So I was doing some research online yesterday, trying to find out what meat i can give to the cats which is around £5 a kg, to make up the meat part in the DIY mince/chunk food i'll be making.

I just wanted to know if there is any specific cuts they shouldn't eat or may be hard to chew, bear in mind 1 cat has had 5 teeth removed.

What i found was:

Lamb stewing meat
Turkey thigh meat
Beef roasting joint
Beef casserole chunks
Beef stewing steak
Chicken thigh fillet
Chicken breast
Pork shoulder joint
Pork leg roast.

all of that should be fine you also need to source some body parts like heart/lung/ kidney & a small amount of liver to make sure they get all the vitamins they need. Have read of the sticky at the top of the page i use the following:
11oz muscle (dark meat)
2 oz heart
1 oz offal- lung/kidney/brain
1 oz liver
1 oz ground eggshell

Think that works out to the right proportions, i'm sure Hobbs will be along to correct me if i'm wrong. Good luck with raw feeding i'm having some teething troubles with my 2 boys, they don't serm to want minced meat!

I'm going to try Hobbs original recipe:

1000g lamb meat ------------------------------------or any other meat, beef, chicken with skin, duck, rabbit, venison
500g lamb breast (together that is 50% meat)
250g lamb heart (8.3%)
250g lamb kidney (8.3%)
1000g chicken wings with bones and skin (33.3% but remember this also includes meat)
98g ox liver, or 85g chicken liver or 300g lambs liver (you need more lambs or calf liver than ox or chicken liver to get the same amount of Vit A)
17g salmon (for Vit D3)

Supplements
seaweed powder 4.4g (for iodine amongst other things but also helps with metabolism)
brewers yeast 6g (for Vit Bs and other trace elements)
Vit e drops 6 or 50g wheat germ oil (very expensive in this country) for Vit E
Salt 1.4g to substitute for the sodium loss not feeding blood
Water about 1l (this is to substitute for the loss of blood and therefore loss of moisture)

---------------------

Just wanted to know regarding the meat section.

sounds like the cats will be eating better than me
Those cuts should be fine you could always chop smaller if meat feels too tough when cutting up.

Hi Tylah

Lamb is good with most cats, the breast meat is very fatty though, and the fat becomes rancid quickly which could spoil the whole batch, the same with lamb hearts but its easy to cut the fat off of hearts, you could get organic hearts within your budget and swap that for the breast meat, would also be much higher in taurine. Some fat is needed but breast is excessive IMO, wild creatures that would be prey animals for cats do not carry the levels of saturated fat found in farmed animals.

Also couldn't help but notice about the bone calculation, wings are 46% bone on the USDA database, I've never physically checked wings but being the 'I don't trust anything' type, I have stripped and weighed many thighs and drumsticks to check the USDA given percentage for those and it is pretty much in line with what they declare. I couldn't fully check with the vast difference in the liver amounts?? Feed any liver to a maximum of 5% of diet is a rawfeeders mantra.

I wonder which teeth are missing? Have you tried them on pieces of meat, many toothless cats can still mash up the food quite sufficiently, cats don't chew but mostly crush small prey and swallow whole or shear off pieces from a large piece / prey. Same with bone in meats, I think I said about bashing stuff up with a hammer, well I never needed to do that as my lot quite happily eat prey size bones but thought as it was something I was offering as a suggestion I ought to be certain in the suggestion and see what all the excitement is over bashing up bones for transitioning cats.

Big Big thank you to you for enabling me this enlightenment!

I tried a wing, bashed it a few times with a club hammer, had a feel and thought hmm bit too big pieces, although I'm sure my crew would have swallowed them down, bashed a few more times and indeed a pulpy floppy chicken wing! Had 2 cats almost fighting over it! Don't feed chicken wings as only one will manage the bones

I got so enamoured of this I tried it on some rabbit. Normally I section the whole rabbit out, legs, rib cage and the saddle and they get it through the week. The ribs are eaten no problem as are the front legs, the back leggs are easy to strip and my smallest cat will munch the spine in the saddle but everyone else says 'too much hard work', so muggins strips all the meat off very tediously around each vertebrae and through the pelvis so that there is as little waste as possible, well just a few bashes with the hammer and voila! I am so so grateful, zero waste yippee!

If you can bear to do it, the cats would get the dental benefits and to my mind its far less work and gruesomeness than mincing.

I am firmly enamoured of the hammer and will keep the mincer for grinding peanuts for the birds.

More variety in the main meat would be good, any of the animals listed

Hello,

One problem I have is that i have no butchers in my area, so I'll be buying most of my ingredients from Asda and Sainsbury's. Neither of them do hearts so I'll have to find some elsewhere. I've currently got cow hearts in the freezer, but apparently you shouldn't use that type because of some disease or other.

The chicken wings i bought from Raw To Go have very little meat on them. I think i may try this recipe i worked out. Please let me know if it doesn't add up. As these ingredients only make 10 pouches, i can make 10 chicken, 10 turkey, 10 beef at a go and just defrost 2 random ones a day.

