards to the raw feeding because if not, this could have a devastating effect on the children. On the other hand, if I have gotten the balance right, then this should stand the kittens in good stead for the rest of their lives. Having said that, it is interesting to note that in Pottenger's study it is suggested that it takes up to 4 generations before the lines recover from ill effects as result of consuming cooked food.

A couple of weeks ago, my meat cleaver arrived so I was delighted. Graham had ordered it for me online although he has made it quite apparent that having seen my knife skills, he is incredibly worried that I may end up with no fingers. Naturally, I couldn't wait to try out the cleaver and was really looking forward to the next meal however my enthusiasm soon vanished after I placed said chicken portions on the marble chopping board, lifted the cleaver, brought it down once and was horrified to see whilst it went through the chicken as it should have done, it also cut straight through the chopping board splitting it in two! Thank goodness I hadn't decided to use the massive marble chopping board as that is one of Graham's favourites. I went upstairs to tell him that I had tried out the meat cleaver and did he want the good news or the bad news. His suggestion was to buy a new, thick, wooden chopping board. Very typically, when I went out later that afternoon I couldn't find one. The cleaver remained untouched then for another week and when we were re-arranging the kitchen last week we stumbled across a massive wooden chopping board that we didn't even know we had. Result :) I have since been very happily chopping away at entire chickens and massive chunks of meat. Now, if the raw diet entries suddenly come to a grinding halt with no explanation, it will probably be because I have chopped through my fingers as I do tend to get carried away.

I have now increased meals for our other due raw fed lady who is due at the end of December and just like Toussaint, sometimes she will eat the extra meals, other times, she is not interested. As she still has approximately 5 1/2 weeks to go I am not overly bothered. I do have to say though that she is looking particularly good at the moment.

Prior to writing this diary entry I gave a lot of thought to how far we have come since the beginning of our raw feeding and whether or not there had been any effects on the cats that concerned me. Also, I had to ask myself if, 5 months into the raw diet, do I still feel we are doing the right thing and what aspects of raw feeding bother me. One thing I learnt during these past 2 weeks is that despite my enthusiasm for a total natural diet for the cats, I am not yet as fully converted as I first thought. Actually, that probably isn't the best way to word it because I am still totally hooked on the raw feeding however I realised just how easy it is to slip back into the old method of giving commercial foods.

We had a queen staying here that belongs to a very good friend and she was having a honeymoon with Ashanti. This queen is not raw fed so naturally I purchased her chosen commercial foods to feed her during her stay here, biscuits and pouch/tins. During her stay despite my resolve to not buy any extra for JB, I couldn't help myself and sure enough I started adding a small tin or pouch here and there to JB's raw mince meals. As for why I did this? Well to be honest it was convenience more than anything else. I was pretty disgusted with myself for having fallen back into the habit so incredibly quickly and this is something I shall have to be very careful of in the future. Old habits do die hard but I refused to be sucked back in to the commercial way of feeding so when our friend collected her queen after the matings took place, I sent her home with any leftover tins/pouches that I had. (I also sent her home with a Prize Choice pack as I couldn't resist.) I've not bought any since and despite sometimes glancing longingly at the cat food aisles when I am in Pets At Home, I continue to march past them with my arms laden down with Prize Choice frozen raw food. The only commercial type food we keep in the home is the Hills Canine/Feline a/d and this is something that we will always have permanently on hand. Even if it doesn't get used and sits in the cupboard for a year it doesn't matter.

There are a couple of downsides to the raw feeding, one of which is the preparation first thing in the morning. Even now, I still have some mornings where I really do loathe having to warm up the raw meats and then stand there cutting it up. Admittedly it is far less of a chore now than when I first started but every now and then I do find it so very time consuming. The other downside to raw feeding is when the ladies are pregnant and spend the last few weeks of their pregnancy sleeping in the bedroom with us. Let me tell you that when you get out of bed at some ungodly hour of the morning to go to the loo and stand on a half gnawed quail bone in the dark it is quite painful, to say nothing of the fact that it is incredibly gross!

Those really are the only 2 aspects that I have issues with and I have to say that I am still totally convinced that we made the right decision. I only have to look around the home at our own cats, at our pregnant ladies, at JB (our current kitten) to see that they are truly reaping the benefits of a raw fed diet.

Very shortly, I will have a new section to add to our raw feeding pages and it's an idea that was suggested to me by one of my dear friends (and kitten family) who also feeds raw so hopefully I'll get this underway later on this week.

