Hi people,
Sorry if this is a bit of a daft question but I just got my order of Grau from zooplus & have given Indy & Anna wee bits of it over the past couple days to see how they get on. Well anyway I notice that when they have finished there are wee bits left in the bowls that looks like small bits of ground up bones? Is this right? I know cats are meant to have bones but I thought only raw bones & do they not cook cat foods or put them through some kind of process so would that not make the bones brittle & sharp? At first I thought the white bits were the rice but then on looking close up it def looks like bone. Just checking this was ok? I am hoping to move them onto some of the other german brands from the A-Z wet food sticky, are they similar to Grau, will they have wee bits of bone too?

Eventually I would love to feed them on raw as I read an article saying that all processed cat foods, even the best ones, still have chemicals & is just like feeding them junk food. I'm just a bit nervous about doing the raw diet as I'm not sure where to source good meat, plus I saw an article saying some of the vitamin & taurine powders aren't regulated so how do we know exactly what's in them? It's hard to know what to trust out there isn't it!?!

Hmmm, are you sure it is bone fragments that you found in the Grau. I thought they used calcium carbonate as a calcium source but that could just be to supplement that calcium content that isn't quite covered by them using carcasses. If they are using bone that it should be very finely ground so as not to pose a danger to the cat.

The only thing I can suggest you do is to email Grau to see what they say. They might have a perfectly good explanation as to what that white bit was that you saw or they might have had a manufacturing problem.

I feed some of the other German brands and can honestly say that I haven't seen any bone bits in there yet.

TBH, I think there is a lot of scaremongering going on with regards to commercial diets. Just because they use certain products (at the end of the day everything in food goes back to being "chemical") to reinstate the nutrients that got lost in the manufacturing process doesn't mean that that makes it "junk" food.

Re the raw food. I have very rarely questioned the provenance of the supplements I use but that is because the shops I get them from tell me exactly what they contain (for example, the purity of the taurine I get). I wouldn't recommend you using vitamin pills in order to make a raw diet complete. These vitamin pills, if we are indeed thinking about the same vitamin pills, are to top up a diet that is already complete; not to provide missing vitamins in full from scratch.

I've never noticed anything that looks like bone in Grau. What flavour was it? I have regularly seen fish bones in the fish variaties of other makes, these go very soft and crumbly when cooked and hence are not a concern.

Thanks,

I think there are so many articles out there on what to feed cats and they can be quite scary when they list what kind of diseases your wee cat can get if they aren't fed properly. I've lost track of the amount of times that I have decided what kind of cat food I want to feed the wee guys only to come across an article scaring me off it

I will maybe give the folk at Grau a wee email. I'm not sure if it was bone, at first I thought the wee guys had managed to get tiny wee chips from their cat litter in their food bowls as I use Catsan so the wee chips kind of looked like wee bits of litter except a lot smaller, probably only 2-3mm in diameter and some of the bits were a bit smoother than the litter. So I kept an eye on their food while they were eating and there is no way they could have got litter in their so don't know what the wee chips are. I just assumed they were bits of bone as I couldn't think what else it would be. I'm probably just doing my usual and worrying about nothing!

Hobbs I have been reading your sticky on the raw diet and I think I am going to look into giving that a go and giving the wee guys a mix of the german food and a bit of homemade raw diet. Sorry in case you hadn't noticed I am a big worrier! I think I have just been reading too many articles and getting myself scared about what to feed them. Feel a bit better after getting your responses, thanks

i know what you mean i actually think its fat. mine never eat it i tend to get more of it in the beef and chicken flavour. it does look alot like bone but if you pick it up you can tell it is not.

i add a bit of water to mine and really mush it up it normally solves the problem.