How to make homemade wet cat food

For people, homemade meals are almost always healthier than what you can buy ready-to-eat from the store. It stands to reason that the same would be true for our feline friends, right? Not necessarily.

It’s a good idea to learn all that is involved in making nutritionally complete and balanced cat food before you rush out and buy a bunch of ingredients. The process may not be as simple as you imagine.

Here’s what you need to know about homemade cat food.

Is Homemade Cat Food Better Than Commercial Diets?

Making your cat’s food at home does offer some benefits. First, you have complete control over the ingredients that you use. Are you looking for a diet that is free from artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives? Do you want your cat to go organic or grain-free? It’s all up to you.

Homemade food can be a good option for cats with dietary sensitivities.

If your cat has a food allergy or intolerance, it’s easy enough to avoid your cat’s triggers. You may also be able to tempt a sick cat to eat a homemade food when they refuse to touch other options.

Is Homemade Cat Food Healthy?

However, homemade cat foods are not necessarily healthier than commercial diets.

It’s possible to get most of the advantages mentioned above by being a discerning consumer and offering your cat only high-quality commercial cat foods.

For example, a natural canned cat food will be free from artificial colors, flavor, and preservatives, and it can also be grain-free and made from the types of ingredients you’d use in a homemade cat food.

Organic cat foods are also widely available through online and local pet food suppliers.

With the wide range of unique cat foods available (such as duck and potato), it’s also quite easy to find options that will meet the needs of cats with dietary sensitivities. Commercial veterinary diets are made under the strictest quality control standards to avoid cross-contamination that can lead to symptom flare-ups.

Cooked vs. Raw Homemade Cat Food

If you’re not just thinking homemade, but raw homemade cat food, you have a few extra concerns to address.

The contamination rate of raw animal parts deemed fit for human consumption is truly shocking. For example, the US Department of Agriculture estimates that approximately one-quarter of raw chicken parts in human food production facilities are contaminated with Salmonella and/or Campylobacter bacteria.

While healthy cats may be able to fight off many (but not all) foodborne diseases, young, old, or sick animals often can’t. Additionally, pets who appear healthy can act as carriers and spread infections to people.

Some raw food proponents also advocate for the inclusion of whole raw bones in homemade cat foods. While raw bones are less likely to shatter than cooked bones, chewing on any large bone puts cats at increased risk for broken teeth and gastrointestinal injuries.

What You Need to Know Before You Make Your Own Cat Food

If you’ve decided to make your cat’s food, follow these guidelines to ensure that you meet all of your cat’s nutritional needs.

Ensure Nutritional Balance

Balanced nutrition is essential if cats are to thrive. Nutrient excesses and deficiencies can lead to serious health problems.

Unfortunately, many recipes for homemade cat foods contain too little or too much of one or more important nutrients. A study published in 2019 evaluated 114 recipes for home-prepared maintenance diets (HPMD) for cats gathered from books and online sources. According to the authors, “problems with nutritional adequacy were identified in all evaluated HPMD recipes.”

Use Vet-Approved Recipes

So, where should you get your recipes for homemade cat food? Your best option is a board-certified veterinary nutritionist.

These specialists can design recipes that take your cat’s age, weight, and any health problems into account. Your primary care veterinarian can refer you to a veterinary nutritionist, or you can find one through the American College of Veterinary Nutrition.

The online services Petdiets.com and BalanceIt.com are run by veterinary nutritionists and are also good options.

Follow the Recipes Exactly

Your potential problems don’t end once you have access to a good recipe.

Research has shown that, with time, many pet parents make substitutions in the diet and/or completely stop including vital ingredients, like vitamin and mineral supplements.

Never make changes to your cat’s recipes without first talking to your veterinarian or veterinary nutritionist.

Get Need the Right Supplements

It is virtually impossible to make a nutritionally complete and balanced cat food without the use of vitamin and mineral supplements. Be wary of any recipe that claims to provide all the nutrients your cat needs without supplementation.

Reputable sources will tell you exactly how much of each specific vitamin and mineral supplement needs to be added to the other ingredients in the recipe.

Make Sure You Have the Time to Commit to Making Cat Food

Preparing a homemade diet for you cat requires extra time (and it’s not cheap).

