Sunshine, I am not arguing with you about cats' abilities to eat raw meat and love it. But the world we live in is, yick, dirty and toxic.

i know about all the problems with dry cat food, which is why we feed the cat table scraps. she eats some dry food, but mostly waits for her turn after dinner for her portion. The new cat too, eating some dry food, but mostly chicken and whatever else we eat... cooked.

Years ago, that cat I loved and lost in NYC, I used to give him raw chicken livers which he absolutely loved, suppose to be real good for the cats too. I tried that with this cat months ago and she snubbed them. I don't think it's a personality issue as much as it is a quality issue. You are what you eat, the cats too. And if their bowls are filled daily with heavy duty hormone fed and antibiotic fed raw meats they are sure to develop problems downline. cooking destoys a lot of the properties of the chemicals as well as bacteria and other toxins. In the wild, animals do have a better immune system against certain things, like dogs and even my cat will lap up water from a puddle and not seem to suffer any side effects. but 'seem' is a key word here. First off, your cats are not feral cats and probably don't have as much natural resistance as you want to believe. Second, there are parasites and dogs and cats are well known to proliferate in that area for that very reason. Lots of dogs die of heartworms for instance. I had a dog once that pooped out an enormous tapeworm. it was lovely. they get this stuff from puddles and hunted prey.

Which leads me to another issue. In the wild, prey takes two forms, healthy and unhealthy. Predator animals do not discriminate between healthy prey and unhealthy prey. you'll notice that predators generally prey most on young or weak animals because healthy animals are a lot harder to bring down. young is one thing, weak is another. the slow squirrel may be slow for reasons other than not being sure which way to run. he may be sick for instance. The mouse or rat your cat drags in may not have even been killed by him, it might have died on it's own for other reasons. It might be slow and sick because it ate the posion that your neighbor's left by the garbage can or the bird they catch might have a virus and is sitting still for a reason, hard to say..

If we lived in a perfect world I would agree with you wholeheartedly but much to my dismay I discovered, many times the hard way and with many tears over the years, that that unfortunately isn't so.