I saved the plastic cups from store bought wet food, and measured out equal portions of ground meat in each one. Then I sealed them with a sticky plastic wrap and froze them. Each container had enough for 1 day, and I made enough for a month or 2 at a time. My adopted cat lost weight and soon had a glossy coat. (If your cat resists the raw food, add a little tuna. But don't do 100% tuna, because it's like feeding a kid pringles and mountain dew for breakfast.)
This was a great video! I am in the process of getting 2, and now you have given me cause to really think about what I feed them. I want them the healthiest possible. So, raw it is....!!!
REALLY LIKE your site,AND info.! I had my Bengal on RAW Rabbit,and chicken.He did VERY WELL...until he was almost 12,and we SADLY lost him to Heart Disease,AND CANCER!! The Vet seemed to think it was from OVER breeding!WHERE did you get YOUR BEAUTIFUL Bengals??THANKS,Gina
Excellent videos from you, very interesting. I wish everyone put as much effort and care into their cats as you do. I have just started feeding my Bengal a raw food diet and it's the best decision I have made (that and letting him outside - I'll comment on that on your other video). I adopted him from cats protection last September and I couldn't find a cat food he was happy with. So after much research I got my local pet store to order some commercial raw cat food in and he absolutely loves it. It's easy too prepare, has the right mix of meat and organs and costs no more than normal cat food. The way to go!
Bengal Cat Love It comes frozen and each box costs £ 2.45 (around $ 3.80) and lasts for three days so it's no more than I was spending on 'normal' cat food. I just take out of the freezer what I need for the next day and it's easy to deal with - no mess and no smell. Early days yet but I am optimistic!
We only feed our boys raw! There is a lovely pet food deli in Minneapolis that specializes in raw pet food, made of whole ground animals and supplements. Our boys love chicken, quail, turkey, and rabbit! (:
We feed our Savannah Tau 7 yrs old and our Bengal Ari 5 yrs old , Blue buffalo wilderness, they get 1/3 of cup of kibble 3 times a day between both of them and 2 tbsp’s of wet food each twice a day and we put extra water on the wet food, never had urinary tract issue and they are a healthy weight and plenty active.
Hi again! Somewhere you mentioned to use taurine in powder, not in tablets. I bought taurine+L-carnitine for cats a while a year ago and never used. As I have it, it would be nice to use it. Why I you said I can't? Thanks for your videos! My bengal love her new raw food diet! Much more than her old dry food...
+Carol Doya Using taurine powder was a suggestion... I've used tablets, it just was a pain to me to grind them up with a coffee grinder! I'm glad your Bengal loves her new raw food! Once you go raw you never go back! This year will mark 5 years of my cats eating raw and they still seem extremely healthy!
I am in a dither. I am giving a forever home to an Abyssinian/Bengal mix. Cadmium is 9 years old. She lived in CT for most of the time and is now in Louisville, KY. I need to know what to expect.
Thank you for this great video! I have a question. My Bengal Kitten was born on the 17 march..so i must wait till June 19 till she can come home to me. At what age could i start a raw diet? Is it safe for a kitten or should i wait till she is older? Thanks for any advice!
Well, it might take a few judgment calls. You see, in the wild, the mother bengals will feed them cooked jerboas until they're old enough (about 18 months) to eat raw ones. Usually after 3 or 4 months, they begin to add small increments of raw jerboa in until their systems are fully accustomed to it. Jerboas may be hard to find where you live, so just use your judgment: mice would be all right as a replacement, but I would steer clear of guinea pigs.
I have been feeding 100% raw for one year and I am so happy with the results. I could never go back to dry food. I have shared my recipe and my step by step process here: meowlifestyle.com/how-to-make-raw-cat-food/
HOLY! I subscribe to your house youtube account and just saw this video because I was doing some research on bengals and was like this person looks familiar. Do you let the cat roam outdoors freely?
HI! Im just concerned about if going on vacation the guys who are going to feed my cat will not prepare raw food. Is it Posible to mis the diet. 1/2 Raw and 1/2 Commercial Food (dry or wet)? THKS!!!
