Making Catfood

Here we are grinding Texas venison into catfood. Minnie Mao is very interested in what we are doing...my little helper!

This is all of the meat from four whitetails from Texas. We get way more from the whitetails in Illinois. One and a half or two Illinois deer gave us about this same amount of meat for the kitties. Minnie Mao and Cinderella are inspecting our work.

After all of the meat is ground, I use a one pint freezer container filled 3/4 full to shape the meat into blocks and freeze before wrapping. Right now the kitties get one of these in the morning and one at dinner time. The number of kitties varies, depending upon how many of the wild Toms show up at mealtime.

We have saved all of the legbones. These are wrapped individually and frozen. If we go anywhere for a day or two, we can throw some bones with meat out for the barn kitties to gnaw on.

Update

All of the kitties have improved greatly since the last post. Mama Kitty still sneezes occasionally, but her eyes have pretty well cleared up...In fact; all of the outdoor kitties have, for the most part, recovered from their watery eyes. This is with the exception of Honey Bear, who is still a little watery. Minnie Mao, who lives inside, did catch the cold in her eyes, but it was never too bad and is for the most part through it. As far as I know they are all over the diarrhea.

When I took the Mama Kitty and Raggedy Ann in to see the vet on January 2, the only changes that were really made were that each got a vitamin B12 shot to help with their appetites and all of the kitties were put on a daily colostrum supplement to their food. The Mama and Raggedy Ann both showed an immediate improvement...gaining weight and obviously feeling better. Raggedy Ann also began to play after a couple of days whereas she wasn't playing at all before.

So all is quiet on the Midwestern Front for now.

Another trip to the Vet

This time it was Mama Kitty and Raggedy Ann. Mama Kitty has been sneezing off and on and also has had a few 'hairball' type dry coughs. She also had watery eyes. It may just be a cold.

Raggedy Ann is still underweight at 2.5 lbs. She doesn't have a very strong appetite and doesn't play like the other kitties. She spends most of her time under the dining room chair when she is inside. She is the only one that I have to go out to the barn to bring her in for her meals. She also has a watery eye. Also, I needed to find out why all of the outdoor kitties still have diarhea. They are almost finished with their Coccidia medicine and it's been a week since they were wormed.

I want to make sure that we don't lose any more kitties! That was so heartbreaking to lose both Sugar Bear and Poppy in the same day.