can i feed raw meat to my kitten or should it be cooked?

Answer 1

There wouldn't be much meat on a cocked kitten, but you can try......

Answer 2

At about seven or eight weeks of age I would give the kitten some raw meat. The simplest way for you to do this is to take a chicken wing, the liver, the heart and gizzard from a whole chicken you are cooking for a human meal.

You chop the wing into three or four pieces so the kitten can manage it better (thigh bones are a little too much for a kitten) and just use the other stuff as is though the gizzard is quite tough and I usually trim it up a bit to remove some of the grizzle.

This is a perfectly balanced meal - some fat in the chicken wing, lean muscle meat and bone for calcium. The liver is a rich source of vitamin A and the heart and gizzard are rich in taurine. The chicken neck is considered cat "candy" as they love to chew on that. Chop that up into pieces so the kitten can manage it better. You do not want to give liver alone or neck alone as that meal would be nutritionally UNbalanced and balance is the key in feeding a natural diet.

If you use ground meat you run a high risk of contamination as any pathogens are dispersed throughout the meat in the grinding process and make it a perfect medium for bacterial growth. Ground meat also has no calcium and the phosphorus content is too high and out of balance. Beef can be very hard to digest for some cats, pork and fish are never used in raw feeding.

I have found WholeCatHealth to be the best Yahoo group for advice, recipes and support for arriving at the best raw diet for cats. You can join the group by going to: http://www.yahoogroups.com and putting in a search for the WCH.

Try the little chicken wing meal with the kitten. Even if you serve this meal only a couple of times a week your kitten will receive great benefit from that wholesome and complete meal. Chewing on chunks of meat and bone is the best possible recipe for healthy, strong teeth. Don't be surprised is kitty growls at this meal and wants to drag parts of it through the house to protect his feast!

Answer 3

There's too much of a risk of a kitten catching something from the raw meat, so it has to be cooked, once it's older you can feed it raw meat, but until then cook it to be safe.

Answer 4

of course they eat raw meat. Feral and wild cats eat nothing else. If you are worried about parasites then do as I do, and feed meat from your butcher fit for human consumption. I feed my cats mostly raw rabbit with bones and fur - this is the feline equivalent of 'roughage' - from 6 weeks old and they never have digestive or teeth problems. A six week kitten can get right inside a rabbit ribcage to get at the best bits. (a white kitten gets in a bit of a mess...) There's no harm in cooked meat but it's not as healthy. Cooked bones, though, are dangerous as they splinter

Answer 5

Why did kokopelli compare a domestic kitten to lions and tigers etc? They're not lions and tigers, they're a different species.

Cats are quite likely to catch worms and other diseases from raw meat. Quite apart from this, a raw diet is difficult to conduct correctly - you can't just feed muscle meat, you also need to feed kidney and liver in appropriate amounts (too much liver is very bad).

I strongly recommend you finding a high quality kitten food. Getting the right balance of nutrients via a raw diet is hard enough for adult cats, in kittens it just isn't worth messing about with, it's so easy for kittens to die or become deformed from malnutrition. I'm forcibly reminded of a six month old kitten I met not too long ago who looked about 8 weeks old and had ricketts - his owners had fed him on mostly tuna. He died.

Don't do it. Whatever else you may think about 'commercial' versus 'raw' diets, there's no doubt that cats can and do live into their twenties on commercial cat food, so I don't know where this sudden insistance on feeding raw food has suddenly come from.

Chalice

Answer 6

I have read in an article and I have seen it on TV that raw meat should never be feed to a cat or a dog because they can get worms from it and also salmonella and you could end up getting it. Or the cat or dog can get e-coli. Make sure the meat is cooked before you give it to the kitten.

Answer 7

Raw meat for a kitten is not a good idea. With a mature cat, an occasionally morsel of raw beef can be tolerated. However, do NOT feed any cat raw pork, lamb or chicken because of possible diseases that can be contracted from them.

Answer 8

If our meat wasn't so pumped full of hormones and other chemicals, raw meat would be fine. But, the meat we buy in the stores is full of little "extras". I would cook it first, but agree that a good cat food is better.

Answer 9

My concern with feeding raw meat is that it could be contaminated. Raw meat in and of itself is not bad but in this day and age I would be leery of feeding it unless I know the exact source. So much of our food supply is being imported these days, that I wouldn't risk it.

Answer 10

It would probably be better for your kitten if you bought a quality cat food for it. The meat should be cooked so that all the potential parasites and bacteria are removed. Hope this helps you.

Answer 11

A raw diet for a cat or kitten is fine but the thing is it has to be specially prepared as cats have some additional needs that humans do not. You would need to buy a grinder. here is instructions for preparing a raw food diet for cats
http://www.catinfo.org/makingcatfood.htm

Please don't ever feed dry foods to a cat