When you say (4) chickens a month, are you just chopping and grinding the entire bird? Does that give you the desired bone content? and does your "vitamins" follow Lisa's recipe? Thanks -- we have 2 kittens coming and are excited to try this.
i get wild bengal cat, could you help me how to make it friendly?? cause this cat are scared and...well yeah wild..sometimes it bite person i find it difficult to make it friendly ,do you know any triks? pleaseee give me some information
Love this idea and awesome video. I just have some concerns or fears....my kitty recently died of some random issue of anemia. Know one understood why she suddenly died of anemia with no real explanation from the vet. We got her a blood transfusion and she just couldn't produce red blood cells. I was so heart broken and the vets had no answers. I strongly believe that it is possible that it was the food I was giving her. Idk why but I believe maybe the dry kibble was why her body shut down:/ I just didnt know...but I am ready to change my other cat's diet and get them off this fake food. I just heard there are harmful dye and hormones in the meats to make it a red color. Will that harm my cat? And should I get farm raised meat since the live stock from factories is fed corn and pumped with hormones?
Ingrid Peterson I would try it just little bits at a time. Try maybe 1/4 raw 3/4 non-raw, then 1/2 1/2, etc. that way it gives your cats time to warm up to the new food and the transition is less harsh.
is it fine to feed a bengal kitten raw meat? we have one and he hates eating dry food so we tried feeding his friskys can but that almost killed him :O (hes getting better)
@@joshbonfield7444 Weaned is KEY. PROPERLY weaned is of the utmost importance. Many breeders take kittens away from their mothers too soon for the sake of a quick sale. There have been instances where kittens have fell ill from a raw diet due to them being fed way too early (they should have been still drinking mother's milk).
Do not let this scare you possible Bengal owners. I've been raising Bengals for ten years and you DO NOT have to feed raw diet. If you buy from a reputable breeder, you won't have to worry about this. I've bought all three of my cats (two brown spotted and a snow spotted) from the same breeder. I feed high quality dry and wet food. Mostly seafood based because they both hate chicken. My snow is 11 years old and feels and looks like a kitten. My current 2 year old brown spotted male is silky and glittery as hell. I am not knocking raw but it doesnt really matter. It depends on the cat. Mine scoff at raw. EDIT: They are domestic cats.
The person in this video is not attempting to scare anyone. She is giving guidance and her personal story. Dry and canned cat food is a recent invention. Cats have eaten raw meat and organs and bones for millennia. Many cats are different, just like humans and have various food preferences. Dry and canned cat foods are products of convenience, not necessarily the healthiest option. Can you feed your cats dry and canned cat foods and will they survive? Yes. I want my cat to thrive, not just survive.
you just bought them. There will always be vet bills and it's good to get blood work done. The only cat who never had vet bills are the ones with owners who don't do preventative health. Raw is natural i agree, but i studied butchery and it's quite incredible how fast bacteria grows, bacteria that wouldn't be there in the wild. I might try raw, but it's going to be a big step for me.
@@nicoled5160 nicole, we gifted all 17 Bengal's to our veterinarian and her hot little staff! They all got absolutely free, and beautiful Bengals! I just asked that they love them and care for them. Don't be sad Nikki, they are all so cute, the girls show me pictures and videos whenever I want...
I will have two bengal kitties in 5 weeks. So I was thinking to give them more raw food. I love how they will get into misschief. So I named them Bonnie and Clyde. Thank you for these great informitive videos
I’ve got a 10 week Bengal the breeders advised me NOT to feed her RAW as it changes their temperament. I feed her Royal Canine Kitten complete complimented with Whiskers kitten food and kitten milk. Have great fun once Bonnie and Clyde arrive, ps get plenty of toys you will need them as they will be SUPER active.....I’m exhausted haha xxx
@@Diana-yr8wp that sounds like a selfish reason to not give your animal the best possible diet. Their temperament will probably reflect who they really are without feeling groggy and run down from a man made diet…
Hi, that's for this video my little Bengal girl is 16 and she's been having a lot of issues lately with eating and keeping food down, we've tried every commercial brand of food imaginable over the years she gets bored within a week usually but she's always there for the Sunday joint to have her slice as close to rare as she can have it. We where worried about switching her to a more fresh meat based diet due to her age but she's coping a lot better with it although she only likes red meat, she's never liked fish and will rarely eat chicken. She's gone from deaths door to jumping around and keeping everything down in a few days. Although I have been feeing her more cooked meat and gradually introducing raw as she's such an old girl and she's still getting used to it. Thanks for putting my mind at ease over trying this to try and perk her up.
My daughters bengal had a swollen intestines. The vet thought he had a rare cancer. He didn't. So now he is on a steroid. And a special diet and a vitamin B 12 shot a week. He wasn't keeping anything down. Now he is keeping food down and water too. He has put on one and a half pounds. He lost 3.
I buy a frozen box of 5 kg raw chicken fillets a month for my Bengal, the bones can be dangerous so I find fillets is the best way to go. My cat prefer to eat the chicken almost frozen so I take out a chicken from the freezer 5-10 min before and never had to worry about bacteria on the chicken.
