An Answer For Alex: Raw Food and Tight Regulation

My story begins when we moved to Amsterdam from South Africa in 1995 and brought our three cats with us. Alex, short for Alexandria, and her brother Orlando had been rescued from the animal shelter in December 1994. Byron had been rescued as an abandoned feral kitten in December 1993. I got their expensive scientific diet from the vet and ensured that was all that they ever ate. By 2005, Byron looked decidedly underweight and Alex was looking like she was eating all his food. Orlando had fur that made him look like a dandelion in a stiff breeze. We had real concerns about Byron and Alex, but we were told that 13 was old for Byron and that the Senior Light Version of the food we had been feeding him was what we actually needed for Alex. We thought that our blindly accepted veterinary advice would resolve Alex's weight. We tried to accept that the inevitable was just around the corner for Byron.

 

It was those Rubenesque proportions of Alex that got me to do a one-eighty degree turn in my approach to cat care. Her ever-expanding frame even after we got the Senior Light Version seemed to get addressed by August 2007. It appeared that the new diet was finally working. She started losing a lot of weight, about one kilogramme (2.2 pounds) in a few weeks. This was 20% of her body weight! That she was not using her litter box, however, was somewhat of a concern. Before she had made it to the vet I had guessed diabetes.

 

I found an online forum for diabetic cat care, diabeticcatcare.com. The first advice I received was to ditch the kibble, including the latest purchase, specially formulated dry kibble pellets for diabetics. I was advised to home test Alex's glucose before injecting the PZI or Lantus insulin, with a sliding scale to be injected pending the glucose levels. So I bought a human blood glucose meter and learned to home test.

 

I was quite fortunate in that obtaining blood the painful way was only a factor with the control tests I did with Orlando and Byron. They proved to me what a cat's blood glucose should really be. My vet had said 10 mmol/L (180 mg/dl) was a good target. Byron was 2,9mmol/L (53 mg/dl) and Orlando was 3,3mmol/L (59 mg/dl). According to my vet, those were hypoglycaemic levels. With the Tight Regulation Protocol, I was told to aim for nadirs of about 4-6 mmol/L (my metric interpretation of 80-100 mg/dl). Doing this was a breeze. I am sure that I lucked out, as Alex was very calm with me. She never scratched me once. In fact her worst crime was to shake her head just as the spot of blood appeared on her ear. It really is amazing how much blood can be sprayed over a designer shirt from just a pin head of blood on the ear. Tip: wear old clothes when starting out.

 

In time, I fired my vet because I could not reconcile what he was saying with what I was learning elsewhere. Furthermore, after my own research, I rejected his advice to feed dry kibble pellets. Never again! You may wonder why I was so head-strong. After all, the vet had studied the medical treatment of animals, something I had never done. The tipping point came when I also rejected his prediction that we had one to two years left with Alex, that she would slowly deteriorate and I would end up putting her to sleep because it was impossible to regulate a cat. I rejected this because there was online advice that included vets whose experiences presented a real alternative, and with the prospect of happier endings. Besides, the specially formulated commercial diet could not give better odds than that.

 

I really started questioning everything I knew about cats and considered that perhaps consulting an holistic vet would be less frustrating. I fell in love with her for a few reasons. She did not promote any expensive brands in her practice — by now I was fully hostile to them — and she was thrilled I was already home testing. She was prepared to get me the type of insulin I wanted; it was not available in Holland and we got it flown in from England. Then she suggested I consider switching to a raw diet.

 

With the right insulin and a grain-free tinned food diet, Alex was tightly regulated within two days and achieved remission within six weeks. The only question was the food. The good quality tinned food cost €2 ($2.40) for a 200g (6 2/3 oz) tin and the cats were getting bored with it. I was sick and tied of keeping a magnifying glass with me when I went shopping so I could read the ingredients list of the other tinned foods I could consider. The carbohydrate levels were never listed and I had to "guestimate" from the guaranteed levels what they might be. Mental arithmetic is not my strong point and I am not in the habit of taking a laptop with the Excel formula with me when shopping. Plus, ingredients like animal by-products and plant by-products had me wondering about the quality that I was paying for. Even though the melamine scares did not affect me directly, I was determined to keep it that way. So I took my new vet's advice and started the research to feed a raw diet to my cats.

 

I learned that there was a range of raw food suppliers in the Netherlands and a great raw food shop zoo-natuurlijk.com within a five minute cycle from my home. It is at this point that I must highlight that this is Amsterdam. We cycle. Everywhere. With everything. Including a very unhappy cat in a travel basket. The lack of a free hand makes this a problem for holding an umbrella when it rains. Which is often. So yes, it was often that I arrived at my vet dripping wet because my raincoat had been draped over the basket.

 

Now we had our priorities straight. My new vet was not only an advocate of raw feeding, but also had written a book in Dutch called Voer voor Carnivoren (Food for Carnivores). I had a copy of Your Cat by Elizabeth Hodgkins and was a member of a Dutch raw feeding forum, barfplaats.nl. And the advice that I was getting from some people on the diabeticcatcare.com forum was to give raw feeding a chance.

 

However, none of the pre-made raw products we tried appealed to the cats, even when I mixed them with tinned food. So I tried small cubes of meat. I sliced a few pieces of raw chicken fillet and presented it to them. I had jokingly presented it on a silver platter and yet they still rejected it. I refused to give up my experiment, so the next time I tried a few slices of organic