FYI - An Alternative to Canned Cat Food

[Vox Acerbus]

My father-in-law, a veterinarian, has long recommended that we feed our cats baby food. Meat varieties only: beef, veal, turkey and chicken. At first it seemed like a silly extravagance, but I can't tell you how relieved I was that we had started doing it when I heard about the cat food recall. Gerber almost certainly wouldn't screw something up like this!

As for expense, those little jars don't cost anymore than premium "organic" cat food tins. I just wish they sold the meat varieties in bigger jars!

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. Thanks, I never thought of that.

I've used dry Iams and Science Diet for years, cuz I thought I was doing the right thing.

Now I'll always wonder if the dry stuff has poison in it too.

We're all going to have to rethink how to best take care of our lil' buddies.

[OneGrassRoot]

14. Me, too. Have fed my 4 cats only Science Diet dry forever....

I always thought it was the one thing I was doing right by being consistent with this brand.

Let's hope that stricter regulation so something like this never happens again is one result of this horror. Poor babies...

[CrazyOrangeCat]

18. yeah, this is an awful shame.

and greed is at the root of it. :(

[kestrel91316]

37. Science Diet dry is still just fine. It's what my own cats eat, and a large

percentage of my patients. I have had ZERO (knock wood) cases of this ARF syndrome from recalled food.

I am convinced that my dietary recommendations have spared a number of cats from injury or death. Several clients have called to thank me for telling them to NOT feed various foods on the list.

Stick with Science Diet dry for now.

[OneGrassRoot]

46. Thank you for that reassurance. Glad you haven't encountered...

sick patients from this fiasco. Nice to know you're a vet (I went to your blog - cool!). :yourock:

[kestrel91316]

48. When this thing settles down I will post on the blog about it, or

feline nutrition, or whatever.

[Lars39]

2. Well, Gerber has had problems before...

there was a glass scare in '86.

[Vox Acerbus]

5. But was it was widespread?

True, but that was 20 years ago and it didn't seem to be nearly as widespread as this is, IIRC. And I dont' think it actually killed anyone. But there was SUCH a huge **** storm about it, which was good. They didn't sit on it the way Menu Foods did with this, and they didn't try to downplay it.

[Lars39]

16. I'd forgotten some of the details:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9A0DE0DF1E3BF937A35750C0A960948260

[Vox Acerbus]

19. Interesting... So funny how things weren't "tamper proof" then

Remember Tylenol? How naieve we were...

[gaspee]

3. I make my own dog food

With six dogs, three of them currently competing in dog shows, it's cheaper and easier to make my own food than to buy a premium brand. Safer too.

You can find recipies all over the internet.

I supplement with a good quality kibble and make my own wet food. They're all in great shape and great coat. My oldest, at 12, acts and looks 5.

[Vox Acerbus]

6. I don't think baby food would be feasible for a dog anyway...

The jars are really tiny.

[MissB]

13. I've used it before for a dog of mine, but not for everyday food.

She was epileptic and the vet suggested giving her a jar after she came out of her seizures.

[gaspee]

17. I use baby food

When I'm weaning puppies. Otherwise, I just use the cheapest meat that's on sale. Dogs need at least 40% meat based foods and cats need higher. I use meat, fish, sweet potatoes, carrots and if I can get it cheap enough, chicken. Soup bones are super cheap and dogs love 'em. You can give dogs any kind of bone if it's not cooked, but I'm not sure about cats. I'm sure it's the same for them. They're even more of a predator than dogs, who are more scavengers than predators.

[Clark2008]

9. Post a couple of recipes..

I keep seeing all these ways to make cat food, but there ARE DUers who have dogs (even though I get the feeling we're way outnumbered. LOL!)

:hi:

[Vox Acerbus]

10. Oh Bah ... ;-)

We have a dog too, but she only eats dry.

[Clark2008]

45. I was teasing, of course.

My big dogs eat only dry and so did my old man cocker spaniel until he had mouth surgery. Now he's on canned for the duration of his life - he's nearly 15.