Stop tricking yourself that domestic cats are wild. Yes, I know that f1 bengals are half wild, but chances are, your cat is almost entirely domestic, not wild. Domestic cats eat domestic food, and wild cats eat wild food.
Thanks for giving us this information! My fiance and I didn't find out our cat was a bengal until a couple months after adopting her. She's been on wet cat food since then but we could tell she didn't like it. We're switching her to a raw diet as of today (after seeing this video). Thank you again!
My Sweet Tabby/Bengal is Now 4 months old She's Gaing Weight at About 1 Pound Per Month. I Feed Her A Raw/Cooked Diet Beef Stew Meat is Frozen for 2 days then Refrigerator thawed then Cut into 1/2" to 3/4" Cubes. Boneless Chicken Breast is oven Baked. Deli Cooked Shrimp & Crab Meat for iodine. Sardines Packed in Water. Frozen fish oven baked Pollock, Sole, & Cod Too
If you feed raw, even commercial, please, please please make sure you add taurine drops to it. Unfortunately taurine does not remain stable in raw food. Unless your cats are killing their prey and eating it. If they are taurine deficient, it could lead to heart failure. Also realize everything natural isn't good. Ecoli is natural too!
Thank you so much! This answered all of my questions! My bengal has been on an all meat diet his whole life. He is new to me though! His owners before gave him chicken legs so we followed with that as he wouldn't touch anything else. I wasn't sure if it was the best choice for him, but now I'm sure he's doing well! He's does exactly what you said. Takes the leg runs away with it and eats the whole thing, sometimes bone included. He won't touch livers but likes eggs okay, so I'm going to try the blender way next :) thanks again!
Prey Model for raw feeding is by DR TOM LONSDALE (80% raw meat + 10% organ meat + 10% raw bone). Cats can eat as high as 90% raw meat. B.A.R.F model for raw feeding is by DR IAN BILLINGHURST who uses supplements. If you feed raw using 'whole' foods...under the Prey Model...then you don't need the extra expensive supplements.
Excellent video, I have 2 Bengals and they are 14 years old. Each one had to go to a vet only once in their life and also the last blood analyzes are excellent. I started also with all the additional work you described, but simplified it with the years: for each cat 1 raw chicken leg in the morning and during the day they go back many time to eat something from the leg. At the end of the day there remains only 3-4 cm of the bone. The tooth of the cat are excellent!!! I do disagree only on one part of the video: the cats in the wild do eat vegetables but they eat it indirectly from the stomach of the mouses they caught. So I give the cats in the evening a small portion (40g) of quality cane food, which has a small portion of vegetal part.
thanks for the video. we feed half Raw and half dry. for the meat, we actually just buy from the breeder who orders the food in from her butcher who does all the 'dirty' work. so that works out well, and we also give our Bengal a whole chicken wing/ chicken Neck once a week. his health is perfect and he is super happy.
What about feeding them frozen mice? You can buy packs of them at a lot of reptile stores. I would think it would also be a more natural diet since the majority of what cats catch in the wild would probably be small rodents, reptiles, or birds. They would also be getting the organs, bones, and meat with every meal so you don’t have to worry about proportions. Have you looked into this option? I would guess it’s probably more expensive to go this route though.
Thank you for sharing this video. My cat got a lump recently. I don't know if it's from the cat food I've been feeding him or the greenie cat treats. But I've decided to turn to the raw natural cat food diet. Why do you add so many things besides just the raw natural meat? If they just hunt back yard animals they eat the bird or lizard. We're not adding stuff.
Please oh please do not just feed the muscle meats. You are guaranteed vitamin and mineral deficiency if you do not include organ meats (and some ground raw bones) that contains vitamins and minerals. Lack of taurine guarantees heart problems. The vitamins via the links above in the show notes are the vitamins recommended by an actual veterinarian. Good luck!
My kitty's vet insisted that we DON'T feed her wet food bc of a tooth problem that costed over $250 to have fixed. She ate mostly dry food her whole life and she was a happy kitty (on her own terms of course.) She WASN'T a Bengal though; she didn't have THAT much energy. My friend has a Bengal kitty and he acts like the Energizer kitty sometimes. It makes my friend laugh to see his kitty zooming up and down all over the place.
I think my bengal is broken …. He loves licking my ice water and prefers cold meat to mousy temps and he is alwayyyssss drinking water. He also loves to be held And proped up in the camera. I got him a year ago and he’s about 3 now. But he’s a healthy happy boy. Smartest cat I know
Thank you for the video. I do not have a Bengal Cat but do have a Domestic Short Hair (Mut). But we love her. Is the raw meat only for Bengals or can I also start raw food for my cat? I am torn about getting a Bengal. I am not sure I have the time to keep a Bengal busy. Saw your other video on Bengals and enjoyed it. But scared to get a Bengal. Thanks again.
