Have "jumped the shark" lost my last "Orange Brain-Cell" took a giant swan dive off the plank of reality.
It was Cat Food.

Noticed my hairballs weren't eating their canned food which gets expensive and equally pisses me off. So I made the mistake of googling to see if anyone else was having issues or maybe pet food companies had reformulated their "slop in a can"? 

Well...that got ugly.
And political, and virtue signaling, and shocking. Turns out by-products now include beaks & feathers plus all manner of other nastiness pet food companies can toss into a vat & market it as healthy. The homemade cat recipes were equally dismaying. 27 step recipe for the cat's just isn't happening. 

Here's where insanity comes in.
Long story short my elderly severely previously abused feral cat is now getting ground elk & venison and acting like a adolescent nut-job. Playing with toys, letting me sneak a few pets an giving the younger ball of fluff a real run for his money. Did the math an it isn't much different than canned food except feral kitty cleans his plate to a dishwasher-esque shine. 

Now everyone who hunts is going to go "yeah DUH!!!" but I don't hunt an finding a specialty Butcher was a PITA. Am pretty sure stuff like this is why we can't have nice things but seeing the change in this cat has been amazing! He is never going to like humans, he's never going to be a lap cat, if he's ever purred only the other cat has ever heard it. But he's happy now. That's enough.

My cat loves the Blue Wilderness meaty morsels, and the Tiki Cat morsels/shredded cans. 
He gets corn free kibbles and a bit of wet food.

This is gonna sound weird, but....go to Wal Mart.

They have 10 lb bags of chicken leg quarters for about $8.50. No hormones, no steroids. I buy 2 bags at a time. That 20lbs of chicken for less than $20.

Boil a couple and save the broth. Strip the chicken off the bone and feed them some of the broth with it. Keep doing that till you use all the chicken. My cats love that stuff. Cats will also eat leftovers from something like a roast, potatoes and carrots. They will even eat the carrots too. Just be sure to give them the broth also, because that where a lot of the fats are. Any meat in your freezer that's got freezer burn, give it to them. I ALWAYS boil it. It cooks the meat and gives them a nutritious broth to go with it.

I know I'm saying "broth" a lot, but they love that stuff more than milk. 

I have 16 cats by the way, 14 outside and 2 inside and if you come out with a pan of leftovers, Stand Back ! They also get dry food, so 20 lbs of meat goes a long way.

Thrilled for you!!
 
Tried them, cats took several bites an had to throw it out the next morning. The amount an cost of every kind of wet food I've had to toss is shocking. Even to me!! Am sure my trash guys are VERY happy things have changed. It was awful. 

It'd be easy to think feral kitty was just being picky, but I don' think so. 
Just like human food is on a race to he bottom ingredient wise, animal food is a even lower priority quality wise. 

btw I'm never going to be not shocked I now shop at a butcher's for a cat.
unfathomable!!! Previously I thought getting him beer battered fish was lunacy! I don' even get take out for myself!!!

Cat's do not make taurine so they need some taurine supplementation in food unless it is not cooked too much.  Taurine irreversibly binds to proteins if it is heated over one hundred sixty five degrees, and at a hundred eighty degrees it is pretty much inactivated.  Cats need food for the same reasons humans do, for four metabolic processes.  Sulfite oxydase being the most predominant one that is part of this.  Sulfite oxidase is needed both to make taurine in humans and to utilize taurine in humans.  It is only needed to utilize taurine in cats though, cause they lack the enzyme to produce taurine...so they must consume it.

So in cat food they add taurine, it is all heated to a temperature that destroys taurine's bio-effectiveness.

With taurine you also need sulfite oxidase, which requires the MOCO enzymes which are Molybdenum co-enzymes with about five major enzymes produced off of it.  Nitrogen dehydrogenase is also pertinent to cats, to metabolize some foods.  Now rice has molybdenum in it, so do oats and wheat... that is one reason cats eat parts of grass outside, they like the rye grass tops with the seeds in the pods so they get some coenzyemes to use the taurine in the mouse or bird or chippy, or squirrel, or partidge babies they just ate.  But they add taurine to cat food but often removed the part of the cat food now that has the molybdenum in it to guel those crutial enzymes...adding green stuff that also needs the moco enzymes to process.

