Pet owners have been duped by the billion-dollar pet food, well-intentioned veterinarians, and advertising disguised as educational content. Homemade kitten food is easy and inexpensive to make, and gives your kitten perfect nutrition that he or she will love and thrive on. A good start with quality kitten food is what your kitten needs to grow into a healthy strong cat with a long life.
There is nothing commercial pet food provides that you can’t make in your own kitchen other than a high price markup, depressingly inferior ingredients, disease-causing fillers, and a fancy label.
Here’s an easy, cheap way to get cats the nutrients they need. Like so much in human nutrition, feeding cats is actually very simple once you take out the dogma. See the 2 rules for feeding cats below, and when you follow those rules, you’re on your way to good pet health at a fraction of the price.
Take a look at the bigger picture (how cats eat in the wild) and stop trying to apply human nutrition myths to our pets, your pet will get the food it needs to live a long healthy life.
After feeding raw for 3 months
Hannah got a cat! We got a rescue from the animal shelter earlier this month. Her name is ‘Little Ditty’ (as in about Jack and Diane) and she’s so sweet and a good hunter too! She was from a hoarding situation, and the only health issue she had was her 3rd eyelid on one of her eyes was stuck. The shelter’s vet thought it was from a previous infection, and told us it would be permanent but not an issue. Amazingly after a couple weeks of switching to Raw Cat Food (all meat- recipe here) the eye issue almost gone and sometimes completely gone! Meat heals, ya’all!
Raw food rules for Cats
There are two main rules for feeding cats. When you follow these, you’re working with the cat’s natural nutritional patterns.
- Feed your cat nose-to-tail animals that are smaller than they are (what they could realistically catch in the wild). This includes bones, muscles, and organs – especially the heart.Be careful about giving cats too much liver – they can get vitamin A toxicity from liver. This recipe has a good amount – you want it to replicate what they would get if they were hunting in the wild: Muscle meat and liver/heart/kidney. If you can find small animals (ie chickens rather than beef) that is a more natural diet for a cat!
- If your food is not fresh and raw, supplement with the essential (for cats) amino acid taurine. (source)
After seeing so much success with switching our cat Bob to a raw food diet for kidney disease, friends and family and readers have been asking me about a recipe for kittens and healthy cats.
The only change to the Feline Kidney Care Raw Food recipe is that I used bone-in chicken in place of the beef, as it contains the healthy fats from the skin as well as bone bone that cats need to grow and maintain bone health. Cats with kidney disease need to limit their phospherous, but cats without kidney disease should NOT limit phosphorous and should include bones in the diet.
Is this recipe enough taurine? I wasn’t sure, since taurine in the chicken heart may degrade when it’s frozen, and my chicken hearts come frozen. Since taurine is so essential to cats, I sprinkle powdered taurine, 1 pinch, on each container of his food (2 days’ worth).
Feeding cats vs dogs
Cats are carnivores, dogs are scavengers. If you feed your dog raw already, you may know that it’s a simple process. For cats, there are more delicate needs to take into consideration.
Because this recipe requires thawing multiple kinds of meat, I do meal prep for the cat – I make up 4 bags with the organ meats in it at a time, and then freeze each bag, adding the chicken, water, and egg as I make each batch.
Then I make 1 recipe at a time, and freeze into tablespoon fulls (shown below) to introduce the dietary change to the cat, or in 1/4 cup portions as the cat’s whole diet.
Find the ingredients for homemade kitten food: US Wellness Meats has them most of the time.
Chicken and Salmon-Based Raw Kitten and Cat Food Recipe
This is the cat food recipe that I made for my sister-in-law's kittens. It is based off the raw kidney care cat food that our cat Bob is thriving on, but includes needed bones in place of the extra egg shell.
Ingredients
- 50 grams chicken liver raw
- 50 grams beef kidney raw
- 2 cups water more as needed to puree
- 1 whole raw egg including shell
- 100 grams chicken heart raw
- 700 grams bone-in skin-on chicken wings raw, cats need to be eating some bone in their diet for phosphorous and calcium
- 100 grams raw salmon bones kept in, cats need to be eating some bone.
- 1 teaspoon taurine supplement powdered form. Taurine is essential for cats, and lack of it can lead to cardiac death.
Instructions
-
Pulse to grind all ingredients in a high-powered blender or meat grinder. Leave raw!
