A Message from the Founder

Margaret Gates and friend.

It made sense. In fact, it made perfect sense. Why hadn't I ever heard of it before? No cat owner I ever knew had ever mentioned it. No vet had ever mentioned it. I had never questioned what I "knew." Since when did carnivores start eating grain? I talked to people; they all fed their cats dry food. They had never heard of raw feeding. You can't choose a better way if you don't even know it exists. I was going to have to do something about this.

The Feline Nutrition Education Society and the RawFedKitty campaign,™ are what I decided to do.

First, I threw out all of the dry food. That's how my own conversion started. I'll confess, we have a lot of cats. This is our second generation and I wanted to raise this group the best way I could. I didn't want this group to go through all the medical problems the last had. Three of them had developed hyperthyroidism, one had had diabetes, two had had cancer, and two had died from renal failure. I started doing a lot of research. The first thing I learned was how unhealthy dry food was for cats. How this fake food was implicated in a lot of the health problems my previous cats had experienced. One book I read mentioned raw feeding, but termed it "controversial." I read more, and found that raw feeding was not so controversial in all circles. I attended a series of lectures on cats. One of these was on nutrition, and included a demonstration of how to make homemade raw food. I thought "I can do that!" I was hooked.

When I was cooking, I had always shooed my cats away when they tried to sneak a bit of raw chicken. I automatically thought: "You can't eat that, it's raw. You'll get sick." They were trying to tell me all along how wrong I was. Of course cats eat raw meat, what did I think a mouse was? When did I stop thinking of them as carnivores, as highly evolved killing machines? Just because they are furry and cute, doesn't mean they aren't predators. When you think about it, a cat's natural diet is more than raw meat, it is whole raw animal. Bones, brains, organs, fur, everything. That's what the raw diet is emulating; the natural, carnivorous diet of a cat. Going to a live prey diet just isn't practical, but we can get pretty close to the same nutritional benefits through commercially prepared raw diets or homemade recipes. Think of it as reverse engineering a mouse.

Once I started raw feeding, I noticed changes in my cats immediately. One cat, who had never had a firm stool, only pudding-like puddles, had a firm stool the next day. The amount of stool they all produced dropped by about half. Best of all, it didn't stink any more. Really. With eleven cats, this was a very big deal. I'll confess I probably would have switched them to raw for this result alone.

After a couple of weeks, I noticed other changes. They had more energy. They were running around and playing more. It was obvious they felt better. They didn't wake us up in the middle of the night for food. Their coats had become much softer, and felt silky. The chubby ones lost weight. And, they loved this food. Most of them had taken to it immediately, looking at me as if to say "finally, real food."

I hope you read everything on this site, follow the links to valuable information, learn everything you can and have your own epiphany. I want you to consider raw feeding your cats. It's easy, whether you buy commercially prepared food or make your own. Your cats will benefit from it, now and down the road. I hope you'll look back, as I do, and wonder how you ever thought to feed them any other way.