In the summer of 2001, my mom called in a panic and said "Is your vet still open?" It was Saturday and the vets in her town were closed. "Why," I said. She said a kitten had crawled out of the woods near her house and was in terrible shape. He was barely breathing and had punctures all over his body. It looked as though he had been attacked by a wild animal. I put the 911 call into Dr. Chris, my vet, while she sped down from Poland Springs with the dying kitten.

BEFORE

Mom showed up with the tiny gray kitten, looking dead in a basket. He weighed a little less than a pound and was in terrible shape. He was starved and dehydrated. He was very young, maybe 6 weeks old, but in his starved and lifeless condition it was impossible to tell. He had not been attacked, but had leaches and cutarebra worms burrowing into his flesh. This helpless kitten had obviously been abandoned some weeks earlier to get in this kind of shape. Dr. Chris removed the worms and leaches, dosed him up with antibiotics, and I took the tiny kitten home.

For the first 5 days, the weak kitten could only suck cream off a cloth. He couldn't pick himself up to eat. As soon as he could eat I fed him all the best commercial kitten foods. He had a long course of antibiotics to recover from the infection the parasites had caused. Slowly, his health improved and he gained some weight. I named him Baby Sweetie, or B.S. for short.

A few months later I took him to get fixed. Soon after, he came down with a high fever, another infection, and more antibiotics. When he was feeling better, I took him back to Dr. Chris to get checked, and he was well enough to be vaccinated. Again, he came down with another unexplained fever &ldots; more antibiotics.

Everything was good for a while. B.S. gained weight and terrorized his older brothers. Although he was very small, about half the size of my other cats, he seemed to have overcome his hard start in life.

One day I noticed he hadn't eaten or gone outside. He looked sick and cried if he was touched. This time the fix would be surgery to remove a bowel obstruction of unknown origin. Dr. Chris was not optimistic after seeing enlarged lymph nodes during surgery. He said "B.S. may have FIP (feline infectious peritonitis) or feline leukemia." Both feline diseases are fatal, but the FIP was particularly insidious -- barely testable, non-treatable and incurable. Whatever the root cause, the vet's prognosis was not good.

I left the office in tears. I didn't want the Baby Sweetie to die. I had done everything I could to restore his health. I felt hopeless. The FIP test would take weeks to come back. If he did have FIP, there was nothing Dr. Chris could do for him. He would just die a painful death or be put to sleep.

In my desperation, I began searching for alternative treatments, anything to help him. I came across a web site in Australia where a holistic vet was having some success treating FIP infected cats with mega-doses of Vitamin C and raw meat. Her treatments were based on her belief was that many feline diseases are actually massive vitamin/protein deficiencies resulting from low quality cooked cat foods. Wild cats are the apex of the animal kingdom's food chain. They are the only obligate carnivores -- they have to eat meat, and only eat meat in the wild. Other than their smaller size, domestic cats are identical to their wild cousins. It seemed logical that domestic cats need more high-quality protein in their diets than they are getting in commercial cat foods made with waste products and grain.

I began to think maybe the B.S. needed some type of super nutrition. When he was a kitten and should have been getting super-nutrition from his mother's milk, he was enduring neglect and starvation. I read more and more information about the horrible stuff used in commercial cat foods and the diet related diseases plaguing cats through out the country. The "best" canned kitten food hadn't seemed to help the Baby Sweetie one bit.

AFTER

I came to the conclusion that I had nothing to lose with trying the biologically-appropriate food approach with Baby Sweetie. Dr. Chris figured I would kill him feeding him raw chicken. Half of my college-educated brain was listening to Dr. Chris, but the other half of my college-educated brain kept saying "cats don't have stoves". I was sure I could make him better food than the "nutritionally complete" canned foods made with animal waste, 4-D meat, dyes and preservatives. I took a leap of faith and started feeding him raw food.

I burned up a few Cuisinarts making him "wild" cat food. Many batches found their way to the trash, as my test subjects turned their noses up at a formula with too much of this or of that. But, slowly I figured it out. I used all organic chicken or fish, brewers yeast, flax seed, lecithin, kelp, kale, carrots, apples, blueberries, all kinds of vitamins. I started adding lots of clams as the natural source of Taurine, an amino acid that cats can't synthesize on there own and is found only in muscle meat and shellfish. Mollusks, like clams, have the highest density of the essential amino acids that are the backbone of feline health.

When the test came back Baby did not have FIP, but his immune system was clearly compromised. It has been two years since Baby Sweetie, and the other three kitties have been on the "Wild Kitty" diet. Baby Sweetie has not been sick again. None of my cats have ever shown any ill effects of eating raw food, in fact quite the opposite. It's hard to explain, but they look wide awake. The food has transformed them into their ultimate cat selves.

  Baby Sweetie's blood tests are no longer that of a sick kitty. Although the little terror is tiny, he has a beautiful, luminous coat and bright, shiny eyes. He is no longer a weak and ailing kitten, but the picture of health. I will never really know why Baby Sweetie got better, or why he was sick in the first place, but his raw diet was the key to his recovery.

My cats are my children. They are less troublesome than regular children and more affectionate. When preparing meals for my family, I take great care in buying fresh quality ingredients. A healthy human diet contains a minimum amount of processed foods, and a plentiful amount of fresh, whole foods. Would you feed your children an uninterrupted diet of highly-processed junk food with no fresh meats or vegetables? Then why would you do that to your cat?”

Stephanie Nadeau

888-733-1033 / 207-985-3038 (fax)