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Divide into how much the cat will consume in 2-3 days and refrigerate. Freeze the rest, in small portions for easy serving.
Recipe Notes
This works best to puree all the organ meats (heart, kidney, etc) into the water, and then pulse this mixture into the chicken. If you have a Vitamix this should work just fine (just pulse and allow to rest if it sounds like it's over working). If desired, a meat grinder can also be used. It should be relatively easy to grind up raw (never cooked) chicken wing bones and skin
Divide out into containers and thaw 2-3 days' worth at a time.
Nutrition facts most likely are lower in calcium than are really in the recipe, as they assume the bones and shell are not consumed.
Changing from Commercial to Homemade Cat Food
If your cat has been on commercial cat food for most of its life, his digestive enzymes and digestive system has most likely acclimated to this unnatural diet. Slowly transition over to raw food, 1 teaspoon at a time, over the course of a month.
You will want to follow the advice of your veterinary professional, but for many this will look like:
Day 1-5: Mix 1 teaspoon of raw food (freeze food in 1-teaspoon blobs to make this easy) into whatever your cat normally eats.
Day 5-10: Increase the raw food by double.
Day 10-15: Feed your cat half raw, half what they were eating before.
Day 15 on: You may be able to switch to all raw food as your cat has had time for their digestive system to catch up. If your cat is fussy, continue the slow transition.
Is commercial cat food necessary for cats?
I don’t think that a little dry food here and there is bad for cats, but I would always want to have raw meat, including organ meats, as the main part of their diet.
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Hi Cara, thanks for the cat food recipe. Wondering about the chicken wings with bone-in and skin-on? Do you throw those chicken wings into the high-powered blender and it all gets pulverized? I just have a regular blender. I might try using a food processor.
It does get all pulverized, I haven’t tried a regular blender or food processor, but the small tips with the smaller bones might do better.
Thanks Cara for your quick reply. I’ll try pulverizing small chicken wings with food processor or even blender. Since being on carnivore, I’ve been thinking of getting a better diet for my 2 cats. And your cat food recipe showed up. Thanks again.
Hi Cara
Thanks for sharing this recipe.
A question for you though.
You said that you get your chicken hearts from frozen. I am wondering how that works if u are thawing out and combining the ingredients to then freeze again? From everything I’ve learned, it is extremely dangerous to thaw out and then refreeze an item, especially meat, without cooking. I’m just wondering how you are getting around that?
Hi Bek, I’m not sure that it’s extremely dangerous, but would depend on quite a few factors. If it was thawed on the counter and came to room temperature, that would be different than thawing in the fridge and then re-freezing while cold for sure. https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/safe-food-handling/freezing-and-food-safety/
In a nutrition class I took, I was told as long as you defrost meats in the refrigerator, you CAN refreeze raw meat.
You can thaw out meat, cut it up and refreeze it. Perfectly fine.
Hi! Thanks so much for this recipe! Just to reiterate, my cat is 14 and has early signs of kidney disease, would you say to include the bones or not? Or maybe just bones from chicken and not salmon?
Hi Naomi, I’d use this recipe for a cat with early stage kidney disease: https://healthhomeandhappiness.com/raw-kidney-care-cat-food.html
Your Kidney diet is really counter productive. Cats with Kidney disease need less protein and less phosphate. Additionally, cats that have Kidney disease usually also have acid reflux disease and constipation issues (which can lead to Megacolon). HENCE an ideal diet for cats with CKD is high quality protein like, FISH, and other foods with low phsophate (another waste product that has trouble being filtering out of kidneys of CKD patients). To mitigate constipation, brown rice contains excellent fibre and so does psyllium husk, which is a form of insoluble fibre. If you ever have seen cats, you will note that they eat or chew grass, which is a source of fibre of domesticated cats. Please correct your recipe
This isn’t the kidney diet- the kidney diet doesn’t include bones. Also, they don’t need low protein (that has been disproven) just low phospherous.
It will work if I dehydrate the food?
Hi Clara,
Thank you for the receipe.
You just microwave frozen cat food to feed them?
Any feeding table pl to avoid over feeding or under feeding, age or weight wise?
Our persian is just 13 weeks old now and a very picky eater.
microwave kills nutrients
I have access to quite a bit of canned Pink salmon. It is wild caught with no preservatives. Could you help me create a good healthy meal for my cat. She loves the small snack size salmon that I give her now, but It would be great to have a full healthy recipe.
