Here Kitty Kitty... part trois

Well step 3 has commenced on the kitty raw diet adventure. :-D
I bought a big bird at HyVee a couple of weeks ago. It's called a capon. Not sure what that is, but it was very bird like. I paid 16.81 for it, and it made 1400 grams of kitty food. I portioned it out into 13 days of food. That means I'm paying 1.29 a day to feed Rienne. Still a little high, but manageable. She was begging for scraps as I was preparing the meat, so I gave her a part of a wing to gnaw on. She did attempt to eat parts of the wing off the bone, but was a little put off by the complexity and bone. So, if I ever want to get her to eat prey or raw meaty bones, we'll need to work on that skill set. But, for now, she really enjoys the meat in large chunks, cut off the bone and she eats the organ meat without fuss too. So, we're two hurdles down at least. :-D

Here Kitty Kitty... part duex

Well, the raw diet adventure has begun.
I got Rienne moved to our new house. My other kitty, Demeter, will sadly not be joining us. He has taken a liking to one of my old roommates and would rather stay with him. C'est la vie.

So, to start things out and transition from dry food, Rienne got a couple days of canned kitty food. There was some hesitation on the first meal, she didn't know what to do with it at first, but when I hand fed bits of it to her she figured it out enough to lick the gravy off the portion. :-) She had wet food figured out by the end of the first day though. Seemed to really like it. So, two days of that, and then sadly a day and a half of dry cat food cause I ran out of the cans, and I hadn't cut up the chicken yet. :-P But, this morning, she got her first helping of raw chicken. She had a nibble last night when I was cutting it up, and seemed to really enjoy it. She didn't leave the kitchen the whole time I was cutting up that chicken. This morning... I sensed the same sort of hesitation that she had at the first wet food meal. Like she wasn't quite sure what to do with it. I tried to hand feed her some, but I didn't have the time to sit with her. I think she did nibble a few pieces down while I was in the bath, but it was hard to tell.
Most of the resources I found on this diet recommended leaving a serving out for only 30 minutes. So, when it was time to go to work I scooped up a large part of the portion and put it back in the fridge. I did leave her one chunk, in the hopes that after we left she would take the time to nibble some more. She also had a few nibbles of dry food left from last night. I'm hoping tonight I'll be able to sit with her and maybe cut up some of the bites a little more and hand feed a bit to get her used to the concept of raw food.
I am going to be keeping track of costs and such in order to do this as cheaply as possible, but I don't want to compromise on quality. I think this diet will get much cheaper when I can order in some level of bulk, but I wanted to start small. So, this first chicken was a local organic bird. It was a 4 pound bird at $3 a pound. I got it from the farmers market 3 miles away from my house. After cutting the meat off the bone and cutting up the gibblets I had 6 portions at 110 grams and 1 portion at 80 grams. I kept about half the skin, if Rienne starts to gain weight I'll keep even less skin. So, just to keep things on the same measuring stick, my 7 portions totaled 740 grams which is 1.63 pounds. I'm a little unsure as to how much Rienne will eat daily, but that should be at least 10 days worth of food. If I was buying her 10 days of wet food, at 50 cents a can, that would be 5$. Clearly the 12$ I spent on this 10 days worth is a little expensive. Although, maybe this is more than 10 days worth, I don't know.
On the plus side of the equation, I did steal 6 strips of breast meat for Dave and I to eat and I made a quart of really nice chicken broth with the skin and bones. It would have been nicer with my fresh herbs, but they are still on Dave's porch, they'll be moved tonight. Still, 4 cups of organic chicken broth is at least 4$ and the strips of breast meat would be a couple of bucks worth of meat. That puts me closer to breaking even. :-D
I have a cheaper bird in the freezer from Hyvee, it was only 2.25 a pound. Not sure what kind of bird it is though. It was between the turkeys and gooses in the freezer, it says "All natural, gibblets included Cabon." I have NO idea what a Cabon is. :-D The meat counter guy didn't know either. *shrug* We'll see I guess.
I want to try buying bulk pieces of chicken too. i.e. 10 pound packages of leg quarters or something. Those could be cheaper than whole birds. We'll see.
And of course, if she takes to the diet, I need to see about getting all the supplements to make sure she's getting all her vitamins. But, one thing at a time.

The garden is coming along nicely, I have green tomatoes on the vine, onions about ready to harvest, and a bunch of broccoli ready to harvest. My mustard patch has a BUNCH of seed pods set. I think I might actually get enough to make some mustard. :-D Both gardens have been a little neglected this past week, due to the move. I should remedy that over the next couple of days. :-D In all my free time.

Here kitty kitty..

The past couple of days I've been pondering my new commitment to Riot 4 Austerity. As I go about my daily routines I've been thinking about how they fit into the commitment and what about them (if anything) needs to change in order to reduce my consumption.
An interesting thought occurred to me yesterday, what should my kitty eat to consume less?

I love my companion cat. Her name is Rienne, she's smart, she's affectionate, she's clean and she plays fetch! Currently I feed her Science Diet dry cat food. My vet recommended it. She seems to enjoy it, she eats well and appears healthy, but I've noticed she's a tiny tiny bit overweight. I didn't think much of it because like me, she's been living in confined quarters for the past year. I did some research this morning and now I'm starting to wonder if her diet may be unhealthy for her. I'm a big believer in proper diet.
That begged the question, what's a proper diet for a cat? Cats are obligate carnivores. I am not. Come to think of it, as of this posting I haven't had meat in a few days. So my first step was to figure out what an obligate carnivore needs for diet requirements. Apparently, it means not only do they need meat, grains are mildly poisonous to them because they don't have the enzymes to digest them. The Science Diet dry cat food I've been feeding her has "Chicken By-Product Meal" followed by a whole host of grains. Eek! The lack of meat is made up with a lot of additives and supplements. To make matters worse in my mind, the "food" is stored in warehouses and shipped all over the country, in who knows what temperature, degrading the nutrients even more before it ever gets to me and Rienne. Completely unacceptable.
Frustratingly, a lot of the resources I found online were unsubstantiated claims, often contradictory to other unsubstantiated claims. This made it difficult to find accurate information on how to go about a whole foods diet for Ms. Kitty. Eventually I did find a site up to my standards. Footnotes referencing studies and research papers backing up logical intelligent claims. This page has all their articles including 12 chapters explaining the hows and whys of a raw meat diet. They even have an article on how to can the cat food. :-D I was immediately enamored with the site.
The cost of a whole foods diet works out to the same price as or a little cheaper than a store bought diet. This site works out some of the math so I'll spare you the calculations here. There is a weird formatting error on that last site, so I lost the last sentence of every third paragraph, but the information was still really good.
This site was written by a lay person, not a vet, but I really liked her straightforward way of presenting her findings on switching her cats to a raw food diet. She even has a pictorial of how to make the food. :-D
There are a couple of books I want to check out before embarking on this journey with my cat, including Michelle Bernard's book, "Raising Cats Naturally." And it's definitely going to be something we ease into so it's happy for everyone involved, but I think it'll be healthier in the long run. She's been exposed to meat, all of her obedience training was done with raw meat. So I'm hopeful the transition can be accomplished with a minimum of fuss.
I see a whole, raw food diet being much simpler to keep up in the coming era of limited energy. Instead of her diet being dependent on the giant oil driven transportation network and petroleum based supplements it'll be dependent on local healthy meats just like my diet.

Links from above:
http://www.catnutrition.org/foodmaking.php
http://www.catinfo.org/makingcatfood.htm
http://www.felinefuture.com/nutrition/