Poultry products are versatile for feeding cats. Meats can be ground with bone for homemade recipes, egg yolk is a nutritious staple for cats, and chicken necks or small, dressed game birds like quail are likely the most effective “tooth brushes” for cats. Day old chicks can be fed (dead) as whole prey and are a staple at conservation centres and zoos to supplement the diet of captive small wild cat species, and can also be obtained frozen for domestic cats. Cooked chicken as meat choice is an excellent stepping stone to a homemade diet and sometimes the only meat some cats will eat initially. Pureed cooked chicken and raw egg yolk are excellent food choices for nursing sick cats and for tube feeding.
For those who are interested in more self reliance, poultry such as chickens are easy to raise. They grow relatively fast and require little infrastructure and can easily be butchered at home. A dual purpose flock can keep your cat well supplied with eggs and meat. When feeding poultry by grinding the whole carcass with bone and skin, food waste is kept to a minimum, which makes poultry a very efficient choice for feeding cats.
Chicken appears to be by far the most popular meat choice made by cat owners when making or buying cat food. The reasons for doing so are mostly idealistic instead of factual, however. Despite the efficiency and versatility of feeding poultry to cats, I am not an advocate of feeding chicken as the first and only choice, and here is why:
SALMONELLA: healthy adult cats may be naturally resistant to many pathogens, but not to Salmonella. “Song Bird Fever” is the name for infection with Salmonella, or Salmonellosis, in cats, because cats get infected by hunting and eating birds. Birds are not the primary prey of cats, and cats have not evolved a natural resistance to Salmonella. Birds, including chicken, and reptiles are the foremost source and carrier for this pathogen. Whereas when I submitted wild-caught mice for a microbiology screen the lab found no Salmonella. Statistics from the American Meat Association indicate that 19% of salmonella infection in people from food originate with poultry products. The CDC states that every 1 in 25 packages of raw chicken at the grocery store is contaminated with Salmonella, and several Veterinary studies have shown Salmonellosis infection in cats from commercially produced ready to eat frozen raw chicken foods, and the Veterinary community estimates that up to 20% of commercial frozen raw pet food is contaminated with Salmonella. Salmonella may not necessarily produce illness in healthy adult cats, but young, old, pregnant or lactating cats, as well as cats with illness or infection, including immune suppressing infections like FIV and FeLV will be at a significant risk of becoming very ill. A spin off risk from potential Salmonella contamination of poultry fed raw to cats is that the cat can shed and spread the organism in feces, which can then expose humans to a source of infection other then the meat itself. The commercial meat industry has long battled with keeping Salmonella contamination to a minimum in a number of ways, including the use of antibiotics in the feed for chickens and other poultry birds. This has lead to the development of antibiotic resistance Salmonella strains which pose a public health risk, and it has now been identified that pets (dogs included) can spread antibiotic resistant Salmonella in feces when they are fed raw diets. This is not the fault of pet owners choosing to feed a healthy fresh diet to their pets, but the fault of the meat industry. Those of us choosing to feed fresh, raw meat to cats can help address this problem by choosing not to feed poultry products and choosing meats raised without antibiotics.
BONES: using chicken or other poultry (or rabbit) to make raw cat food by grinding the meat with bone can not guarantee that the resulting food is nutritionally balanced in regard to Calcium and Phosphorus. Meat contains large amounts of Phosphorus, and bone contains Calcium and Phosphorus. Only the feeding or utilization of the entire bird can, to an extend, assure that the ratio of Calcium to Phosphorus is balanced – with a greater amount of Calcium present in the food then Phosphorus. Mixing and matching chicken parts from the store and hoping for nutritional balance sounds ill-fated. If the food is not balanced in this respect, kittens will experience severe developmental problem, including Rickets, and the bones of adult cats will begin to de-calcify to meet the bodies requirement until Calcium stores in bone are exhausted and the adult cat will experience severe symptoms of hypocalcemia. (deficiency in Vitamins A and D can produce the same ill effects). Even when enough Calcium is supplied from bone in such diets, case studies in Veterinary practice have shown that Calcium from large bone fragments is not always bioavailable to cats for inability to fully digest the bone fragment. This is especially true for kittens. Unless bone is ground extremely fine, bone splinters remain a persistent risk of injury to the gastrointestinal tract. They can get wedged between the teeth in the upper palate, get stuck in the throat, cause digestive upsets in the stomach and cause vomiting, or, albeit rarely, cause perforation of the intestines.
NUTRITIONALLY IMMATURE: commercial chicken at the grocery store comes from birds selectively bred to mature unnaturally fast. At an age of 5-8 week old the chicks have reached a size and weight ready for butchering. This is often accomplished at the expense of the birds health and quality of life. By that age, commercial meat breed chicks are at a high risk of dying from a heart attack or are often completely immobilized because their legs can not support their rapid weight gain. Traditionally, domestic chicken breeds were not ready for butchering before 6 months old. Commercial meat chicks are not mature at 5-8 weeks old, have not reached full bone density, and have not received enough physical exercise for natural development of muscles and organs. The chick was deprived of sun and fresh air, and it is unlikely that the nutritional profile of a bird raised under these circumstances resembles any prey cats would naturally hunt.
NOT NATURAL: chicken is not a natural food for cats. The African Wildcat (ancestor of our cats) is to a degree opportunistic and will catch birds as food when it is too good to pass up, but birds are not its main prey. Most prey hunted by the African Wildcat and our domestic cat are small mammals like rodents, and mammal meat is red. Therefore, nutritionally speaking and considering the risk of exposure to pathogens that the cat is not immune to, read meats from grass-eating mammals is a more natural choice nutritionally.
Poultry products and chicken often make for an indispensable contribution to the diet of cats for many, mostly because cats are very fond of eating chicken. It would be nice if cats could eat a chicken neck or day old chick a day to keep the dentist away, so to speak, but there is a lesser of two evils that need to be assessed.
Knowing how to turn a whole chicken with bones into cat food is good knowledge to possess, if for no other reason then emergencies and self-sufficiency. But there are risks to be aware of, and steps that can be taken to mitigate them to a large extend. Do not feed raw chicken to kittens, old cats, sick cats, and pregnant/nursing cats. Handle raw chicken and the litterbox with great care and implement good hygiene. If raw chicken is ground with bone, grind it 2-3 times and implement the different grinder head plates, graduating to the smallest hole size. Do not rely on meat ground with bone to feed growing kittens. If chicken is your cat’s favorite food, consider making cat food with cooked chicken. Chicken ground with bone can be cooked if ground very very fine and no visible bone remains.