Thank you Teresa
Hi, i was wondering if any of the meats are interchangeable for example use lamb kidney instead of beef? Thanks in advance
Yes, you can use any kind of kidney but the heart needs to come from a small animal (chicken or smaller)
Can you give this to a 4 week orphan kitty that I raised since 1 day old in the bottle mixed with replacement milk to introduce him to raw food
Hi, I’ve been thinking about changing home made. The prices are outrageous on canned. MY question is , I have an 18 year old cat, who is blind, almost deaf and just a big baby, is there anything special to put in his food ?? I also have a 6 year old, so I need something both will eat!!
Hi Cara! Would you please tell me how you determined the amount of taurine in your recipe? Did you use AAFCO or NRC recommendations? Thanks so much!
My boys LOVE their raw food. I’ve even heard the crunching of them breaking down bones with their tiny kitten teeth; which is perfectly fine. They would need to do this in the wild & do it naturally with their food now.
I have noticed if the chicken wings don’t get pulverized enough, there will be too much of the skin not broken up. I ended up pulling it out, as I was worried it’d be a choking hazard. The dog was happy to have their leftovers 😉
Hi Kelly,
I wouldn’t worry about your cats choking on raw meat; mine catch wild mice outside 6 months of the year and eat every bite from head to toe (leaving of course the stomach).
Hi Cara,
I have 5 li’l orphan kittens aince they were 3 weeks old. I am still bottle feeding them until right now. Then, I came up to this in looking for food could prepare them. Is it really okay to feed 6 weeks old kittens with raw?
Thanks in advance.
Don’t feed any cat raw meat. By the time you buy raw meat, it has a lot of pathogens, especially minced meat which has more surface area. Cook your meat and save your cat from intestinal pathogens.
Hi Cara, thank you so much for this info, I’ve been feeding my dogs raw for awhile now but have been nervous about staring my cats on raw just because of all the information out there. I will be following this recipe now and I’ll let you know how they do! Just curious if you’ve ever replaced salmon with bone-in canned sardines, that’s a little easier for me to source and I already buy for my dogs food. Thank you!
Hi Eryn, I think that would probably be fine. Any bone in raw fish should be fine too! You’re right there is SO much info out there.
Hello,
We make homemade cat food-300 POUNDS chicken EVERY FIVE WEEKS since 2017 using Dr Lisa Pierson’s recipe at catinfo.org
I STRONGLY urge you NOT to use RAW chicken liver due to high bacteria counts in chicken liver. Chicken liver is not same as eating mouse, squirrel, rabbit, or other bird liver.
In our extensive experience using raw or not thoroughly cooked chicken liver purchased at Giant Food Store, Bell & Evans Farm Store, and Berger’s Market (different chicken supplier) we had SEVERE issues with bacteria.
When I say severe, I’m talking 4 cats sickened, 3 died despite veterinary treatment. All four had abnormal liver values. My vet stated, “it was as if they had been poisoned” which they were not.
We had batches of cat food that obviously had unacceptable bacteria counts evidenced by horrible stench, colour change -grey and or green, & expansion of containers.
When we thoroughly cooked the liver these issues were resolved. There is NO DOUBT raw or under cooked chicken liver IS the cause.
Worldwide there have been cases of human food poisoning due to raw or undercooked chicken liver.
Yes cats can handle a higher bacteria count in their food vs humans.
Yes cats eat their prey raw.
However cats DO NOT ROUTINELY EAT & KILL CHICKENS!
We use raw chicken hearts for Vitamin A & Taurine. We supplement Taurine. And I THOROUGHLY cook chicken liver, usually 4 hours on low setting in covered pot. When my daughter failed to cook thoroughly we ended up dumping over 100lbs of cat food. The STENCH was unbearable.
We sanitise our containers, surfaces, etc. There is no doubt the bacteria are coming from the chicken liver because when it’s thoroughly cooked, no issues. No smell, no blown lids, no discolouration, no cats vomiting food, & most important of all, NO SICK OR DEAD CATS.
It’s not worth the risk.
