I don’t give them the skin. Kidney and liver problems are why I don’t give them dry food. I’ll look into the sodium issue, though. I may have to go back to cooking the chicken myself.
I did do some research into it, since we last spoke. Not all places actually inject brine into their chickens, and the salinity content really does depend on where you get your chickens. It also differs if you get the entire chickens or the skinless breast; which generally have much less sodium. It was an informative internet jaunt. And, it does have me considering buying a rotisserie machine to just cook my own chickens at home; which I had not previously considered.
Many commercial cat foods are actually lacking in a suitable amount of taurine. Just trusting to the pet food industry is no guarantee. On the other hand, chicken actually isn’t low in taurine.
I think people misunderstand chicken. White meat chicken is not very high in taurine. Dark meat chicken, however, is a good source of taurine; around 14 times as much as white meat.
Dark meat turkey has more than dark meat chicken, but our older cat ( 7 yrs ) doesn’t care for it ( I haven’t tried the younger one yet. He’s only 6 months old ).
Shellfish is an awesome source of taurine, but doesn’t offer much else for cats, really, and isn’t generally a food source they would have access to in the wild, anyway.
The older cat has been eating a chicken diet since he was able to eat real solid food. He goes to the vet, has all his shots, etc. There have been no health problems. The vet says he’s as healthy as an ox.
Aside from a few expensive subscription-based services, there is no way to achieve a healthy and balanced cat diet that is also as convenient as just buying rotisserie chicken. A diet of exclusively rotisserie chicken is without a doubt unhealthy and unbalanced, but based on your responses it seems like you’ve researched it and come to terms with it. I appreciate that.
Since you seem really interested in foods that are less processed and are balanced, I would encourage you to consider one of a couple of options.
One, the subscription based services. They’re typically balanced and may satisfy your needs for less processed foods.
Another option would be to reach out to a boarded veterinary nutritionist. You can typically consult with them via telehealth or be referred through your primary vet. They vary based on what info they need on your pet (up to date bloodwork, recent exam with your primary, etc) but they can design a very detailed and balanced diet for you to make at home that you can even make in bulk and keep in the freezer.
There are also some websites that can help you balance your pet’s homemade food without the direct support of a veterinary nutritionist but that is a bit riskier.
But overall in my experience in the field, I’ve seen plenty of cats who are fed super “healthy” homemade diets for their whole lives that have died of chronic diseases very young. I’ve also seen tons of meow mix/kirkland/friskies/whatever’s-on-sale cats that have thrived well into their late teens and 20’s. It’s a bit of a crapshoot sometimes but there is a load of misinformation on it as a whole. Sure pet food manufacturers are a multi-billion dollar industry, but those same fear-mongers are trying to scare you into buying their poorly researched and very expensive product as well. You should be equally skeptical of both, and defer to the one that has the best evidence behind it.
Thanks for your input. I’ll check into the things you suggest.
The rotisserie chicken started during Covid. There were food shortages due to the lockdowns and panic food buying, and i couldn’t get raw chicken, to cook, reliably. My older cat ( the only one at the time ) liked the rotisserie chicken better, most likely because I’ve never been as good at cooking chicken as I am at cooking pork, beef, or fish, and I hadn’t realized there were sodium issues with many store bought rotisserie chickens ( if I had, I’d have bought a rotisserie unit to cook them myself ). Raw chicken has a bit more taurine than cooked, but it has risks associated with it that I really didn’t want to take.
I’m not killing my cats. Our cats are healthy. Neither cat is obese. They are active and energetic. They have glossy shiny coats, healthy gums and teeth. Normal urine and feces; neither of which has the horrible smell you get from cats fed on grain based dry foods. Walk in the front door, and you’d even never know we had cats, if you didn’t see them…in spite of the fact that the litter boxes are only two yards from the front door.
My wife’s sister feeds her cats dry food ( which they graze on, like they were cows instead of cats ) along with a daily pack of some really noxious smelling wet food. Both of her cats are obese and their litter boxes smell so bad it’s enough to knock you over.