5 months - November 26, 2008

It has been a very busy couple of weeks and we are delighted to announce the birth of our first raw fed litter which so far, has been interesting. The babies' weights were what I would have expected from this mating considering there are 5 babies, with the exception of one very tiny child who was a mere 73 grams at birth. I spent the first 5 days or so syringe feeding 2 of the smallest babies and are delighted to say that they are both thriving and are now feeding from mum and the syringe feeding has stopped.

Now even though it is very early days, I have noticed a couple of changes with this litter in comparison to commercial fed litters. Normally after the birth process is over, you wait for that dreaded visit to the litter tray. For some reason, I don't know why, but after a queen has given birth, when she first goes to the litter tray it is usually to deposit the largest, most vile, smelly poo you could ever see. It is always really disgusting and even if you are sound asleep, if mum goes to the toilet at 3am, the odour will wake you up with minutes, I am not kidding! I have never figured out why this is, but it is the same with each of our queens. You can imagine my total and utter delight when Toussaint when to the litter tray and Graham and I sat there with baited breath waiting for that inevitable odour yet it didn't happen. When she finished, I got out of bed to look in the litter tray to be greeted by a non smelling, not overly large stool. Bonus! This has not happened before. During labour, Toussaint ate approximately 350 grams of raw Prize Choice chicken mince.

Something else I have noticed is that by Day 5, all 5 children were well on their way to doubling their birth weight, or at least coming very close to it. Now for one of our litters, that is pretty good going because we don't normally see this. In a litter of 5, we may get a couple of the bigger babies who double their birth weight, whilst the smaller ones might only gain 50 - 70 grams so this really does please me immensely. Is this due to the fact that their mum was fed solely on raw throughout her pregnancy and she has only had raw since giving birth? Perhaps it is too soon to say and it is still very early days yet for these babies.

My dear friend Gwen and I have spent the last couple of weeks preparing from scratch, all the raw feeding pamphlets, diet sheets, information sheets and menu etc. that we will be giving to our new kitten families in the hopes that at least some of them may wish to carry on with their kittens' natural diet. We have thoroughly enjoyed doing this and had a giggle along the way and yet again, I have learnt even more about raw feeding. We think we have now got the final versions ready though thank goodness :) Gwen, who is the mathematical genius of this partnership is currently working on costing's for kitten families to feed a raw diet to kittens and/or established cats. Provided of course she sends me the end result rather than sends it to herself as she has a habit of doing we should be okay ;)

As you can imagine, the rest of the fur family are still thriving on their raw diet although I must admit that during these past 2 weeks when life has been so incredibly hectic, I have not actually been following our set menu as I should. On Friday, Juniper Berry is leaving us to live with Gwen, and then starting Monday I will get back on track with the menu. Gwen gave me a little present this week, she created an fantastic spreadsheet for me with loads of different functions and the idea of this is that I simply added our cat's names to the sheet, put them all in their set areas for feeding times i.e. upstairs people, boys room, downstairs people etc. and the spreadsheet calculates the exact amount everyone should be fed. This is a massive help because obviously we do move the cats around sometimes and all I have to do now is just change the names to different areas on the spreadsheet and it adjusts the feeding ratio. Well done Gwen, I owe you big time for this one mate. It did come as a bit of a shock to me to realise that I have still been overfeeding <sigh> and that explains why there has been so much food left over after each meal. There is also the fact that JB, our preggy eggies, and our new mummy all get offered food far more often. These people are not just on the 2 set meals per day. It is a little complicated but well worth the effort I think.

Something else I have finally found is tinned bloody clams! For those who are not aware, clams are an extremely high source of taurine but do you think prior to now I could buy them? Nope, not at all. Our local Tesco now stocks them. The problem is that they are in brine which shouldn't be given, so what I'm doing is buying the tins and thoroughly rinsing them under cold water to remove as much of the brine as possible. Our fur kids love them and it's great to have yet another source of Taurine in their weekly diet.

Thanks to Gwen having a bit of a bright moment, I do now have something else to include in the raw feeding section of our web site and that is to share the experiences of kitten families or cat guardians who are also either raw feeders or in the process of changing from a commercial diet to a raw diet. I think this will be extremely beneficial to anyone who is thinking of feeding raw because it can be very encouraging to learn how other kitten families cope and what they go through. With this in mind, Gwen has kindly given me permission to publish her own raw fed cat experiences and I have no doubts that there will be additions to her raw feeding diary as the months go by.