Fred’s Blog

I recently got a feral cat (Max) from a shelter in Brooklyn to be integrated into my local cat colony. Unfortunately Max came with a plastic ID collar that the shelter people had put on him during his incarceration at the pound, and obviously this collar had to come off before I let Max out into my colony (if he got it caught on a branch he could choke to death).

So the challenge was, How to remove a collar from a feral cat that is wild, terrified of humans, and cannot be touched except under sedation?

Here’s what I did (after getting some advice from Bryan Kortis at Neighborhood Cats):

First I raised Max’s cage up on blocks so that there was about a half-inch of space beneath it. This allowed the forks of a trap divider to go down through the floor of the trap, “locking” it in place.

My plan was to confine Max in as small a space as possible on the “square” end of the trap (not the tapered end), so that I would have easier access to him.

With the first trap divider in place, I gently nudged and prodded him into the confinement space using the other divider. Fortunately he was more stubborn than violent so all I needed was a bit of patience.

Max was not very pleased with this at all.

Next I slid a quarter-inch diameter wooden dowel down into the cage, through Max’s collar, and through the bottom of the cage.

This effectively “locked” him in place, making it easier to access the collar, and making it less likely to injure him in the process of cutting the collar, which came next:

Here I was able to reach a pair of scissors in between the bars of the trap and make the cut. This was why I chose the square end of the trap: depending on where Max had chosen to position his body, being at that end of the trap gave me more options for getting at the collar. If necessary, I could even have opened the trap’s front door and reached in between the bars of the divider, which are wider than the trap’s bars.

And here, the collar is cut.

Voilà.

Since I started making my own catfood back in August, I have refined my procedure somewhat.

For one thing, I’ve become more skilled at carving up a chicken carcass. With a good heavy santoku knife and sharp kitchen scissors I can skin and dismember a 4.5 lb chicken in about 20 minutes. I got considerably faster when I discovered there are pressure points that “pop” out the shoulder and hip joints, allowing easier cutting and removal.

One of the big problems I had in my early attempts was that bones would jam the machine and bone chips got jammed between the round grinding plate and the housing. Thus not only did I have to stop and clear the bone jam every few minutes, but it was very difficult to remove the plate to clear the jam on account of the jammed-in bone chips.

I discovered the solution: by trickling water through the input tube during the bone-crushing phase, the mechanism stays lubricated and there are no more jams. This also helps to keep the holes in the plate clear, making clean-up much easier.

Cutting the bones into smaller chunks also helps a lot.

I try to buy chickens not larger than 4.5 lbs, since smaller birds have smaller bones and that makes it easier on the grinder.

So here is my process:

1. Wash the chicken in running water to remove surface bacteria.

2. Skin and dismember the chicken. Discard the skin and as much fat as is convenient.

3. Remove as much muscle meat as possible from the bones (this gets easier with practice). Separate the muscle meat and bones in separate bowls.

4. Chop the bones into lengths not longer than 1 inch. This is quite satisfying if you use a sharp, heavy knife. I always keep my unused hand behind my back while doing this so that I am not tempted to chop my fingers off.

5. Measure out the water that is needed for this weight of chicken (see chart below) and set it near the grinder.

6. Install the medium plate (5mm diameter holes) in the grinder.

7. Send the bones through. After every few bones, trickle a few tablespoons of water into the intake chute. Don’t stand directly in front of the grinder, as meaty water will sometimes spit out. Don’t wear your good tuxedo when doing this.

8. When you’re finished with the bones, put the ground-up bones aside and put an empty bowl in front of the grinder output. Flush the grinder with a good portion of the remaining water (but don’t use too much– at the end of the day, you don’t want to use more water than the recipe calls for). You now have a bowl with bony, meaty water in it.

9. Open the grinder and scoop the bone chips that didn’t go through into your bone-water bowl. Set it aside; we’ll deal with it later.

10. Now install the large plate (8mm diameter holes) in the grinder. Send the muscle meat through.

Note: The idea here is that you want fairly large chunks of muscle meat for your cats to chew on. This is very good for their teeth as it is a natural way of removing tartar. I have read some recipes where people chop up their muscle meat with a knife rather than grinding it; I tried that with my cats and the chunks were too big– they didn’t acknowledge that the chunks were actually food and they ate everything except the chunks. All my cats except Jill, who was born feral, did this; Jill (who is known to have eaten her own children– more about that another day) tore into the big chunks with relish.

11. Set the ground muscle meat aside and use the remaining water to flush the grinder; use the bowl of bone-water from earlier.

12. Open the grinder and scoop anything that didn’t grind into the bone-water bowl.

13. Pour the contents of the bone-water bowl, along with the unground bones, into a blender and run it on high for a few minutes. The result will be a nice pink mush of watery goop. If any large bone chips remain, discard them.
14. Add your nutritional supplements: egg yolks, vitamins, psyllium. Add psyllium last as it is a coagulant and if it sits too long you will be left with a firm stinky mass of jell-o that is hard to work with.

15. Mix the bone-meat, muscle-meat, and supplements in a big bowl. Decant into containers, and freeze.

That’s it. It takes me about 2 hours to process 9 lbs of chicken, including clean-up.

