jamest0o0
Chameleon Enthusiast
I can barely choke down liver with cartelized onions so the rest of the offal is out for me. There isn't enough Tapatio in the whole world.
Raw diets make a little bit of sense for cats who are obligate carnivores like most chameleons. There are two factors, one is taurine, an amino acid that can be lost during cooking. Cats can't make taurine like you and I can't make vitamin C. Without it they develop heart problems. However most commercial diets have it added back in. Canned food usually has more than dry. The other factor is that they need to eat the whole animal for complete nutrition and the modern chicken is a lot bigger than what they would tackle in the wild and so are its bones.
The biggest down side to raw diets is the possibility of diseases and parasites. Disease wise you know about toxoplasmosis and salmonella for the cats. Sure cats and dogs are easy to deworm compared to chameleons but some of the worms they could get from raw food are horrifying. I assisted in surgery where we had to remove a hydatid cyst (don't look it up I'm warning you-seriously) from a dog. It was supposed to be a tapeworm in a sheep or something and ended up in the dog from raw meat it ate. Liver flukes are the other awful raw food parasite that dogs can get. That's from raw fish, salmon or trout I think. It can be lethal if not treated in time.
So cat's I might feed raw but dogs I would never. I'm sure some people do it and it's worked out fine so far but me, for my dogs, no, never.
PS. Dogs are not obligated carnivores as they can make some use of plants on their own. They aren't omnivores by any means but are closer than cats.
Happy to see your response. I read into raw for a while with cats/dogs... after some time on facebook my !BS! Detector started going crazy on those cult-like groups. People claiming their cat poop no longer had a smell and that they never pooped because it was all going to energy. While there was small partial truths to this, these people were lunatics that had no understanding of how digestion works. To them, raw feeding cures literally any problem. I have no problem with it, but I have a problem with misinformation.