You can make life a little easier by making a week or two’s worth of food at a time and freezing meal-sized portions. Thaw the food in the refrigerator overnight and then warm it to body temperature before feeding.

Homemade food should be discarded after two hours at room temperature or after a few days in the refrigerator.

Make a Gradual Switch

Rapid dietary changes of any sort can lead to gastrointestinal upset for cats. Take a week or two to gradually mix in increasing amounts of a new food with decreasing amounts of the old. If you cat doesn’t take well to the new diet, switch back to the old, and if symptoms persist, talk to your veterinarian.

Take Your Cat to the Vet Regularly for Monitoring

Cats who eat a homemade diet should be seen by a veterinarian two or three times a year to monitor for diet-related health problems and to ensure that your recipes continue to meet your cat’s needs.

Featured Image: iStock.com/Bebenjy

And always remember to avoid human foods that are toxic to cats.

Pet parents may consider home cooking for their pets for many different reasons. This may include concerns related to pet food recalls, health conditions such as food allergies, and/or a desire to provide the best quality foods for their fur babies. The internet is full of recipes and suggestions for the best ways to cook for your cat, so you may be surprised to learn that vets and veterinary nutritionists recommend against this practice. Cats' dietary requirements and the way that they absorb nutrients is extremely complex. Crafting a diet at home that will meet all of their nutritional needs and allow proper absorption of those nutrients is very difficult to do. The risks to your kitty’s health can be serious if done improperly. Find out all about your cat’s unique dietary needs and alternatives to home cooking.

Over the years, there have been pet food recalls for many different reasons. Most of the time, a company voluntarily recalls a batch of food if minor problems arise. For more serious risks, the FDA may issue a mandatory recall if there is concern for serious adverse health consequences or death. When these stories make the news, it understandably creates anxiety for pet parents. At the same time, these recalls let us know that our cats’ commercial diets are carefully monitored and tested so that we find these problems quickly and can take action. Feeding a homemade diet may give you more control, however, home cooked diets are also at risk for contamination with potentially dangerous germs and/or unsafe ingredients.

Your kitty may need a diet change if it is diagnosed with certain health conditions. While this may feel overwhelming at first, a change in diet can go a long way to managing certain diseases. For example, special diets are often recommended for cats with diabetes, kidney disease, a food allergy, or urinary tract disorders. Prescription diets are carefully formulated to help treat these medical problems in ways that over-the-counter commercial diets cannot. They should only be used for a cat diagnosed with that specific condition and only under the guidance of your veterinarian.  

When you see the ingredients listed in commercial pet food diets, they can sound unappealing or frankly, gross. It raises eyebrows when you read the label and see "chicken byproduct" or something equally unappetizing, and it may be more appealing to envision your kitty eating a nice slice of roasted chicken with a side of shrimp. However, what you can’t see is the actual nutritional value of these ingredients. In most cases, the ingredient list does not tell the full story since pet food companies can add certain ingredients to improve their image without those ingredients having real nutritional benefits. In other cases, the best nutrients may come from ingredients that sound less appealing but contain more of what your kitty needs.  

Most cat owners have been here at some point; you pop open a can of your kitty’s favorite food just like you do every day, and all of a sudden, it sniffs it and walks away in complete disgust. This may be a sign that your cat is sick, so you should always check in with your vet when this happens. Other times, it turns out to be a change in your cat’s preferences or a behavioral issue. This can be especially frustrating if your healthy cat is turning up its nose at a smorgasbord of options you offer while simultaneously stealing table scraps. It can lead cat owners to think their cat wants human food and that a home cooked diet will appease them. However, it is important to consider other factors such as boredom, fears, or changes in the formulation of the diet as to why your cat is no longer eating its food. If deeper issues are at play, they will arise again, even with a home-cooked diet. cite

Let’s face it, high quality commercial cat foods can be expensive. Home cooking for your cat may seem like a way to save money and also provide high quality ingredients. However, to do it properly and provide all of the necessary nutrients for your cat(s) would cost significantly more than most commercial diets on the market. This is because you need to cook a fresh batch of food every few days to avoid spoilage, and you need to purchase many different ingredients and supplements in order to make a balanced diet for your cat. 