We use Pedigree Lean for him and I haven't seen that on the list, but he has to have mushy food. He had mouth tumors which caused some tooth lose and decay. Basically, he's just getting spoiled in his last few years.

[gaspee]

22. I don't really follow recipies

But this is what I made this week...

4 LBS bottom round roast -- on sale at 1.69 LB
10 med sweet potatoes - .69/lb
2 lbs carrots (on sale .39/lb)
1 lb frozen green beans -- .99 at save rite

I added brewers yeast, ground egg shells I had been saving, ground flax seed and garlic. My dogs love garlic. I've heard conflicting information about garlic, but I've been using it for years and have never seen any adverse reactions. Do not feed Arctic breeds, especially the Japanese breeds, onions. Cooked or uncooked.

As you can see, this makes a lot of food and is definitely cheaper than canned food. Hell, it's cheaper per pound than the dry food I feed. (Timberwolf Organics Ocean Blue -- my breed does best on a fish based food. They make many flavors. I sometimes Use Solid Gold and Abady as well.)

Other recipies I've used --- Chicken on sale? Go for Chicken and Oats -- use the no name brand oats. When I use rive, I use brown. I buy it in bulk from costco. It's much cheaper that way. My dogs like all vegetables so I rotate them out. They seem to like root vegetables best but will eat them all.

They love bananas too. And pineappe.

[Clark2008]

36. My dogs want to know if you'll come over for dinner...

you know, to make it.

:)

[kestrel91316]

38. Please be aware that garlic and onions are documented to cause

oxidative damage to red blood cells of dogs and cats, and are as such POISONOUS to them. There is no benefit to feeding them, only potential harm.

I have found Heinz bodies in cats eating only trace amounts of garlic. Heinz body anemia is not something you want to cause.

http://www.aspca.org/site/DocServer/vetm0805_562-566.pdf?docID=5602&AddInterest=1101

[gaspee]

47. I knew that

Hence the don't use onions, cooked or raw. I've seen conflicting info about garlic - and I know people who have used it for years. I use some powdered garlic when I make treats, but not to excess. My dogs' last set of bloodwork (I do yearly full panel baselines starting at eight years old) was normal.

The dogs most likely to develop anemia are the Nordic breeds, specifically the Japanese Native breeds; Akita Inu, Shikoku, Kishu, Kai Ken and Shiba inu.

I first became aware of the issue fom a study done by the Akita Club of America in the late '90's.

[kestrel91316]

49. Garlic is also bad.There are just more published articles about onions.

[eleny]

4. Another solution

I once found a book at the library written by a vet. He developed healthy recipes that were easy to prepare at home for cat and dog meals. There may even be recipes online.

Our German Shep had terrible food allergies, too. So I made her meal every day. It wasn't hard. I just got into a routine of putting together her food and it became a snap. Rice was the base to which I added different things suggested by the vet. She lived a long life with a warm meal every day. Even the cat would stick his nose in her bowl and they often ate together. Good memories!

[Vox Acerbus]

7. One prob with one of my cats...

One of my cats won't "bite into" any food. He licks wet food. He'll bite into hard dry food, but not wet. He'll just lick it around the plate until he loses interest. He's actually the reason we started with the baby food. We even thin it with water, so it's lickable... I have no idea how to force him to actually take hunks off wet food off a plate, otherwise I'd consider making our own. He'd just lick the meat around...

[eleny]

24. Cats can be very fussy - just like people!

And what the heck. Why not baby them. They're deserve it.

Since my hubby has allergies, we don't have house pets these days. I miss them. Today I was at the craft store and they have a cat in the shop. It was sleeping on the counter in it's cat bed. but I couldn't resist waking it up with strokes to the face!

[DeepBlueC]

28. you could puree it in a blender

or food processor.

