Crazy cat lady

A while ago, I wrote about the poisoned cat food in the US and my thoughts on making my own species appropriate, raw diet for my cat. Well, I've gone ahead and taken that one last step towards being a crazy cat lady and done it.

I looked up a whole bunch of stuff on the internet (as we all know, if it's on the internet, it must be true!) and found a few sites that seemed to be written by people who know what they're doing. I compared three recipes and found one that was do-able from what I can find in Dublin.

A couple of weekends ago, The Limey and I devoted a couple hours to putting the whole thing together. He got the raw end of the deal (ha!) and had the job of grinding the bones. He's now scarred for life and refuses to do it again. He says I'll have to do it from now on, and if I can't manage with the hand grinder, we'll buy an electric one. (Off topic: the hand grinder is so old-skool cool. It's all '50s steel, heavy and totally makes me feel like I should put on a pinafore and grind up meat to make sausages and hamburgers.)

We put in all the vitamins and supplements and mixed it all together, and the f*cking cat refuses to eat it!

My cat's not a picky eater, and takes to new food quite quickly. Still, I had done the control experiment and gave her a few pieces of plain raw chicken to see if she'd recognize it as food. No problem. Ate around the tinned stuff and picked out all the chicken pieces first, as a matter of fact. One of the websites suggests that the vitamin B is quite smelly, and maybe to put in half the amount at first, until the cat got used to everything. Whoops, should probably have followed that advice.

Anyway, no freakin' feline was going to get the best of me, so the past couple weeks have been spent getting her slowly used to the new food. I started with a bit of it in her old tinned food, then gradually increased the ratio of new to old. Now she's on a whole meal of the new stuff, with just a spoonful of the old stuff for the familiar cat food smell. Next batch I'll put in less vitamin B and hope to get her off the tinned stuff forever.

She handles the new food fine. Once she starts eating, she goes right for it. I think it's the smell at first that may put her off. She hasn't gotten sick or anything, and is frisky as a 10-year old should be. The absolute best part? Her litter box no longer smells noxious. In fact, it's nearly odourless since she started with the chicken stuff. Amazing.