Cats have special dietary needs that differ from humans and dogs. This is what makes home cooking for them especially challenging. Cats are true carnivores, meaning they require a high content of animal protein as the bulk of their diet. Additionally, they are unable to make certain amino acids and vitamins and must absorb these from their diet.cite  Wild relatives of cats and outdoor cats usually obtain these nutrients when they eat whole prey. Commercial diets have been carefully formulated to meet these needs as well. However, it is very difficult to meet these needs by cooking for your cat since many of these nutrients come from organ meats, bones, and other parts of prey animals that would not be typically cooked in our homes. For this reason, home cooked diets are usually deficient in crucial nutrients unless they are balanced with a large number of supplements.  

It is understandable why you may consider home cooking for your cat if you find yourself in one of the situations mentioned above.  However, as you learn more about cats’ highly specific dietary needs, the challenges and health risks become more evident.  In fact, a study in 2019 showed that over 100 home cooking recipes for cats that were tested and analyzed were deficient in important nutrients and were not as complete as commercial diets. cite  The most commonly noted concerns include:

Deficiencies in home-cooked diets include taurine, choline, iron, thiamine, and Vitamin E.cite  Cats that are not getting enough of these nutrients may seem fine for a while, which can reassure owners that their diet is adequate. However, when they do show signs of a deficiency, it can be serious. 

Taurine deficiency can lead to heart disease known as Dilated Cardiomyopathy, blindness due to retinal degeneration, and neurological signs.  

Iron deficiency may cause anemia, which results in cats who are weak, lethargic, and may have rapid breathing as well as risks of collapse or death.  

Thiamine deficiency initially may result in decreased appetite, nausea, and vomiting.  In time, it will lead to serious neurological signs including stumbling, blindness, inability to lift the head, seizures, coma, or even death. 

Choline deficiency often leads to liver problems. In cats, this can trigger Hepatic Lipidosis, or fatty liver disease, which can be serious and challenging to treat.cite

Vitamin E deficiency in cats can lead to pansteatitis, a condition where the fat inside the body becomes inflamed and painful.cite 

In addition to concerns about improperly balanced diets, home cooking also increases the risks of food borne illnesses and/or spoilage. This is because home-cooked foods have a much shorter window of freshness and lack preservatives that can prolong their stability. New batches of food need to be cooked every few days to avoid illnesses related to the growth of bacteria and other harmful germs. Leaving home-cooked food out at room temperature in your cat’s bowl will also increase the risk of harmful germs for the same reasons, making it difficult to leave food available for long periods of time. These risks are further magnified with raw food diets as feeding raw meats skips the step of thoroughly heating the food to kill off the germs. Raw food diets are at much higher risk of contamination with nasty germs like Salmonella and E.coli, and humans have become sick from handling raw pet food.cite    

Home-cooked diets are often not as tasty to cats. This is because in order to make them nutritionally complete, many supplements need to be added to the basic ingredients and most cats will be turned off by their taste and/or smell.cite

The best option for a healthy diet is to find a commercial food that meets your cat’s needs. There are so many cat foods available now that it is possible to find a food that suits even the pickiest palate, or most specific needs. When analyzing a diet to determine if it is nutritionally complete, it is important to look at a number of factors other than the ingredient list. The World Small Animal Veterinary Association has put together a list of important guidelines and the Pet Nutritional Alliance has compiled an interactive document where you can see if a particular pet food manufacturer meets those guidelines.

For those kitties who need a special diet due to a medical problem, the best option is to consult with your veterinarian to find a prescription diet that will address your cat’s health needs. If these diets are not suitable for some reason, be sure to speak with your vet to find a safe alternative. Sometimes they know of other creative solutions to meet your cat’s nutritional and medical needs.

Finally, for the really rare situation where there is no commercial diet available that can meet your cat’s needs, you will need to consult with a board certified veterinary nutritionist to get a custom-designed diet for your cat. A nutritionist will be able to craft a diet that includes all of the required nutrients for your cat.They usually use specialized software to calculate exact quantities of all of the important supplements. Be prepared for a lot of labor and expense in keeping up with this kind of diet and make sure to follow the instructions exactly. Changing even a brand or source of a certain nutrient can affect its availability to your cat.  

There are many reasons cat owners might consider home cooking, however, the complications that arise from homemade diets can be serious and are simply not worth the risks. Cats are complex little beings with unique dietary requirements, and ensuring their diets are healthy and balanced is best left to the experts. 

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