Thread: My raw feeding experiment

Originally Posted by Antonia

This Winn Foundation study merely shows that feeding cats on rabbit and rabbit alone is not the best way to keep them healthy.

No, that is not what the study shows. The rabbit-based diet was made from multiple parts of the rabbit and had been designed and assayed to ensure that it was nutritionally sufficient. If you have a truly nutritionally complete food then you most certainly can feed it alone. Many cats are fed an essentially single food diet. One of our female cats gets more than 90% of her nutrition from a single food. The fact that the diet was based solely on rabbit does not invalidate the study. That this raw diet ended up being (apparently) deficient in taurine was a major surprise given the assays. So one thing the study showed is the danger of relying on assays rather than feeding trials to assess nutritional sufficiency, and that people using raw diets must work hard to try to ensure complete nutrition. Remember that these were vet researchers designing the diet, with the assistance of lab testing, and they still got it wrong. The study also found no objective health benefits to the raw diet--with a focus on intestinal health and growth--over a 12 month period. I would also suggest that it clearly demonstrates the limited value of subjective evaluations. The subjective health evaluations suggested that the raw fed cats might be a bit healthier, while in reality their hearts were being destroyed and they were slowly dying. In other words, the subjective health evaluations were extremely misleading.

In searching around the Winn site for the report, I came across this recent grant award that you might find interesting:
Cat Health Grant Awards 2009: Winn Feline Foundation