Cats don't like science, they like food.

We had two cats that just died in the last few years, no more cats for us.  The food is compromised.  and the wife doesn't want to start doing what I was doing to fix the problem, she can't comprehend how I kept the cats pretty healthy even though they had some major health issues.

I formulated a special set of supplements to just make up for what was wrong with the cat foods, and so I could feed some regullar table foods to the cat without them getting sick.  Raw meat, no problem, the taurine is bio-active, if you cook meat, a tiny sprinkle of the taurine from a pill will work.  But molybdenum is also needed, or maybe some of that rye cat grass they love might work...but a single sodium molybdate pill will last for two weeks if sprinkled in milk or in some wet cat food and mixed in.  It will help them utilize the taurine in the food, to make sulfite oxidase and the other MOCO enzyme needed enzymes.  The MOCO enzymes only directly effect five enzyme creations, but those enzymes are used to make over a hundred secondary enzymes by the body.

The Molybdenum added to our cats food, along with some unessential minerals stopped our cats seizures almost immediately.  I have to take both taurine and Molybdenum, because the wife likes her meat brown, so I cannot have it pink because she grabs the leanest parts and gives me the fatty parts of the steaks or meat.  So everything is over cooked, no thermometer needed, nothing is pink at all or she complains. 

I still have the recipe for the mixture I made for the cats.  I also make it for my Ex's cat, and my daughter gets some from me when her cats start getting certain problems.  I take the taurine and molybdenum for my epilepsy, along with a few other cheap supplements to help control it, that allows me to not have to eat all the anti-epileptic foods I used to eat to control it.  So two pills, mixed special combinations, sprinkled on their food lasted two cats about four days, then they did not puke so much and were way more energetic.  we had four cats in the house, all were getting this, but the other female outside cat died a year before the last two, she was twenty one.  If the cat with seizures had not self treated her seizures with eating so much plastic, she might have lived longer than eighteen years, but that plastic she ate messed her up before I started giving her the taurine with molybdenum, and the little bit of B complex with types of B that were bioavailable to cats...one strange thing, I share some genetics with cats...probably the paternal inuit genetics.  So I need special B comlex vitamins too...mostly kinds found in meats, except for the folate which is found in certain plants and seeds.  But the level of that folate would be high in animals that eat those plants and seeds too. and is present in liver....which the wife also does not eat, but I love.  Did you know that cats clean the mouse out first most times, they go for the liber and heart...sort of like the Native American guys did when they got a deer centuries ago...raw liver

Ok, enough about that, if you want to know what I put into the special supplements I designed for cats, I can go get my recipe book and look it up.  It costs about three cents a day for a cat, because I use the more expensive Jarrow B-Rite brand.  The rest of the combination is cheaper,   But remember, if a cat is feeling good, it gets into more trouble, it is constantly around and blind ones seem to get themselves stuck in high places and can't get down without help.  The big thing about supplements is that too much is not good either, I designed them to be just sprinkled in, testing how much the cat does best at has to be done at home.

Now if you feed them all meats that are cooked, you need taurine, if you feed them raw meats, less or none is needed.  If the cats are outside cats, in the summer they know what grasses to eat for the molybdenum, but not much grass when everything is snowed over....so Adjusting things to match your environment is needed.

One of the needs of sulfite oxydase is processing cysteine.......that is what is in the feathers you mentioned.  N-acetyl cysteine is close to taurine in molecular structure.  And a form of cysteine is part of taurine's chemistry too if I remember right.  N-Acetyl Cysteine is more heat stable than taurine's 165 degrees, NAC is about two hundred ten degrees that it starts falling apart.  If you boil a chicken, adding cabbage, some onions, celery, and carrots in it lowers the boiling point to about a hundred five to ten degrees.  Some is lost, but it still contains plenty.  A cup of my homemade soup probably contains about equivalent to three of my NAC pills.  Four ounces of medium rare steak contains about as much taurine as five of my taurine pills, remember, over half of that medium rare steak is actually never heated above one hundred sixty five degrees....remember, they say that meat should be cooked to an internal temp of a hundred sixty degrees to be done...analyze why they say a hundred sixty degrees...taurine is still bio-active on part of that meat. They tell us things but do not tell us the whole story, taurine can control epilepsy, but also if low in it in your body, it helps anxiety and depression somewhat too.

