How to prepare raw veggies for your cat or dog

The best ways to prepare vegetables at home to obtain optimal nutritional value for your pet. 

The best possible way to prepare highly nutritious vegetables and fruits is to put them, in their raw state, through a juicing machine.  A juicing machine completely crushes the plant material, squeezes out the juice and forms a highly nutritious pulp loaded with nutrients.  The better quality the juicing machine,  the more nutrients are extracted from the plant cells. 

As the teeth of cats and dogs are not built for grinding down plant material, completely crushed, is the one form of vegetable and fruit matter where all of the nutrients have the opportunity to be absorbed from the gut into the bloodstream. Author of, ‘Give a dog a bone,’ strongly suggests this method in order to extract the maximum benefit for our cats and dogs. (Billinghurst 1993)  If a juicer is not available, a meat grinder does a similar job, the difference being that the juice is not separated in the process (Arora 2006).  Juicing or grinding ensures that the vegetable matter closely resembles the plant material our cats and dogs would consume in the wild from the gut of a herbivore prey animal.  If the plant material is not thoroughly pulped into the digestible form that would be found in a prey animal, the nutrients are lost as simply roughage through the gut.  (Schultze 1998).

Optimally, fruits and vegetables should be organic.  This ensures that they do not contain toxic chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides.  Organic produce is also known to be higher in nutritional value than their non-organic, genetically engineered counterparts. (Goldstein 2005)

Freshly juiced vegetable pulp contains fibre, water, minerals, enzymes, vitamins, carbohydrates, anti-oxidants, essential fatty acids and some protein.  To benefit ourselves and our pets we can juice the vegetables, give the pulp material to them with a little of the juice and drink the rest of the juice ourselves.  Once juiced, vegetable and fruit juice and pulp breaks down very quickly.  As a result the pulp and the juice should be consumed soon after processing.  It should not be stored and preferably used on the same day in which it is made (Billinghurst 1993).

The next best option to prepare our pets vegetables is to grate them as finely as possible. This can be done by hand or better still, through a food processor.  (Martin 2008)  This would expose some of the nutrients for absorption, however most of the nutrients will unfortunately be lost through the digestive tract.  Grated vegetables are not of much value to cats and dogs as most of the cell walls remain intact. (Billinghurst 1993) 

Without a juicing machine, this is still the next best method of preparing plant material, however much of what is given to our cats and dogs using this method is wasted.  From an economical point of view, it would be cheaper, long term, to invest in a high quality juicing machine.  At least this way we know that all of the plant nutrients is going to be available for digestion rather than being a form of roughage.

The third choice is to finely chop the vegetables or to steam them.  As cats and dogs cannot digest cellulose (the material plant cell walls are made of), any plant cells, which remain intact, will be wasted.  In fact if chunks of vegetables are given to our pets; 99% of the nutrients are lost, undigested.  Cooking, however does break open all cell walls of the vegetables.  The only problem is that during the cooking process most of the nutrients and enzymes are destroyed in the high temperature of the surrounding water (Billinghurst 1993).

Whilst dogs are easily adapted to raw vegetables, cats being incredibly fussy, prove to quite a challenge.   Author of ‘The Holistic Cat,’ recommends trialling cats on cooked pureed vegetables.  They can be bought, already prepared as organic baby food in jars.  Popular baby food includes pureed pumpkin, carrots, wintersquash, green peas and sweet potato.  (Coscia 2009)

From personal experience with my two extremely fussy eighteen year old cats, they have until now, both enjoyed in particular the pumpkin and the green peas mixed into their meat, ground up bone and supplement mix.  Slowly, I have been also introducing juiced parsley, alfalfa and fresh wheat grass to their food.  Its not easy finding food for our cats that is healthy, raw and palatable to them.  However, due to this particular author’s advice I have at last achieved my cats willingly eating vegetables even if they are cooked.

It is advisable, no matter what the method is of introducing vegetables and fruit, it should be done gradually to avoid any stomach upsets, wind and diarrhoea.  It is strongly advisable though, no matter what, to persevere with fresh plant material in the diet of our cats and dogs as it (along with other benefits) greatly assists in preventing and treating degenerative diseases. (Billinghurst 1993)