When I adopted my cat from a rescue I was given cat food recommended by the vet. She had horrible farts and overly soft and incredibly stinky stools. I had considered giving her raw but after I saw how horribly sensitive her digestive system was I changed her to raw. The smells stopped entirely. Her cat box doesn’t reek like previous cats I grew up with who we fed dry to, though they were hunters and caught a lot of prey. One of our cats would refuse to eat kibble or canned and would only eat raw meat. So it wasn’t a new concept for me. But it amazed me how quickly she improved. She is so healthy and her fur gets softer every week. Her eye goop is clearing up and she has so much energy. It’s like I have a kitten in the house. I started by putting psyllium in her food. She has started chewing on the bones from the meat I bring home. She loves it. And she used to gulp her commercial cat food down too quickly so now she eats much more slowly. I have to close my bedroom door when I give her a bone cuz she will drag it off and most of my house is linoleum. I got to feed the tigers at the Monterey zoo and they fed them whole chicken soaked in supplements. My raw food is similar. You can buy the premix supplements without having to buy the individual supplements separately. That’s what I do right now. It’s not really that hard to feed raw. Thanks for posting.
The teeth cleaning benefit is only for raw chunks and whole prey. Ground does not clean teeth anymore then pate food cleans teeth. Genetics also play a huge part of oral health. If you have a smash faced cat, their teeth are junk naturally, if you have a proper healthy muzzled cat, the teeth are much better off.
My Bengal eats the meat of the bone that we've left he carries around a bone bigger than himself for a few days, he does eat cooked bones but it's normally dense bones not like tiny chicken bones.
my vet said not to do raw as my kitten was fighting infection for a while. my bengal however loves beets and cucumber. First cat ever to want this. He begs for pieces
You are very well spoken. It would be cool to see more videos of your cats. It seems like you take good care of them. Im sure they do a lot of funny stuff.
Is it a good idea to cook the raw food for the cat? I'm concerned about the parasites and bacteria. I know the commercial cat foods are not risk-free. Just thinking whether raw better or cooked raw better? Thanks in advance!!!
Definitely no cooking. Cooking denatures the meat and will kill the taurine which a cat desperately needs. You can bring some water to a boil and pour it over meat to kill any surface bacteria. You will need to feed organs and bone as well, not just muscle meat. A cat needs about 85% muscle meat, 5% bone, 5% liver and 5% other organs. Hearts are considered muscle meat, and are rich in taurine, darker meats also contain more taurine than light meats. It's best to feed the freshest meat possible, as taurine will die over a period of time. Cats will instinctively avoid spoiled meats. Store bought meats for humans are almost certain to be parasite free, but if your worried you can freeze it solid for 3 days and it will kill parasites.
All cats are different. Many cats will over eat if they have dry or canned food 24/7. She was giving a personal example as a guide, not as written rule.
Do you live in the states? I know when I moved to Australia from Ohio that butchers were everywhere but in Ohio finding a butcher can prove to be quite a challenge.
No, in Canada in an Italian neighbourhood where there are butchers on every corner practically. They ground me chicken for chicken burgers though no problem.
Adam, good idea, but the only issue with a butcher grinding your meat is that you will then have to remember the bone to meat ratio and grind chicken bones to mix with the already ground chicken meat. The only way I see this working is if you tell your butcher the bone to meat ratio and stand there to make sure he/she is doing the ratio correctly. This is why I just grind everything together myself.
Don’t listen to this crazy cat lady. Purina One 4 life! I feed all my bengals purina one and they all lived a long life of 3 years. So strange that cats only live 3 years. 😂
You are amazing, you know that? I will be adopting a handsome Snow Bengal in a couple of months and of course I want him healthy and spare him as many trips to the vet as possible. So this information is so very helpful! I'll definitely look into a raw diet because the hydration thing is a really good thing you to consider. I was wondering if you're familiar with BARF menu and if you would recommend it for a Bengal? Its basically all raw meat, organs and bones without any grains, rice and other unnecessary ingredients. It's also quite affordable and available in most pet stores.
My cat sounds and looks exactly like a bengal and acts like the ones I've seen but he is pure black with some white. Could anyone tell me any related cat species or if bengal's can have pure black fur? My cat also has the fur texture of a bengal. he's basically a bengal with out the iconic bengal things; Spotted fur and green eyes.