We can't get any decent cat food where I live.   All of our cats over the generations have been feral.   We had all of them neutered/spayed.  There have been 13 of them over the past 30 years.   Now we are down to one, who is an amazing 14 years old.   His name is Tiger, or Tie-tie.  

The best of what we can get is Fancy Feast little cans.   They don't have an expiration date on them, but cans older than two months, Tiger looks at me like I'm trying to poison him and runs away.   I was stubborn for a while.   Tiger wouldn't eat any of it, even though they were freshly opened cans of a pate which he'd eaten before.   

So, I set to trapping feral chickens, and Tiger will eat them.   So do we.  Other than hens that are preparing to set a nest, none of them have a lick of fat on them.  

I am convinced that at least this particular brand degrades quickly.   Also Tiger has never eaten the fake meat that is in the "grilled" cans.   He will lick the gravy but not eat the frankenmeat.   

So, now we're in a place where we will do whatever it takes to carry Tiger through his last years.   He used to eat a little dry food, but won't touch that anymore either.   When there aren't enough feral chickens, I feed him whatever local fish I can find.   Tiger won't eat tulapia or Swai.   Neither will my neighbor's cat.   They don't consider it food.

Our cat for a treat sometimes gets sliced turkey or rotisserie chicken pieces when he is asking politely. 
He absolutely adores turkey. 
He's a bird boy for sure. 
Fish not so much.

(10-09-2025, 12:55 PM)David64 Wrote: This is gonna sound weird, but....go to Wal Mart.

They have 10 lb bags of chicken leg quarters for about $8.50. No hormones, no steroids. I buy 2 bags at a time. That 20lbs of chicken for less than $20.

Boil a couple and save the broth. Strip the chicken off the bone and feed them some of the broth with it. Keep doing that till you use all the chicken. My cats love that stuff. Cats will also eat leftovers from something like a roast, potatoes and carrots. They will even eat the carrots too. Just be sure to give them the broth also, because that where a lot of the fats are. Any meat in your freezer that's got freezer burn, give it to them. I ALWAYS boil it. It cooks the meat and gives them a nutritious broth to go with it.

I know I'm saying "broth" a lot, but they love that stuff more than milk. 

I have 16 cats by the way, 14 outside and 2 inside and if you come out with a pan of leftovers, Stand Back ! They also get dry food, so 20 lbs of meat goes a long way.

Those leg quarters make great chicken soup too.  For us.  I make lots of medicinal soups for the kids amd their kids when they get sick, we have six 48 ounce stanley thermos pots that we use to bring soup to the kids in circulation.  They always come here empty and leave full...we usually door dash them to their house full of chicken, beef, or turkey soup. 

Right now I have four pots in the closet ready to go, picked up two empty ones from the oldest daughter and brought one full one to them yesterday for sickness.  My youngest daughter is getting some chicken soup when she gets back from the hospital...emergency gall bladder removal...she wants a pot of broth, so we will be parboiling a bunch of leg quarters and some breasts with veggies and cabbage, then tomorrow for supper, I will make BBQ chicken on the grill for the wife and I and the great gradkids and grandson-in-law when he picks up the kids at night.  We get the kids on the bus and off the bus here all week and feed them and their father supper usually at night when he gets off work.

I vacuum pack them in packs of three or four leg quarters and freeze them.  The last ones I got three ten pound packages of were from Tadycks Marketplace, five bucks for ten pounds..frozen though, have to work harder to get them separated than the unfrozen Walmart ones.  Walmart ten pound leg quarters taste pretty decent, better tasting than the golden plump chicken.  Best non organic is definitely Gerber.  But the price is usually almost double the walmart ones.

Cats do like boiled chicken a lot, much more than roasted chicken, and they do like the broth in their bowl too.

(10-09-2025, 03:56 PM)sahgwa Wrote: He's a bird boy for sure. 

I do care for my little kitty cat who is adorable and thank you for all the information everyone.

But this thread is now disturbing and I will disengage.

I tawt I taw a pussycat