Changing Your Cat to a SARF™ Diet
SLOW CHANGEOVER FOR CATS
Changing cats to their SARF™ diet can be a task in itself for some so time and encouragement, is needed and a little understanding too.
Cat’s are naturally cautious animals and in many cases don’t take to raw as quickly dogs do. If you find your cat doesn’t take to their SARF™ diet immediately, try following the slow changeover guide we recommend. For this you will need patience and perseverance as this may take sometime, but is achievable and will be worth be totally worth it in order for you to wean your fussy cat from their commercial synthetic dry/wet food diet.
Stage 1
Create a scheduled feeding plan
So firstly if you have a cat that’s used to “free feeding” (food left down all day) you need to introduce and get them used to a set time throughout the day. Free feeding is not advisable when raw feeding.
When selecting a scheduled time, ensure that you can be present long enough to take the meal back up, set time set amount, if your cat doesn’t entertain the food after 30 minutes, then remove it and try again at your set time. This method allows your cat to A, rest their digestive system between meals and B, should allow you to build up a sensation of hunger, helping to encourage them to try something new, it also allows their body to regulate and begin producing the appropriate gastric acid that is essential to digesting a SARF™ diet.
Stage 2
Changing From Dry Food to Wet Food
This stage is all about your cat experiencing and accepting wet meals, substituting a small amount of their dry food with wet . As they begin to accept their new wet food, reduce the amount of biscuit until you have a cat that only eats wet food, we always recommend a chunk wet food and not a paste. You can use the following guide to get you started.
25% of the new chunky wet food mixed into dry food for approximately 3 days, your cat has chosen to eat the 25% of wet food, you can increase the amount to 50% dry food 50% wet food. When you see that your cat is accepting 50/50 dry and wet meals, you can then increase the amount again to 75% dry food with 25% food.
When your cat is happy with a 25/75 mix of dry and wet food, you can start feeding 100% wet food. When the changeover to a wet food is complete, you can begin to look at step 3, bearing in mind that you should always changeover at your cat’s pace, remember this process alone could take 1-2 months, and throughout this process don’t allow them to go without food for 24 hrs, if they’re not happy with the pace of change, take a step back.
Stage 3
Introduction of mince/small raw chunks
As above we use the same process, starting with a 25% substitute of raw minced food or 3-4 small bite size raw chunks. At this stage ensure you coat the raw food (minced or chunks) in the wet food flavours, this should help encourage them to try it.
When they have accepted the 25/75 mix, increase to 50% raw mince, or 6-8 small raw chunks to 50% wet. Again ensuring that your cat is accepting and eating their new raw food you will need to continue phasing out the wet food whilst increasing the size of the raw mince or chunks.
Once your cat is eating primarily raw mince or chunked muscle meat with small amounts of canned wet food, it is time to make the next step into fully balanced 100% raw meals.
Whilst adding the raw food to their wet, we advise feeding a variation of animal meats always starting with chicken or turkey, again if you see they are consuming their raw, you can try some red meats such as beef, or pork. We also strongly advise feeding some heart throughout this process as its necessary if feeding a minced raw food or chunked as cats need higher amounts of taurine (heart contains a good amount of natural taurine) we don’t recommend synthetic taurine supplements.
If at any point you are really struggling you can try adding tinned sardine juice, tuna or warmed bone broths, which can be found here.