[Vox Acerbus]

29. That's a good thought!

Wonder if my husband would mind me hijacking his "Magic Bullet" for that... He'd do anything for our boys. :)

[kestrel91316]

39. Lots of my feline patients REALLY HATE canned/wet foods.

If they do, I tell the client to stop torturing the poor thing, lol, and stick with kibble. The caveat is: feed a top quality kibble. No junk. No generics or off brands. And remember that Purina never seems to get it right with cat food.

[StatGirl]

8. Baby food isn't balanced, though

Not enough calcium, vitamin A, or taurine, to name 3 nutrients off the top of my head.

Home-made food is possible, though. See http://www.catinfo.org, or books by Pitcairn or Donald Strombeck. I know a lot of people who feed homemade food, and their cats are very healthy.

[Vox Acerbus]

11. ..

Well we feed it as supplemental to a low-carb dry food, and my FIL I *believe* (don't quote me on this it was late at night in a phone call) said that the canned foods are higher in taurine than he would like. There was some component definitely in the canned cat food that he said had been known to cause gum and other health problems in cats.

[StatGirl]

21. Oh sure, as a supplement, baby food is good

. . . and I've fed it to my kitties when they had poor appetites. Some people try to avoid any brands that contain onion or garlic, as they are related to "Heinz body anemia" in cats.

I've never heard of too much taurine being a problem. Before taurine was discovered to be an essential nutrient, many cats died prematurely of heart disease because there wasn't enough in commercial foods. Taurine deficiency can also cause blindness. But it's certainly possible to get too much vitamin A or D, same as with humans.

[SoCalDem]

12. and they will probably get a bad case of diarrhea.. I have given babyfood chicken

to an elderly cat before, and although he ate it willingly, it also gave him the runs.. (we feed ONLY dry, and he had a tooth issue taken care of & had a sore mouth...he refused the canned food we tried at first .)

[Vox Acerbus]

15. ??

I think it must vary by cat. Our two cats never get the runs on baby food or canned.

[kestrel91316]

40. Meat by itself is a death sentence for a dog or cat. I know. I had to

euthanize a cat years ago that was fed ONLY THE BEST according to its owner: nothing but roast turkey and ham and beef sold for humans. And I mean nothing but. At the age of 5 months he came in (first vet visit ever) with the cat, who had broken literally evey long bone and rib in its body, and several vertebrae, too. The radiographs were truly nightmarish. The cat couldn't walk. The bones were paper-thin and crumbling.

It's called Nutritional Secondary Hyperparathyroidism, and is completely preventable with appropriate nutrition. It's a disease not of poverty, but of ignorance.

Poor cat. At least I had a chance to set the owner straight, and he truly had no idea any harm could result from what he was doing. It was an "accidental" death of sorts. But preventable.

[StatGirl]

43. That poor kitty :(

I'm really feeling like we dodged a bullet. I do have foods containing wheat gluten in the rotation for my cat, but they are Fancy Feast.

[kestrel91316]

50. If it were ME, I wouldn't feed any pet food with wheat gluten for the

time being..............

Sometimes I'm a bit too much of a worrywart. Just sayin'.

[AllieB]

20. I've heard good things about the BARF diet

BARF stands for "Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods". It's an evolutionary diet for dogs and cats:

http://www.barfworld.com/html/learn_more/what_is_barf.shtml

http://www.shirleys-wellness-cafe.com/sampleraw.htm

http://www.pets.ca/articles/article_raw.htm

[gaspee]

23. I try to

Follow a modified version of it. Homemade food as the bulk of their diet with a supplement of good quality kibble because I can't feed BARF everyday. I do have to say that my dogs' teeth, even the 12 and 10 year olds' are in great condition. I tend to give lamb soup bones (surprisingly cheap) and chicken necks.

I've had four of my six -- the other two are too young-- OFA'd (hips and elbows and manual of patellas) and all hips were excellent and all passed on elbows and patellas. Before I started feeding BARF, one of the older ones was low thyroid, but not anymore.

