MEATY SHAKES

My Meaty Shake bottle

Just weaned! Rey is VERY happy with her Meaty Shake!!!

One of my most useful and life-saving discoveries is what I call the Meaty Shake. Out of total desperation, I decided to experiment with raw meat one day. I had an entire litter of kittens with digestive and nutrient absorption disorders, and they were dying one after the other. They wouldn't eat anything, and whatever they did eat came out in the same form it went in. I had one of these babies left and was determined to keep him alive....

The vet said to give him whatever I wanted, to experiment, that there was nothing to lose. My idea was to get as many different kinds of raw meat as possible and to make a baby kitten shake with them. I blended them all together with a bit of multi-vitamin, probiotics and nutritional yeast....and my little monkey went to town. He sucked down that Meaty Shake as if he hadn't eaten in weeks (he hadn't)! And it digested! And he gained weight, and he survived!!!!!! It was nothing short of a miracle.

Since then, I've weaned all my babies on Meaty Shakes. Most hand-raised babies don't thrive the way they do with their cat moms, and take a lot longer to grow. The Meaty Shake seems to help them along their way and to gain weight an develop more easily. It can be fed by syringe, or (my favorite) a bottle with the nipple cut short and slit down the sides. I add whatever is necessary--formula, vitamins... Of course, there is the risk of transmitting salmonella when feeding raw meat, but I do believe the benefit of keeping more babies alive outweighs this risk.

The other benefits of weaning on Meaty Shakes are cost-effectiveness (I buy scraps from the butcher for about $0.80/3 NIS/kg), knowing what goes in your baby's stomach (gotta say that canned food freaks me out a bit), fridge-life (most of my kittens won't eat canned food that's been in the fridge for more than a day), and skipping out on meats that I don't want to buy (see my post "Cat Food and Slavery").