Here are the proportions I use:

Chicken (lbs)	4.0	4.5	5.0	5.5	6.0	6.5	7.0	7.5	8.0	8.5	9.0	9.5	10.0	10.5
water (cups)	1.8	2.0	2.2	2.4	2.7	2.9	3.1	3.3	3.6	3.8	4.0	4.2	4.4	4.7
taurine (mg)	3,555.6	4,000.0	4,444.4	4,888.9	5,333.3	5,777.8	6,222.2	6,666.7	7,111.1	7,555.6	8,000.0	8,444.4	8,888.9	9,333.3
Vitamin E (IU)	711.1	800.0	888.9	977.8	1,066.7	1,155.6	1,244.4	1,333.3	1,422.2	1,511.1	1,600.0	1,688.9	1,777.8	1,866.7
Vitamin B (mg)	177.8	200.0	222.2	244.4	266.7	288.9	311.1	333.3	355.6	377.8	400.0	422.2	444.4	466.7
salmon oil (mg)	1,777.8	2,000.0	2,222.2	2,444.4	2,666.7	2,888.9	3,111.1	3,333.3	3,555.6	3,777.8	4,000.0	4,222.2	4,444.4	4,666.7
psyllium husk (tsp)	3.6	4.0	4.4	4.9	5.3	5.8	6.2	6.7	7.1	7.6	8.0	8.4	8.9	9.3
egg yolks	3.6	4.0	4.4	4.9	5.3	5.8	6.2	6.7	7.1	7.6	8.0	8.4	8.9	9.3

Notes: I tried using the egg whites, but my cats couldn’t stand the taste. I’ve also read that they can’t digest them.

I haven’t been able to find the supplements in free-form, so I have to waste quite a bit of time opening up the gelcaps and pouring out the powder (or, in the case of the oils, piercing them and squeezing it out).

As for the Taste Test… my guys love it. I tried giving some to Sammy, a feral kitten I’m confining until I can get him fixed next week, and he scarfed it down and now won’t touch the canned food I give him. Picky. Sheesh.

Back when the tainted petfood scandal broke earlier this year, I resolved to make my own catfood. (Which is to say, I would continue to eat my own regular food, but I would make catfood for my cats).

It wasn’t until I met someone who did it herself that I was inspired to take the plunge. My Northern Industrial Tools Electric Meat Grinder finally arrived, and I took it for a test drive with a whole chicken I bought.

I’m a squeamish city boy not used to handling wildlife. Never seen a whole chicken before (except at the petting zoo). I was surprised to find a little paper bag full of organs inside the chicken– quite a convenience! I had no idea chickens had evolved to the point where their vital organs grew in paper bags.

It was hard not to anthropmorphize the chicken. Peeling the skin off was a bit of a chore. It reminded me of trying to wrestle the dress off a… well never mind.

I also discovered the importance of having a good sharp knife (I don’t). After a few minutes of hacking the chicken ceased looking like a prom date and more like Alien.

I worried about the bones. This grinder is not rated for bone crushing, but my informant assured me it handles chicken bones without a problem. So it does. First I sent the bones through using the coarse filter, but found the bone fragments a little big for my comfort. So I sent it all though again using the fine filter, so that the resulting bone fragments had a consistency of fine sand.

My recipe was simple. I added water and taurine; there are other things I could (and should) add in like psyllum, once I get them.

But the proof of the pudding was in the eating… of which there has so far been little. All my indoor cats have so far turned up their noses, but the ferals outside love it.

The problem I think is that they’re addicted to dry food. I started feeding Purina One for Sensitive Systems to Squid, who has a sensitive tummy, and when everyone turned out to like it, I just fed that to everyone by default. So training them out of the dry food habit will be a chore.

Here are links to the instructions I followed:

http://www.catnutrition.org/pictorial.php

http://www.catinfo.org/makingcatfood.htm

Betty had surgery today to have three teeth extracted. She was suffering from a pretty bad gum infection; two of her molars were discolored from tartar and were loose to the touch. The vet noticed this two weeks ago when I took her in for a skin problem (we discovered she’s allergic to flea bites, and even though I keep the cats indoors a flea seems to have gotten in somehow). So she had a week of antibiotics to help with the gum inflammation (amoxicillin trihydrate, a.k.a. Clavamox, liquid, mixed with food, 2 x 15 mL daily) and two weeks of a steroid to lessen the skin irritation (prednisone, pill, crushed in honey and spread on her paw). We would have had the tooth extraction done right there, but the skin allergy had to be ameliorated first and the vet wanted her off the prednisone before surgery.

This morning she went in for her surgery, so no food or water after midnight… for EVERYONE, a fact which disgruntled the other 4 cats. She had pretty much recovered from anaesthesia by the time I picked her up but she was still woozy from the pain killer. I had planned to keep her isolated in the bedroom for a while but she insisted on being let out to patrol the premises and re-exert her authority. She wasn’t shy about digging right into a good meal, either.

The vet had given her more Clavamox and a 3-day supply of pain-killing pills (Torbutrol, 2 x 1mg daily), as well as an anti-plaque rinse. We’ll see what she thinks about that…