CatMom
I am not a cat nutritionist but in my house the kitchen is the medicine cabinet of first resort. Even so, I am forgetful and make mistakes that end up in the garbage (food, not cats!) Anyway I keep at it. I did a lot of research on this earlier this year, and am about 20 posts behind on my cat's blog - where I post my home cooking revelations - I am home cooking 50% of both kitties meals... they always have a bowl of two types of no grain kibble to supplement, as I know it will take me an entire year to get it right, to where they can rely on my meals only... that's OK.
First, almost every site out there on how to make cat food, is about how to make RAW cat food. [Interesting that even raw their recipes always add supplements, what's that all about? either they get everything from raw or not. Hellooo.] But then there is this one:
http://www.stretcher.com/stories/03/03jan27a.cfmThe basic formula then for cooked and raw is simple (this btw is the route a lot of European pet owners take):
ANIMAL PROTEIN + SUPPLEMENTS + PREPARATION = HOME MADE CAT FOODNote: "Supplements" in
US AAFCO mandated formulations also include 50% GRAIN. 50% is nuts but zero doesn't work for my cats either - over time. Your feline grain mileage may also vary.
The first part is easy! The second part is the gotcha, but then I found pre-preared supplements like
SOJO's, and of course my cat hates it. So I looked at the ingredients in SOJO's and started to buy each one... that's where I'm at.
Of course the third part, preparation is the real sticky part. That's why it's going to take me a year - right now, they insist on what I prepare as their first meal of the day... perhaps becuase they're so hungry.
[this morning was a shrimp meat day, and I peeled the cooked shrimp, leaving the tails on the counter-top while I took a phone call, the 3 mo/o jump-jetted onto the countertop and ate one entire shrimp tail ... then I thought perhaps I should grind a bit of the shrimp exo skeleton, lots of good natural stuff in that - in this way I take my cues from them...]
In the case of a sick cat with a prescription for a particular cat food brand, it's always about the supplements in that particular brand, the type of animal protein and the type of grain they use...
I looked at the Science Diet prescription formula and quite frankly, it isn't rocket science... they use a better quality of animal protein (duh!) i.e. turkey not chicken meal, liver (animal organ meat, a staple in home cooking), corn flour, rice flour and soy flour - INTERSTING, none of that wheat gluten corn meal in their other ones - highest quality grain powders (rice and barley flour are what I add to bind my ingredients together) and the rest of the ingreeeds are vitamin cat supplement stuff you can BUY... a lot of human vitamin shops alos get a great deal of traffic about pet supplements, and have 800 numbers staffed with pet owners who are unbelievable fountains of knowledge... I posted some here back in the midst f the pet food scandal...Anyway, to cut to the chase, why not just ask the vet "why that particular brand", what's in the formulation that makes it good. If he or she doesn't know, they he or she has some 'splaining to do about why they don't know why they are prescribing a particular food.