I knew it that a raw diet had problems and I believe some of the dog food raw diet does also so I’m cooking my food and dehydrating it then if I have to keep it in the freezer I will is that a good idea my cooking will be more like steam so I don’t loose to many nutrients and you know how many wild animals get diseases from raw foods they catch and eat due to human uncontrolled factor’s. I don’t but I think it’s pretty high and wild animals don’t have anyone to cook their food and make it safer lol 😆
Well you obviously didn’t keep it properly if your cats got sick and died from it. And yes they WERE poisoned, by food poisoning. It’s common sense that IF you are going to feed raw then properly prepping and storing it IS essential for the health of the animal. If it’s turning green and smells then it wasn’t stored properly I.e. left in the fridge to long or just left OUT to long and rising temperatures allowing bacteria to quickly multiply and making it unsafe for consumption. She is recommending to freeze it after preparing so it keeps longer and is safe for your animals.
I use to do it in the blender, but never raw. Now I cut raw fish and chicken in half inch pieces, and keep refrigerated. I smell it for freshness. What would you give them, to chew on? One of my cats chewing electric cables. I spray it with bitter apple spray, but he probably needs something. It is indoor animal. Thanks
Hello, I have found your recipe for your raw cat and kitten recipe. I have made it and my two kittens have no problems eating it, but I couldn’t buy salmon with bone in it, so I brought a salmon head in stead, it all grounded up ok, do you think this would be a problem using the head of the salmon.
cheers from Australia.
I think that’s great!
thank you, they seem too love it too.
Hi Sherry, I have a 17 y/o cat 🐈 that is in kidney failure for 15 months. My vet has me doing IV fluids under the skin daily to help keep the toxins flushed out. She acts like her normal self unless I miss several days of fluids (I have severe chronic illnesses) and then she gets nausea/vomiting and I have to give her Cerenia (from the vet for nausea/vomiting). The vet assures me that she is not in any pain or I wouldn’t be doing this. Perhaps it would be helpful to do this with your cat 🐈 that has the crystals but may not need the fluids daily. I would discuss this therapy with your vet and second opinion if your vet if they don’t agree. I too, agree with Christine, I would not feed my cats raw meats. Even though cats will eat their kill, it’s FRESH and meats that we purchase have had time to sit and grow bacteria. But they are MEANT to be cooked which kills the bacteria. I purchase a powdered vitamin supplement from my vet and add small amounts of it to my cats wet foods, to much of it and they won’t eat it. Prayers for your furbaby with the crystals. Oh, too, you can add blenderized peas and carrots 🥕 to your kitties wet foods (several canned foods contain them).
Hi, can this be fed to 4 weeks old kitten?
Hello Clare, our daughter’s cat is 10. He has suffered for a long time with crystals. Her main line vet put him on a diet for this, dry and wet. But Ivan going down hill fast. Throwing up and constipated for at least a year.
We love Ivan. My heart is breaking for him. Can a raw diet save him?
Sherry, if your cat has struvite stones they can usually be dissolved. If they are calcium oxolate stones, they cannot be dissolved and have to be surgically removed.
The key is to acidifying the urine to make it unfavorable to the creation of more crystals. You want their urine to be as dilute as possible and since cats are finicky eaters it may be difficult but you may want to try multiple water bowls.
Sherry, I have a 17 y/o cat 🐈 that has been in kidney failure for 15 months. My vet has me giving her IV fluids under the skin daily to help keep the toxins flushed out. She acts like her normal self unless she misses a few days of fluids, then she gets nausea/vomiting (I have several chronic illnesses so sometimes I can’t even get out of bed) I use a prescription called Cerenia from the vet, for nausea/vomiting. The vet assures me that she is not in any pain. Perhaps this therapy will help your furbaby with the crystals but not daily since it is not kidney failure. I would discuss this with your vet.
Have the crystals removed and do only wet food! i had a cat with stones, had them removed and he lived another 10 years
Once fully tranWould you tell us how much of this diet should be served to our cats daily, i.e., calories per kilogram/pound?
The first sentence should read, ‘Once fully transitioned, would you…”
Sorry about that!
Hi, just wondering about the water, I never seem to use that much, is that OK.
So other than taurine,should we not ad more supliments?like A,B,etc?
Would you please answer some of the above questions? I’d really appreciate that because I’d like to know also
I constantly see in the vet shows especially from Dr pol. And Dr Jeff that while cats love fisk they make the point they are not fisherman. And as such eating fish is known to lead to problems in many cats and should be avoided to avoid urinary and kidney problems. Would it not be better to just do straight chicken?
How do we replace or add fish to this recipe?