Hi all,
I will be giving MattM’s chicken and turkey combo raw recipe a try shortly, and was wondering whether the calcium requirements are strictly provided by either the Mazuri supplement or by the whole chicken thighs? In other words, are the turkey and chicken thighs deboned?
Thank you,
Ezequiel
I should probably explain myself a little more about why I chose to do the supplements the way I did. I got the STX megaforce 3000, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's probably the most you can get for your money without spending more than 200$ (thank you Paige). In my opinion and from my experience, bones are not the easiest things to work with, however they offer a large benefit to your cat as a *digestible* source of calcium, minerals, and aid in cleaning teeth. For this reason I decided to go half meat with bones in it such as chicken thighs or drumsticks, and half with breast meat without bones. I also did this because I initially ordered the supplement for slab meat (with calcium), and Mazuri wouldn't let me exchange it. I have since ordered the whole prey supplement as well.
From their website: Mazuri recommends 9.1 grams of supplement per 1 pound of slab meat. I typically go a little bit over this (9.5 - 10 grams) since a lot of what I have read has supplements and really cat food sources in general underestimate calcium requirements of kittens and cats. This was evident to me when reading through dry weight (DW) values of whole prey organisms (thank you John Popp). If I remember correctly, a ground mouse or rabbit can contain up to 2.0 - 2.5 dw% of calcium. That went my concern about overdosing my cat with too much calcium. Normal cat food is around 0.8%, but the mazuri slab supplement has about 1.4%. Keep in mind DW% vary depending on how much you supplement, and how much slab meat you use. It's a ratio percentage not a set amount.
So basically what I do now is supplement about 9.5-10 grams (with calcium) per pound of slab meat and 9.1 grams (without calcium) per pound of meat with bones I use in the 5 pound mix to be frozen. A typical cat will eat about 6 oz of food. I freeze around 21 oz in 1 bag to last about half the week at a time (3.5 days). When I am getting low I take another bag out of the freezer to thaw out.
Honestly, you probably do not need to add supplement (without calcium) to the meat with bones in it because it's already covered by the chicken hearts, livers, salmon, and of course bones. Also, a lot of people chose to not freeze the supplement because of nutrient loss. I find it very inconvenient to sprinkle the correct amount of supplement into each bag after I unfreeze it. It also might not be distributed throughout the food as well when you sprinkle over the top. I figure I am already giving excess nutrients to my cat that is probably just peeing them out (with exception to fat soluble A D E K), so nutrient loss from freezing won't be a a big factor especially since I'm doing batches every month to two months. Your cats stools will be a good indicator of how your batch went.
Lastly, I wanted to compare the cost of the raw food vs what I was initially feeding my cat which was blue wilderness wet food. If I ordered a large package of blue wilderness wet food online (which is a big discount vs local store front) the price per pound was about 6$. The recipe I used is about $6.20-6.30 from a whole foods 100% organic source. The marginal price difference justified everything I have been doing, and now my fiancee doesn't think I am insane.
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe the only source of organic things you actually need are the livers and maybe eggs. If you didn't go organic for the meats it would significantly decrease the price.
Hope this helps.