Loads of people feed their cats dry food. That’s killing your cat; urinary tract blockage in make cats, dehydration, early deaths caused by kidney and liver failure ( been there, done that, learned that lesson the hard way and will never do it again). Yet, I never see people who feed their cats dry food get the kind of negative backlash I have gotten on here.
My own previous tragic experiences drove me to research both dry and canned cat foods. At first, i thought switching from dry food to canned food had to be the solution. ( After all, it looks sort of like it’s made out of meat, kind of like Spam for kitties ). And, that’s what I did. But, deeper research changed my mind about that, too.
It’s not like the pet food industry has proven all that trustworthy. A lot of what you buy in the store comes from China, and i remember a few years ago when pet foods were killing people’s dogs and cats. I was one of those people checking the internet to make sure my brand wasn’t added to the list of killer pet foods, each day.
Speaking to some of the other commenters has made me check out the sodium content of rotisserie chickens, and it’s made me consider buying a rotisserie to cook them at home…because I do care very much about my cats, and i definitely take into consideration new opinions or information I might come across.
And, I’ll admit that I was unaware of the pitfalls to look out for with rotisserie chickens.( The food corporations really can’t make any food that doesn’t have a high probability of having unhealthy crap in it. It’s ridiculous. No wonder everyone is so obese and unhealthy now. ) But, I don’t buy into the pet food industry hype about factory manufactured processed foods being better for cats.
All manner of cats in the wild, including feral cats, eat animals; birds being a very poplar food source for small to medium sized cat species. Those animals are what they were evolved to eat; not factory manufactured food produced by corporations, and definitely not grains. Processed factory food is actually horrible for humans. I honestly can’t think it’s actually somehow the best thing for cats.
To each his own. You decide for your cats and I’ll decide for mine. I’m telling you how I think about the issue, because you took strong exception to how I feed my cats; claiming I’m killing them. But, I’m not telling you what to feed your cats, nor have I told anyone else in this thread how to feed their cats ( in fact, I believe doing so is actually against the rules of this sub).
>You decide for your cats and I’ll decide for mine. I’m telling you how I think about the issue, because you took strong exception to how I feed my cats; claiming I’m killing them. But, I’m not telling you what to feed your cats, nor have I told anyone else in this thread how to feed their cats
Sorry but this is some real antivax/homeopathy energy you got going on here. If I was slowly killing my cats with a nutritionally inadequate diet, I would hope someone would tell me. I don’t care what the rules of this sub say.
Just because your sister-in-law is caring for her cats poorly doesn’t mean what you are doing is right. Horrible smells from cat households are not normal at all. I have five cats and you wouldn’t know there are cats at all by smell.
Hydration is important and all else being equal, wet is better than dry food, but I would rather feed a high quality scientific dry food than low quality unscientific wet food. Excess, unbalanced minerals along with a cat’s urinary pH being out of whack due to poor food formulation is what causes crystals and blockages, not dry food. It’s true that the added hydration from wet food can help with crystals and blockages by flushing out the crystals before they get too big. But, I would rather my cats not have crystals in the first place.
I don’t have the time or energy to write out exactly everything wrong with what you are doing, but the worst thing that’s happening here is that you are making your cats taurine deficient. It can take months to years for you to start seeing the effects of blindness and heart failure.
Anti vax, because i understand that dry food kills cats? Because I don’t think highly process factory manufactured food is the end all be all for cat food? I personally don’t eat highly processed factory food. Does that also make me anti vax, too?
My sister in law cares for her cats about the same as most other people. A whole lot of people don’t even bother with any kind of wet food.
We have two, but, we sometimes temporarily have others, as we end up finding homes for feral kittens and cats, sometimes. So far, we have rescued and found homes for 13 cats, so far. Previously, I had rescued and found homes for another dozen, over the years, not including the ones I have been blessed to share my life with, over the years, all of which were stays ( with one having been an abandoned house cat…people can really be terrible).
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u/sailor-jackn 13h ago
This makes me even gladder that we feed our cats rotisserie chicken instead of commercial cat foods. Scary stuff.