Today, I got all the feeding done in just half an hour!
Juno decided to eat. Hooray! Even Riley ate, which is rare.
Tabs no longer wanted Cindy’s Complete Pate, as expected, so luckily I have a wider selection of canned foods now. I offered Monge and yay, I hit the jackpot! Juno and Riley ate Monge too. So, that’s done.
Gerald had his plate of gizzards and cut chicken, but rejected the canned food I chose. So I quickly gave him Cindy’s canned chicken with broth and he almost finished that. I know he would probably prefer tuna, but fish shouldn’t be their staple (the cat’s ancestor came from the deserts of Persia, so they ate rodents and birds).
As for the Blondies, Kai and Samantha ate some canned food. Indra and Akira weren’t interested and will wait for kibble later.
The Monsters has a Happy Meal served buffet style. They will sapu habis. But you will notice they go for the cooked food first and leave the raw food for last.
So, all that’s left for me to do later is to give Akira and Indra kibble and feed supplements to Ginger, Tabs, Juno and then do Tabs’ subcut and I will be done for the morning. Ginger cannot be given his supplements immediately after food because somehow, that makes him gag and he will vomit all his breakfast out, then he would be hungry and will meow for food again. So, no, I will give it to him after an hour.
A note about giving cooked food or even kibble: It has fibre, so their poop will be bigger and smellier, compared with when they were on 100% raw food where the poop is dry, crumbly, very small and has hardly any smell. In the wild, the wild cats were hunters (predators) but also prey, so when they ate raw, their poop had no smell and it will not leave a trail for their predators. That is how Nature works.
Having said that, previously Bunny was on 100% raw food too, but towards the end he ended up with chronic constipation, which led me to face many, many challenges, from laxatives to enemas and finally, we had to resort to Cisapride (a last-resort drug). I had to keep changing his food too, giving him more fibre and this meant kibble and other cooked food.
So I do remember what a senior vet told me before. She made her own cat food and she always added vegetables to it so that there was fibre. I know that some cat food experts like Dr Lisa Pierson say that cats do not need any vegetables and they are probably right, but we do whatever we think is best for our cats. Cats may have the same general biology but there might be physiological differences in each cat.
Another senior vet (I’m so lucky I know so many senior vets) suggested that I give our cats some greens – just a pinch, he said. Greens are so rich in antioxidants and they do wonders, he told me. He did suggest certain berries (not all). I have spray-dried spirulina for this purpose. At least I know spirulina is safe as I’ve used it before in all my cooked food and another senior vet uses it for her homemade cat food too.
Disclaimer: This is only a sharing. Kindly consult your veterinarian or pet nutritionist for expert advice.