[DeepBlueC]

30. unfortunate acronym...or ironic

I have to assume the latter.

[kestrel91316]

42. It's appropriately named from what I have observed clinically.

[kestrel91316]

41. We vets also call it the barf diet. But for other reasons.

[DeepBlueC]

52. what do you recommend?

I know I can't be counted on to prepare meals for my cats, sadly. I don't do it for myself any more. I live in Toronto so a lot of the American organic brands are unavailable here. At one point I tried a product that was made of human grade ingredients. I think it was Wellness. At any rate it came in tins the size of Fancy Feast which cost $1.20 apiece here. Only one of my four cats would eat it and then he went off it as well. I want them to have the best, but they like crap ... Fancy Feast. They also like the President's Choice pouches,which are on the tainted list, but fortunately they have not had any of that for months because I have to go out to the sponsoring grocery to get it and as a rule I have pet supplies delivered.

[kestrel91316]

54. Fancy Feast isn't half bad. For kibble, I don't know what you have available.

My faves are Hill's Science Diet and Nutro's Max Cat.

[TZ]

55. glad to know you approve

of Fancy Feast since my two really have loved it from the get go. They lick the bowl clean. They never used to do that.

[DeepBlueC]

56. good to know

I give them a choice of two kibbles: Nutro Natural Choice and Royal Canin Oral Sensitive or Science Diet Oral Care are the current favorites. I want to give them premium food, but I have to say I doubt that the ones that are marketed and priced as "premium" really deserve the description. If I could find a palatable selection of canned foods made of human grade ingredients, formulated for cats, with best quality protein I would go for that no matter what the price. My 4 cats enjoy the variety of flavors Fancy Feast offers. They
have different favorites and they will also change favorites, so when a flavor falls out of favor I just put it aside until one or all of them start to reject one of the other varieties in the rotation. So they are happy enough, but I still feel somewhat guilty about the quality of their diet. I think that the best available is probably not nearly good enough.

Can you tell me why so many cats end up with chronic renal failure? They are mammals like us and succumb to cancers as we do, get arthritis, cataracts,heart disease as we do. Heart disease does not seem to be as common in cats as it is in humans, or cancer (are we at 1 in 2 chances now?), but kidney disease in cats seems to be far more common than I can understand. I have always wondered if it is because of the formulation of virtually all commercial foods. What do you think?

[cgrindley]

25. Dried cat food

I love my cat, but he is a cat. Dried food is more than good enough for him.

[StatGirl]

31. That's what I thought, too . . .

. . . until my beloved little guy was diagnosed with diabetes. Wet food is a hell of a lot cheaper than insulin, syringes, and glucometer test strips. Not to mention the worry that you'll come home to find your cat dead or brain-damaged.

When I started researching food ingredients and nutritional content of dry and wet food, my eyes were opened. The line that "wet food is just dry food with water added" is a complete lie, unless the food company is run by completely evil bastards.

[TreasonousBastard]

26. I used to make kitty stew from...

corn flakes, rice, various leftover meat, and a few light vegetables. Cats I had back then loved it, but my two now won't even look at it.

Purina One and Friskies is all they'll bother with, and not always even those.

There's always tuna juice, though-- they love it more than life itself. If I screw up and get tuna in oil, they make my life a living hell.

[Vox Acerbus]

27. I miss my old cat Steve...

Lived to 18. Fat bastard. Would eat ANYTHING...

Always had a weight problem and was begging for food. If he were alive today I now know he'd be a PRIME candidate for homemade, low-carb cat food concoctions. My two current cats are of a normal weight, but the vet recommended switching them to lower carb food and wet food for general health reasons. He said it's only now in the past 5 years becoming well-known that cats need lower carb, wetter diets that more closely mimic their own natural diets.

Steve died 6 years ago. All those years I was feeding him "low fat" dry kibble, and fighting his weight, and I'm so certain that if he were around now and I fed him a wet homemade diet, he'd have been healthier. (Not that living to 18 was unhealthy, in the end stomach cancer got my beautiful boy.)

