7 months - January 14, 2009

I can not believe that we have now been raw feeding for 7 months. Where has the time gone and having not updated the raw fed cats diary since Month 5, I'm not even sure where to begin? I guess I should start with our first raw fed kittens.

As mentioned in the previous entry, in November we saw the birth of our first raw fed kittens. This litter is now 7 1/2 weeks of age at the time of writing this entry and they are just absolutely thriving. They are of a very good size, with more energy that I have seen in any previous kittens and their coats absolutely shine.

Weaning our kittens onto a raw fed diet was something that I had been both excited and anxious about. Due to their fantastic weight gains, I was in no hurry to wean them as they were doing so incredibly well on mum's milk and it wasn't really until about Week 5 that the babies were showing interest in the raw chunks of meat and the raw Prize Choice mince. Zebedee of course was an exception as he has loved his raw food from the moment he first tried it. To be honest, I didn't really have to put much effort into weaning the babies because when they were ready, they just helped themselves to the food. At the 7 week stage, all 5 were eating the raw mince, raw turkey and chicken thighs, raw beef steak, cooked white fish, tinned salmon, raw egg yolks, quail, and the only thing they are not keen on (like our adults, is the darn offal) and I couldn't be more pleased with their progress.

December 26th saw the birth of our 2nd raw fed litter and this was a very interesting litter in comparison to the first. The queen for this litter was just 4 days off being 5 years old when she gave birth. Just like Toussaint, she was on a raw fed diet prior to, and throughout her pregnancy. She went on to successfully deliver 7 kittens within a 2 hour time frame. Of course, with 7 kittens, the birth weights were much smaller than that of Toussaint's babies, and some were very low i.e. 65 grams; 71 grams; 73 grams; and I truly did think that we would lose some of these babies. Actually, I was a little disappointed because even with a litter of 7, because of the raw feeding I was expecting much higher birth weights.

I was stunned to see that on Day 1, 5 out of the 7 babies had all made weight gains. This has never happened previously in any of our litters when the mum's were on commercial foods . Obviously, I started syringe feeding 2 hourly from Day 1 as 2 of the babies had lost weight and I was doing 2 hourly feeding until Day 8 when I then switched to 4 hourly feeding as the babies were all doing so very well.

At the time of writing this entry, our babies are 18 days old and they all continue to thrive and seem to be doing incredibly well, and are making very acceptable gains for a litter of 7 babies. We have never, ever, had a litter this large and not lost babies (indeed we have lost babies from large litters at around Day 2 or 3) and I believe with 100% certainty that this is down to a combination of the natural diet and the Feline Combination Nosodes. Of course, it is still very early days and the babies are so very young but so far we are very pleased with their progress.

As for our own cat family and the raw feeding, well it still seems to be going quite well. During the Christmas period, I will admit to not following our set menu particularly well and was feeding far more raw Prize Choice mince than I should have been. This didn't actually have any effect on the cats apart from the fact that some of them then preferred the mince to actual chunks of meat so I did make a determined effort to get back on track with the set menu and we are now back to normal. One thing I have not been doing which I should be is weighing out the food for our own adult. With the kittens and lactating mummies, the food is not weighed because the 2-3% daily allowance does not apply to kittens or mum's who are feeding. This only applies to our adults and I am definitely overfeeding which is very evident by the amount of meat/bones etc. that is left over after each meal.

To sum up, I guess at the moment it all seems to be going okay. Seven months into the raw feeding and we have not seen any adverse reactions at all yet, not in our adult cats, nor in the kittens although with the kittens it is still very early days.