There's No Kibble Served at the Big Cat Rescue

What began as an intervention into fur farm auctions in 1992 has grown into the Big Cat Rescue, an accredited sanctuary home to more than 100 lions, tigers, leopards, bobcats, servals, caracals, lynx and many other species of wild cats and wild cat hybrids. Feeding time is the best part of their day and what we feed is a critical factor in maintaining their health and keeping our vet costs low. The sanctuary started in 1992, and everything we know now about caring for big cats was learned through trial and error.

 

In the beginning, we fed chicken leg quarters, chicken necks, chicken gizzards and chunks of red meat. We quickly learned the necessity of adding vitamins, minerals and calcium, as the diet was insufficient for maintaining healthy teeth and bones. With cats that ranged in size from the three pound sand cat to the 750 pound tiger, it was a feat of mathematical genius to properly work out the correct ratios for each cat species and then account for the difference in the individual's ages, health and energy expenditure needs. We wanted something more balanced, and a number of products claimed to be, so we tried them.

 

We tried Zoopreme,® a canned diet, but the cats hated it and we noticed that when we rescued cats that had been fed Zoopreme,® they always looked thin, bare-coated and listless. Back in the 1990s, Purina™ came out with Mazuri Zoo Diet,® a dry kibble that appeared to be the perfect blend, but the cats wouldn't eat it. We even ground it with raw meat to make it more palatable, but could never get the cats to accept more than a 50/50 blend. Some wouldn't even tolerate that. I can't remember all of the products that came and went and mostly were thrown away because the cats wouldn't touch them. So, when Dr. Marty Dinnes from Natural Balance asked us to try his Zoo Carnivore Diet, we were less than thrilled at the prospect.

 

We gave it a try and much to our amazement, "Mikey liked it!" Thinking it was a fluke, we were pretty sure that on day two the cats would turn up their noses. The Carnivore Formula was developed, researched and tested by leading zoo animal keepers, nutritionists and veterinarians. It is a fresh-frozen beef diet made from high quality beef processed in a state inspected plant under stringent sanitary conditions. Natural Balance® Zoo Carnivore Diet contains a zoo animal vitamin/mineral premix which includes vitamin E, Niacin, vitamin A and taurine, a particularly important nutrient to felidae. The diet is nutritionally complete and needs no additional supplementation. It meets all dietary requirements for felids and does not contain meat by-products or grains such as corn, wheat, rice or barley. It was just too healthy for them for them to continue liking it, we thought.

 

Days turned into weeks and the cats were eating it…no, the cats were devouring it. They loved it.

 

That was back in 2005, so the diet has been proven through the test of time. The cats still like it and within just months we could see visible improvements in their coats, the shine in their eyes, and the fact that most of our cats live into their late teens and early twenties when most big cats die around the age of 10 to 12. We also noticed that our vet bills began decreasing by a staggering $20,000 per year.

 

Despite the quality of the food, it was limited in that it is a ground diet. Cats like the experience of crunching their prey, and the scraping of the bones they eat is what helps keep their teeth clean. We had begun to feed whole prey to some of our cats in 2000 with the arrival of sand cats who really liked day-old chicks. We found that if cats were sick and needed to get pills, the most effective way to trick them into eating their medication was to stick the pill in a chick. The chicks were a high source of calories for growing, orphaned bobcats that we return to the wild when grown, and to other cats who weren't feeling well enough to eat during an illness.

 

We feed 500 pounds of raw meat a day to our big cats, and that is expensive enough with the prepared diet running somewhere around $1.50 per pound, plus shipping, from California. Feeding whole prey is far more expensive, with a rabbit costing around $9.00 to feed just one small to mid-size exotic cat. We offer whole prey and bones one night per week to the big cats for a variety of reasons:

The bigger cats wouldn't be happy with just one rabbit for the night, so they get ribs with meat on the bone to keep them occupied until the next night when they get a full feeding of the Carnivore Diet.

 

Two reasons that we do not feed a whole prey only diet are the expense and the fact that it is hard to find much other than chicks, rats, mice and rabbits. A cat's diet in the wild would be more varied than that, so we would risk not meeting their nutritional needs. The larger cats would eat hoofstock in the wild, but it is not safe to offer road kill, or downer cattle that are dying from who-knows-what. Also, cutting up whole cows requires a chainsaw and is pretty messy and unsanitary.

 

While we are on the subject of whole prey; the only time we feed the mice, rats or rabbits live is when we are preparing native bobcats for release back into the wild. Most of the cats we rescue are non-native species and have been captive bred for use as pets, props or worse. They can never go free because they have been imprinted by humans and/or are non-native to Florida. In the cases where bobcats have been hit by cars or orphaned, we are able to raise them away from humans, and when they are healed or grown we return them to the wild. These cats must be able to find and kill prey animals, and we have an elaborate system for enabling that training. In essence, live prey is introduced into a subway system that exits into the rehab cage and the bobcat must always be on the alert for when a mouse or rat might show up.

 

Big Cat Rescue depends entirely upon volunteers for feeding and cleaning our cats' enclosures, and most of us are bunny huggers who just couldn't bear to watch what a captive cat would do with live prey. That is the main reason for only offering it dead. We can't even kill the animals ourselves, and thus buy them from suppliers to the snake industry that raise and kill them humanely, and send them to us frozen.

 

Before discovering Natural Balance® Zoo Carnivore Diet, we knew that, aside from old age, the most common cause of death in our cats was from cancer. The beef and chicken we had been feeding were raised for human consumption. Between the hormones, antibiotics and preservatives that went into making that a profitable industry, it had become the kiss of death for humans as well as animals. According to our vet, the cats just have shorter life spans, so we see the results of ingesting all of these toxins in a shortened time frame.