[kestrel91316]

44. Purina One (and this is hard for me to say because Purina is so

EVIL, IMHO) is really not half bad. You could do worse.

Fancy Feast canned is a little better than Friskies canned with respect to tummy upsets.

Tuna is a big no-no for all cats, as is other fish and shellfish. Cats are desert animals. No fish in the desert for them to co-evolve with. We see lots of urinary, GI, and skin problems associated with fish in cats, with tuna being the worst. And there's that nasty little correlation between consumption of tuna and oral squamous cell carcinoma in cats to worry about..........

[TreasonousBastard]

58. What's so evil about Purina? Nestle does have its...

dark side, but no more than any food conglomerate that I know of. First thing I looked for in the dry stuff is tocopherols instead of the chemical stuff as a preservative, and Purina is one of the few to use it.

No tummy upsets with canned Friskies so far. Both are thriving, and one is around 15 and doing fine, so I'm happy to save the money. The other one is a stray that adopted me, probably under 2, and she's got about six extra toes so I expect some other problems will show up from some screwed up genes, and feeding her might be the least of my worries.

I was more concerned about the mercury in tuna, and don't give them much of it-- usually just the drained water. Don't eat that much of it myself, either, even though I usually get the chunk light. Interesting that it's associated with all those problems-- haven't heard that before.

FWIW, the older cat, around 15 or so, had terrible urinary problems after a serious blockage about 10 years ago when he was stupid enough to find some Christmas tinsel. He had emergency surgery and serious urinary crystal and infection problems. Had him on CD/O for a while, but after the urinary problems cleared up, the Friskies/Purina diet seems to have done him well. I'm using mostly the Special Diet and Urinary Health but he seems to be thriving on the rest of it, too.

Went over some recipes with the vet for homemade food, including a few from Cornell, but he refused to eat any of them.

[npincus]

32. do you have to add taurine?

[Lurking Dem]

33. Any meat product

that has been heat processed will need taurine added.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

34. No Way I'm Scoopin Out Baby Food To Them Each Night. Too Lazy. Friskies It Is!

[kestrel91316]

35. As a short-term supplement to regular food, perhaps. But I am quite sure your

FIL is well aware that meat baby food by itself is EXTREMELY INCOMPLETE NUTRITION and can lead to severe mineral imbalances and RENAL FAILURE.

Google "nutritional secondary hyperparathyroidism" if you are curious. Better yet, I did the google for you:

http://www.google.com/search?q=nutritional+secondary+hyperparathyroidism&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

[jus_the_facts]

51. E-coli in spinach...Salmonella in Peanut Butter...how long before even baby food and formula...

...are tainted as well? Seems to be a trend that is expanding instead of disappearing. :(

[roseBudd]

53. I would not trust baby food to contain enough taurine, a raw food study ending in feline deaths...

The consensus was that the whole ground rabbits would supply adequate taurine. The researchers were stunned when they had DCM deaths and halted the study.

[laugle]

57. What a great Idea, thanks!! I've been feeding table scraps and

even cooking my cat chicken, but we don't want to turn him into a beggar at dinner time.

I'm very disturbed that people are saying certain varieties are okay. I've read the "safe" lists and was happy to find out that 3 kinds I fed my cat were on there. However, I don't want to take any chances until some time has gone by and I know for sure that there have been no reported cases on those cat foods.

REMEMBER, UNTIL AN ANIMAL DIES FROM THIS, THE FOOD IS CONSIDERED SAFE, SO IN REALITY, WE JUST DON'T KNOW FOR SURE. I'M NOT TAKING ANY CHANCES.....

[Lorien]

59. Only one problem: taurine

taurine comes from organ meat which isn't in baby food. Cats can lose their eyesight and develop heart disease without it. Taurine supplements can be purchased, or get a high quality cat multi-vitamin with added taurine, such as those made by Wellness.