• 575g meat 65% incl chicken wing meat
• 150g heart 15%
• 50g liver 5%
• 50g kidney 5%
• chicken wings 150g (50/50 bone-meat) 7.5% bone
• 10 scoops taurine
• 2 teaspoons salmon oil
• + other supps as before.

The cat's who will be eating the raw stuff is Tylah (11) who has all his teeth bar a fang at the front. He has lovely white teeth but his breath honks something rotten. He has a red line running along his upper back teeth, so he may have gingivitis or similar. He's a fan of liver, kidney and meat so that's not an issue, but he will not eat bones. he doesn't even try to eat them. It's as if he doesn't register that he should, but he will eat the chicken wing mince.
Then there's Heinzworth (14) who is in my avatar. I'm not sure which teeth were removed but I know he doesn't have many on the bottom anymore. He'll only eat meat and heart, any thing else needs to be disguised. He won't touch bones either, even teeny bits in raw mince, when he got a little bit of bone in his mouth he spat it out. That's why i need the mincer, so i can get the chicken wings ground fine enough so he can't detect it.
Both cat's can eat meat in chunks. I only plan on grinding the wings, liver and kidney, the rest will be chunked up.
If Heinz won't eat the above then I'll have to try him on a mix using only egg shells or he'll just have to stay on his, meat, heart and kidney with felini complete. Then Tylah can have the proper mix all for himself.

Considering my cat's vary rarely eat anything they catch be in mice or the occasional bird, i'd have no chance of them eating a defrosted baby animal. I think you're cat's are in touch with their inner Tiger, mine are in touch with their inner couch potato. I can just imagine you in your kitchen bashing these poor rabbits to bits, something like a horror movie

Feeling very dyslexic today so just double checking it is 150g of chicken wing, pretty sure it is as that makes it all work.

Supermarkets are fine and you can source pretty much all you need from there, if they have a small butcher counter you could ask if they might be able to get hearts, my local Asda does lamb hearts but they are not always on display, when I asked, the man went and fetched them said that lots of people get them for their dogs.
Sainsbury carry a good range of chickens, different varieties, slow grown and woodland birds that are RSPCA endorsed, if I remember right they do wings from different birds. I like the way you've done 50/50 makes more sense, and even though chicken wings might be meatier from Sainsbury, what I found with the drum and legs that I weighed is that regardless of the size the % was still the same. Asda do free range organic chicken legs for £4.73 / kg and at the other end they have smart price frozen chicken portions (drums, thighs) at £1.39 / kg. Plenty to choose from.

You could look for farm shops as well once you are settled with the feeding, might be something not too far away or they've got something worth the effort of a few bus rides. I only have 2 butchers near and both pretty expensive, one I only found a few months ago, just had never noticed it!

Personally I wouldn't go any further than taurine and salmon oil as additions, and I don't give them as a rule, if you feed lots of variety (which you are clearly planning) you shouldn't need them, taurine is safe to give as its water soluable so any excess is peed out, if you get meats of the most active muscles legs and thighs mostly, hearts, tongue its all very high in taurine and more than sufficient.
I know some people do use fish body oil as an omega 3 replacer to balance up large animal meats but if you can feed some natural reared grass fed meats or even wild rabbit that will be more balanced, you don't have to feed the rabbit 'whole' you can get it ready to cook, Woldsway do it online and you might come accross someone who does local wild rabbits and would prep it for you. Or you could give fish occasionally once a week maybe and small fish like sardines are great, spratts are better, very cat sized, mackeral are the same family v high in omega 3. I know of plenty of people who have fed from the supermarket for many years and have perfectly healthy cats and who don't give any supplements.

Check out feline FORLS, red line on teeth is a classic sign, its not well understood as a disease process and diet changes might help, if he's munching ok I guess he's not in pain, keep an eye on it, might need some dental work.

The bashing up with the hammer was not so bad, I guess different things make us squemish, I find the mincer really gorry and horrifying! No wonder it warns on the box not to put your fingers in

Do try the hammer, the skin holds it all together, just looks like a very floppy chicken wing Much easier than the mincer and if you hit it enough times I honestly could feel nothing that remotely resembled bone.

Morrisons sell a far wider range of offal than any other supermarkets and mine def do sell lamb hearts as i bought them last weekend.(much to the disgust of the young lad who served me) they do them whole and diced along with diced ox heart as well.

Yep 150g of chicken wings. I didn't want to add more than that initially as they poop in the garden so i'd never know if they were all bunged up.

I'm sending my mother off to Morries today to get some stock in, will try them on duck as well. I know there are a few butchers around Morries so will see if they have any rabbit.

I'm happy to buy the better quality ingredients once i know they'll eat it but farmers markets are atrociously expensive. I'm sure a jar of jam is 10 quid. This would be my local farm shop, it's about a 10 min drive away. The Blagdon Farm shop / Welcome

I got over excited about my new toy - the grinder - when it arrived on Saturday and minced the lot. All the parts were frozen so it came out looking like pink spaghetti. Will restrain myself next time, as they didn't like the lamb slop very much.

We've decided to try ours on NI minces so want to order some tomorrow. They say we can get £5 off our first order if someone recommends us. I don't suppose anyone can PM me their name so I can get a discount can they please?

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