... when I asked about good books about raw ''Dr Tom Lonsdale, DVM is the Australian veterinarian that helped shed light on the raw diet and dental health in dogs - his book Raw Meaty Bones is full of technical stuff that is mainly of interest to people in the nutrition field like myself, but his second book, Work Wonders, is geared for the pet owner, with a how-to included. Also Monica Segal's book K9 Kitchen is good. ''
I also wanted to thank you for this bit of info - I had not heard of Dr Lonsdale, my colleague often discusses Billinghurst's ideas which, according to Lonsdale, have moved away slightly from the original Raw Meat and Bones diet. I found his website last night and also downloaded the book "Work Wonders..." after reading some of the articles on his website.
When I got my Cornish Rex cat about two years ago, after losing my Siamese to cancer at only 9yrs old (they could live to nearly double that), my colleague had introduced me to Raw feeding then, and it just made so much more sense to me. I wondered would I have lost my Siamese to cancer had I fed him a raw diet, and decided I would do things this way from teh very start. My Cornish kitten Milo, took well to the raw diet and was very active and playful. Unfortunately he was a ticking time bomb from the minute I got him and had to be put to sleep at 8 months old, regardless of what I had fed him. He had been exposed to a virus at around 2-4w as most cats are through their mother, but this mutated into feline peritonitis which is incurable.
So when his breeder gave me another kitten a year ago, I decided to try again with raw. She didn't take to it that well, and is not nearly as easy going as he was. She starved herself (refused to eat the raw food no matter what I tried) and would bite me and wake me in the middle of the night to get me to top up her bowl with Hills Science Diet, which I had as I was trying to wean her off it onto raw and doing it gradually to avoid gut reactions. I took her to a vet and asked how I could get her to eat raw and his response was "Look, it's much easier and more convenient to feed a good quality dry food like Hills. It doesn't go off, it doesn't smell, it can stay there all day and she can graze and quite frankly the good foods we have available today make it not worth the effort to go any other way." I was dissappointed by this response as I was after advice to get her to change and I believed that raw feeding had a lot of benefits to offer. Honestly, he gave me a license to give up. And I did.
I still offer raw foods when I am cutting them up for dinner if she asks for some, and as she over eats on the dry food, she only gets it once a day, just before I go to bed (so she doesn't wake me at 2am!) and the rest of the time has it in treat ball things that require her to be active to get it out. She just doesn't eat the raw food, often sniffs at it, licks it and walks away. I started feeding her tinned fish ever now and then and found she will eat that, but not fresh, raw meat and bones.
Last night was the first time in a long time that she has actually eaten the raw food I have offered her (it was premium quality chicken breast that I was cutting up to make cheesey chicken strips for my children). I was surprised and kept offering it until I thought she had eaten a meal's worth and I didn't feed her the dry food like normal. Lonsdale's website has some excellent tips for changing cats over, and one of them was to use tinned commercial food before switching to raw, because the texture is closer to raw. So perhaps by giving her the tinned fish, she is now more accepting of the wet feel of raw meat.
I know this is a dog forum and not a cat forum, but the information you have provided may ultimately help my cat too. I now have a few tricks up my sleeve to test out on her and another resource to draw from to ensure that when my puppy comes home next week, I am fully prepared with the knowledge I need to make good decisions on what I will feed him.
I am very new to raw feeding, having not been successful at it with my cats and know it can be much more difficult than commercial feeding but if my pets can live to their full potential then it is worth it. My rottweiler (my first and only dog I have owned) lived to 10.5, dying of a rather sudden cancer. Up until his diagniosis he was healthy, puppy-like and active, we thought he would surely live a few years longer despite people telling us that 9 or 10 is a "good" age for a large breed. While I thought I was doing the right thing by cooking up "stews" for him with pumpkins +seeds, leafy greens, potato peels, brown rice, and meat broth and feeding him raw bones regularly, and the weekly raw egg and bacon when we had them for a sunday breakfast, in addition to his dry food, I now know that there is better (and that cooking reduces the nutrient content considerably). I will never know if he could have lived longer, but if I do it from the beginning with my EM, I know I have given him the best chance. It would be nice if one of my pets could die of old age rather than cancer or some other rare and sudden disease that takes them far too soon.
