>After spending several months trying to adhere to a 100-mile diet, I started to consider the source of the food I feed my cats. (This reflection was also spurred by the melamine scare.)

I came across a website by a proponent of the BARF diet (Biologically Appropriate Raw Food). Cats, after all, are obligate carnivores. They eat nothing but meat in the wild. Raw meat. Raw meat with the bones, and eyeballs, and spleens and everything.

Now I am feeding them ground raw chicken with a variety of supplements added in. (You can read the recipe here.) Bean, my dog-trapped-in-a-cat’s-body, loves it. Her Highness Miss Buggerina will not eat it by itself, but will eat it if mixed with canned cat food. Bug had been quite sluggish and obese, but after a month on this diet she has lost significant weight and is much more active and playful. She’s even hunting again, after a hiatus of several years! Bean’s skin allergies are clearing up.

It’s a minor pain in the butt, but worth it for my “babies.”