Kind of a Hippie Move...

So, over here at the Gonzo residence, we, the missus and I, have taken it upon ourselves to try and reduce the amount of shitty additives and animal byproduct that our cat eats, and have started making his wet food.

Dry food for cats does contain the proper amounts of raw protein matter that cats need to survive, but that protein matter comes from soy and other vegetable products, and is hard for kitty systems to process. Apparently it's all in the turds: a cat with the kind of diet they'd get out in the wilderness consisting of a regular stream of raw meats would produce scat in far less volume than one fed a diet of only dry kibble.

Now, we're not there yet, not grinding raw rabbit and chicken into a paste, but some people do. No, we've done our research to find what kind of vitamins, vegetables (if any), and fat levels are necessary for an optimal wet food for our cat.

I started saving rendered bacon, chicken, and beef fat to use as a binder. Cats need calcium, so you can chop up eggshells, which our cat doesn't like, so we mostly go with a crushed calcium pill. We also crush up Vitamin B tablets and use a gelcap of tuarine, which cats need for their heart. Sometimes I'll boil the hell out of broccoli and carrots, but no onion. That's specific. All those chicken carcasses I use for stocks I'll pick dry before they get tossed, giving me a nice little pile of chicken meat. That, mixed with the organ meat, and then all chopped up, make the basis for the food.

Here's the chicken getting pulled, the bottle of tuarine gelcaps, and some stock, where I'll use just the fat skimming from the top (the stock I'm pretty sure I used for quinoa).

Here's the mortar and pestle where I crush up the calcium and Vitamin B, as well as the occasional dried fish in the black rectangular container. We got a large bag of dried fish at an Asian grocer in Austin; they use it for flavoring soup while we use it for cat treats. Sometimes I add it to the powdered what-not. The final resting spot for everything is the old feta cheese container, seen here with untreated chicken.

Here's a look at one example of the finished food on the left and the un-worked chicken on the right.

One day at work many months ago a gentleman came in and gave us all fresh fish he's just caught. I brouhgt it home, took the filets off, cooked them up good, and saved the fish carcass in the freezer, to be used for fumee (a kind of light fish stock) later. That later finally came. Before I threw out the remains from the stock pot, I gathered a pile of the fishy-ness, and, using a special Japanese cleaver, chopped the hell out of everything, bones included. By the end, the mash smelled like regular fish cat food. But I wasn't done. I added the Vitamin B and tuarine, no calcium because of the bones, and a little rendered bacon fat. Here's a picture of the stuff, about to be put into the container. It smells kinda like bacon and fish. The cat loves the shit out of it.

Speaking of which: his weight is where it should be and he's as frisky and spazzy as anyone could ever wish their cat to be.