The cat food experiment, Part 2- or, uh oh

So the last you heard of me and my cat food experimenting, I had to give all the freeze dried food to Emmett and was tackling my bag of raw food patties.

The Nature’s Variety brand makes feeding raw food very convenient, if you’re not into preparing all that stuff yourself. It appealed to me for several reasons:

1. You can buy it in little 1 ounce medallions, or larger 3 ounce patties.
2. The meat is ground up, so you don’t have big bone chunks floating around in the stuff.
3. They actually went the distance to do an AAFCO feeding trial.
4. There are multiple flavors, so could potentially be an appropriate choice for a pet with food allergies.

I’m not saying you should or should not try a raw food diet- there’s plenty of information floating around on the net both for and against it, which you should read and digest (ha ha) if you’re thinking about going this route. But if you are, trying a pre-made brand like this is a great way to give it a go before committing to it for the long haul.

These little 1 ounce medallions make it really easy to measure small amounts for cats.

It was right about this time that I found my husband’s fish eye lens, which I assume is the secret weapon of many a food blogger. It really makes these little nuggets look assertive.

You can take a few frozen nuggets at a time and thaw them in the refrigerator overnight (I made sure to use a dedicated container that wasn’t used for human food.) I microwaved them for a short bit in a disposable bowl to take the chill off, put it in an area the human kids can’t access, and turned the cats loose.

Apollo lacks patience. It’s a family trait. (Yes, they were still frozen at this point.)

Hungry kitteh is not amused to be fed frozen food patties in order to get a decent photo op for the blog while I had the fish eye lens attached. It’s so hard to get a good photo of a monochromatic cat.

Once it was thawed, they liked it. They liked it plenty. I was using the chicken formula, whose smell was much less nauseating to me than the venison one, and for a few days all was well.

Then- *sigh* Then, Apollo’s hair started falling out. This is what happens when he starts getting his food allergies. I had hoped his problem was a grain source, which would be solved by feeding a grain free food, but this was not to be the case. Apparently he has a protein sensitivity, to either chicken or fish, since those are the protein sources in the foods he has been eating the last month.

So, the cat food experiment is temporarily halted while I get his allergies under control, and then I will hopefully be able to pick back up with the raw food venison variety, which is actually the exact food I used to get his food allergies under control last time.