This week I’ve had, yet again, been asked to review a commercially made raw food.  Of course it’s ground.  The manufacturer has some nice pictures of herself and her 4 cats on her website and claims to having been running her own personal trial of this product for 20 gazillion years, so it must all be fabulous.  And she’s studied cats for a long time, not professional, just personally, and because of this combined with her love of felines, then her product must be perfect.  Apparently.

And then , I mean purchasers, can also buy a supplement that contains freeze dried “bovine” (that’s cow for you and me) bone from New Zealand and other such wonderful things, which will make the entire food even more special.

You see, I’m still struggling to understand how someone could apparently study cats for 20+ years and still not work out that the food needs to be whole, not ground.  What did I miss?

Cat, like dogs, have teeth.  Those teeth are supposed to be used.  When you grind food for dogs or cats or ferrets you are providing the food in a way that the animal was not designed to eat.    When you grind the food, you also expose far more of the natural surface area to bacteria, invariably allowing for a much higher bacterial count than would be normal.  And cats are fussy.  We all know cats don’t like food that isn’t fresh.

At the end of the day, I can only conclude this is about money.  You see if that manufacturer provided to you what the cat should eat, let’s say 1 chicken drumstick, and perhaps a chicken heart – all in whole form, you’d be really unlikely to pay the $3 that they would want to charge you.  You’d be saying, um… that’s more like 30 cents thanks.  Yep, it’s not uncommon to see pre-packaged raw food at over 10 times the price you could do it yourself.

I recently reviewed on manufacturer who was selling 5lbs of their product for $100.  Yup, $100, and it was basically ground chicken bones, with a little meat, plus some useless supplements.  But it came in fabulous packaging and no doubt they were thinking that you wouldn’t look beyond having such a trendy looking box (yes cardboard box) in your kitchen.

And once you start looking at the over-packaged, over-processed, over pumped up supplements that these say manufacturers are selling, then you’ll start to reject them too.

So think critically, and think hard.  And don’t let a salesperson tell you that their overly priced product is the bees knees.

And for those of you manufacturers who claim to love cats so much, for goodness sakes start providing cats with real food, and stop hoodwinking people.

Rant over, for now.