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Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:29 am
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Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:59 am
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Gabrielle_AnimalLuver Crew
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Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:59 am
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Good job on feeding the chicken hearts! It's great that he loves it, since heart is very high in taurine.
The risk of a cat getting salmonella is extremely small. I don't want to say "none", because that's not true, but it is extremely small.
Cats (and any other carnivore for that matter) have highly acidic stomachs with strong, potent stomach acid. To give you an idea of how acidic it is, its pH is about 2 (for comparison, pure water has pH of 7 and an acidic fish aquarium is about 6 pH or slightly higher). This high pH kills the grand majority of bacteria, similar to how putting alcohol-based hand sanitizer kills most bacteria on your skin. Not only that, cats have short digestive tracts and digest their food quickly. Their intestines are about half the length of a human's, and naturally their metabolisms are much quicker too. This makes it very difficult for bacteria to have any time to reproduce to a level capable of infection.
Salmonella is present in small quantities practically everywhere, which is something a lot of people do not realize. It isn't just one microbe of salmonella that happens to get through that causes disease, it's when they get the chance to multiply and overtake the immune system. If your cat has ever caught any rodent, bird, or similar creature, it's consumed some salmonella. If it's ever stepped outside on the grass or soil, it's exposed to salmonella. If you ever see a wild bird dropping, it too has salmonella.
In order to raw feed, it's really important that the food is actually raw. Cooking food destroys many of the vitamins that the cats need in order to get balanced nutrition from eating their raw meat, such as taurine. You've probably heard of the famous experiment when a man fed one group of cats raw meat and the other group of cats cooked meat. He allowed them to breed and continued the diet across generations. The group of cats fed cooked meat significantly declined in health, and also developed issues to a deficiency in taurine. Raw fed cats thrived. That's why commercial wet/dry foods need to be fortified with so many vitamins and minerals; even if it's a good brand and contains a lot of real meat, because it has to be cooked, processed, and preserved, it loses so much that it has to be fortified.
If you're concerned, you can parboil the meat. Parboiling is when you lightly cook the outside of the meat by briefly boiling it in water. If any microbes are to contaminate the meat, it's going to be on the outside surface.
I recommend reading catinfo.org, it's an excellent site and contains a good raw recipe on it too.
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Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 10:07 am
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Gabrielle_AnimalLuver Crew
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Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 10:10 am
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