Néline eats RAW!
Some of the recurring questions on Néline’s Instagram are: what does she eat? Does she eat only raw? Do you DIY? The quick answer is: Néline eats DIY raw food and yes, she eats only that. For the long answer, read the rest of the article :)
To start with a visual explanation, here is an example of what Néline eat during a day.
What does Néline eat during a day?
She starts with a breakfast at around 8-9am:
In this example, her breakfast is composed of rabbit liver, lamb testicles, pork heart and little fishes (Atherina Boyeri).
She will then have the first dinner when I go home from work at around 6-7pm. In this example beef meat.
At around midnight, just before I go to sleep, she will finish her day with her second dinner. In this example, it is pork meat and chicken neck.
Each day Néline will eat a total of 150/160g (5.3/5.6oz).
A raw diet : prey model diet
Of course, I don’t feed her randomly. What Néline eats follows what is called a prey model raw diet. To quickly explain what is prey model here are the basic guidelines for a day:
70-80% meat. Such as chicken, beef, rabbit, turkey, mutton, veal... this is the easy and expected part, but muscle meat alone is not enough to provide a balanced diet.
10% offal. The second part of the diet is offal. They are rich in nutrients and, consequently, they are essential in a raw diet.
5% of the offal needs to be liver. The liver is the richest of the offals, especially in vitamin A.
The other 5% needs to be secreting organs. They are organs that synthesize and release substances, such as kidneys, spleen, brain, testicles, pancreas.
6-10% pure bones. This is generally the unexpected part. Bones are an essential part of the diet: they provide calcium and help to firm the stool. It may sound scary, but adapted bones are not dangerous. What is an adapted bone? It’s a bone which is raw, with meat around and adapted to the size of a cat. Examples of such bones are quail, rabbit ribs, chicken neck, chicken wings.
Finally, fish is also needed to provide Omega 3, around 10%.
The idea between these ratios is to reconstruct what a cat eating a prey would eat. A prey being composed of meat, bones, and organs.
You may ask, but why fish? The meat that can be found in a supermarket is rarely free range, and therefore, lack omega 3 in comparison to a wild prey. The fish is added to compensate for the lack of omega 3 in the (not free-range) meat.
That’s it for a quick and not exhaustive overview of raw feeding and the prey model diet. You will notice that this article is not having any sources as it’s just a quick introduction. I will go deeper in the nutrition domain and the science behind raw feeding in other articles.
In the meantime, if you want to know more about it I recommend you to go check the website Perfectly Rawsome, from which I learned a lot. If you have any questions, or a particular subject you would like me to talk about, feel free to ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer in the next articles.