As soon as they are weaned, healthy kittens should be started on raw food by feeding them chunks of meat, or even giving them a meaty poultry bone and letting them tear the food off, eating the cartilage and a bit of bone. This statement is a correction to what I wrote in an earlier article in which I recommended starting kittens on ground meat.
This morning, I reviewed a web site called pet-grub.com that is one of the many good reference sources about raw feeding. The owner ran a shelter for cats in the Philippines for a number of years and has a lot of expertise in the area of cat nutrition. That site posted a photo of a kitten easily devouring an entire fish. From there, I found a number of videos showing kittens easily dealing with large chunks of various types of meat.
Seeing those videos jogged my memory about the time that I hand fed a litter of six kittens whose mother mysteriously vanished one night and never returned. They were close to the weaning age, and so I only bottle fed them for about a week before they were ready for supplements of solid food.
Kittens in good health are voracious little monsters. Although tiny, nature has compensated for size by equipping them with teeth and claws that are needle sharp and well adapted to surviving that crucial period between kitten and adult cat. Anyone who has had a kitten climbing up their leg can attest to that. Although their capacity for food at each meal is limited, they do eat four to five times a day, managing to consume quite a bit of food.
The great thing about kittens ready for weaning is they are wide open to all kinds of food. Now is the time to introduce them a range of food so they will happily accept a range of foods when they are adults, instead of turning into finicky eaters who are addicted to a single type of food.
Raw chicken is a great starter food for kittens. Good quality chicken is easy to obtain and relatively inexpensive. You can give the kittens a raw wing, thigh, or drumstick and let them drag it around and gnaw on it as if it were prey. Chicken necks, being more cartilage than bone, are relatively soft for kittens to chew. They won't get much meat by they will get calcium while cleaning their teeth and gums.
I will end this article with the caution that cannot be overemphasized; never give you cats, cooked bone of any kind. Cooking hardens the bones in a way that makes it impossible to digest and can severely damage the digestive system
