Guide
BARF means feeding a cat raw meat, raw meaty bones and organs in the proportions that reconstruct the make-up of prey. This guide walks the whole road in the order that makes sense: whether it is worth it at all, how to run the transition, what has to add up in the bowl, and where to go next.
Eleven articles, each built on peer-reviewed research and fully cited. From the decision to the first balanced bowl.
Stage 1
What raw food actually changes inside a cat, and how digestion differs between raw meat, cooked meat and kibble.
What BARF really is, what it's made of, and which nutrients you must not miss. A science-based guide to a cat's raw diet — from philosophy to your first recipe.
10 minFive studies, three species, one consensus: raw and cooked meat beat kibble on digestibility by 5-15 percentage points. The problem lies in extrusion.
11 minStage 2
Four to eight weeks, one new ingredient at a time — and what to do with a cat that “will not eat that”.
Switching from dry food to BARF usually takes 4–8 weeks. The route through wet food is the gentlest, but not the only one. One new ingredient every 3–5 days, never by starving — and the hardest stage last: supplements.
10 minYour cat refuses new food not out of fussiness — evolution programmed it during the first 8 weeks of life. What Bradshaw, Wyrwicka, Becques and Stasiak reveal about the critical window of the feline palate.
11 minA 2022 study: a cat's nose chooses warm food before the tongue gets a chance to taste it. 37°C — a mouse's body temperature — is the evolutionarily ideal temperature for a feline meal.
9 minStage 3
The parameters BARF stands or falls on: calcium to phosphorus, protein to fat, bones.
Calcium to phosphorus at 1.15:1 — the single most important metric of a BARF diet. When it drifts, bones soften, the jaw flexes, the kitten stops growing. And how to prevent it.
9 minA food with 30% protein can deliver only 26% of its energy as protein. Why the protein-to-fat ratio — not the number on the label — is what matters in a cat's diet, and how to calculate it.
11 minA cat has no "protein brake" like a human or a dog. Its liver enzymes run at maximum intensity regardless of the diet — and when protein runs short, the body breaks down its own muscle to make glucose for the brain. 50 years of research show that the minimums on the label are not enough.
7 minDr. Lonsdale's Raw Meaty Bones are a return to nature — chicken necks, rabbit ribs, natural dental hygiene. A list of safe bones and how to introduce them.
8 minStage 4
Whole prey and the cooked variant — two roads for those who already have the basics behind them.
Whole prey for the house cat: chicks, quail, mice, small fish. A perfectly balanced meal without a calculator — and no excuses for the feline instinct.
8 minBACF is the cooked version of classic BARF for animals that refuse raw meat. Critical rules: never cook bones, never cook supplements, +50% taurine.
4 minBARF calculator
Neither the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio nor the liver cap can be judged by eye. The calculator works out the portion and the nutrient coverage for one specific cat, showing every variable and its source.
Open the calculatorUsually four to eight weeks, and with fussy cats two to three months. There is more than one route. The gentlest, especially with a cat deeply attached to kibble, runs through wet food, then lightly seared meat, and on to raw. Plenty of owners, though, go straight from wet food to raw meat, mixing the two in one bowl and raising the raw share a little every day. Young cats, in turn, that have not yet settled into a feeding routine can accept raw meat overnight.
With a young cat – sometimes. With a cat used to one food – rarely. A new ingredient is introduced slowly (often every three to five days), so that any diarrhoea or allergic reaction points us straight at the culprit. One thing holds whichever route you take: the cat must never be starved into the change. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours without food can cause hepatic lipidosis, or fatty liver — a life-threatening condition.
Not yet. Meat alone, even with bones and organs, does not cover the body's full requirement. The diet is closed off by supplements: haemoglobin, seaweed, yeast or calcium carbonate. This is usually the hardest stage of the whole transition, because those supplements carry an intense, distinctive smell that can put a cat off a bowl it had already accepted. So they go in exactly as slowly as the meat did: one at a time, in micro-doses, raised over time to the target amounts.
The target is somewhere around 1.15:1, with 1:1 to a maximum of 1.5:1 considered the safe range. It is an absolutely critical parameter for a cat's kidneys and skeleton. It is also one of those factors that physically cannot be judged “by eye” – which is why a BARF diet is always worked out with a calculator and the recipe counted exactly, not estimated by the handful.
Five percent of the total mixture at most. Liver is the diet's main source of vitamin A, and vitamin A accumulates in the body. An excess of it (hypervitaminosis) is toxic and leads, among other things, to severe, painful degeneration of the joints and spine. This is emphatically not an ingredient where “more means better” applies.
It does not have to be. The cooked variant (sometimes called BACF — Biologically Appropriate Cooked Food) is a separate, safe and documented road. For some owners and some cats (those with reduced immunity or intestinal problems, for instance) it is a far calmer solution. It does demand different knowledge, though: bones must never be added to cooked food (heat makes them brittle, they break into sharp splinters and can perforate the intestine), and cooking destroys part of the taurine, which calls for more careful supplementation.
