Keep talking about the different raw options. One of these days SOMETHING is going to click for me. Ground raw sounds waaaaay more up my alley! I'd like to try a brand that I can purchase at a store first...to see how well raw is accepted. And get me used to it.
There are a few reasons that I choose to feed ground instead of frankenprey. I was feeding ground in the beginning because I was worried about balance and with ground food, I could use a premix to make sure she was getting everything she needed. Once I gained a little confidence, I swapped to frankenprey and she ate that for more than a year. I swapped back to ground by no choice of my own. One of my younger cousins got food poisoning (from a restaurant, not from my house, I am very fastidious and she hadn't been there for months) and when her parents brought her over, they started to freak out about the raw chicken thigh sitting on a plate by the refrigerator. That got pretty much the whole family started and the family member I live with insisted that I either put her back on canned food, or find a new place to live.
He changed his mind after about a month and a half, because he couldn't stand the litterbox smell when she was eating canned (there is virtually no odor at all when she is eating raw)
but was adamant that I had to feed her the ground because he didn't want her dragging raw chicken pieces across his floor.
After a while, I was thinking about pushing to get her back on frankenprey for her dental health, but after further research, decided that I am just not comfortable with that. Yes, cats eat whole prey in the wild, but their natural prey items are things like mice, squirrels, songbirds, and lizards. They might get the occasional rabbit. All of these things have much smaller bones than a grocery store chicken or turkey, so I am not confident about letting Amber eat bones that are so large. I would be fine with something like small quail and cornish hens, but both of those things are expensive and not readily available to me, and amber won't touch whole mice. She might eat them ground, but putting a rodent in my food processor is where I draw the line.
Also, I don't necessarily buy into the idea that ground needs supplements but frankenprey doesn't. If you use the 80:10:10(5:5) ratio when grinding the food, it contains the exact same things in it that a frankenprey diet does. Why would this have a negative effect on anything, except dental health? I do not understand. I feel like if the ingredients are the same, either both need the supplements or neither one does. I feel that it is probably the latter, but I supplement anyway, for peace of mind.