Is Licious raw chicken safe for cats?

Short answer: Licious is a better-than-average way to buy chicken, and that genuinely matters. But the question hiding inside this one is raw versus cooked, not which brand. Raw poultry carries Salmonella and Campylobacter at rates no supplier can drive to zero, because they are part of the bird, not a failure of the shop. We cook it.

Separate the two questions

People asking this are usually asking two things at once, and they have different answers.

Is this a good source of chicken? Broadly, yes. A cold chain that holds, a traceable supply, no re-freezing, no wet-market handling — those are real advantages over an unrefrigerated counter, and they are exactly why we tell people to buy from a supplier who can tell you where the meat came from.

Is raw chicken safe for a cat? That is a different question, and the supplier does not decide it.

Why sourcing does not solve the pathogen problem

Wondering how this applies to your own pet? Build their bowl — two minutes, and it gives the exact grams for their weight.

Salmonella and Campylobacter live in the intestinal tract of healthy poultry and reach the carcass during processing. This happens in every abattoir in the world, at every price point. Careful handling lowers the load; it does not eliminate it. That is why food-safety guidance everywhere — for humans — is to cook poultry through rather than to buy better poultry.

So the honest framing is: a premium supplier removes the spoilage and adulteration risks. It does not remove the microbiological one. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What the risk looks like in a house, not a lab

Healthy adult cats do clear these organisms more often than not. The two things that get underweighted:

Shedding. A cat that eats raw poultry can shed viable bacteria in its faeces and on its fur for days, whether or not it looks ill. In a house with a toddler, an elderly parent or anyone immunosuppressed — which describes a great many Indian households — the exposure is not confined to the cat.
The dog-side signal. Raw chicken consumption has been associated with acute polyradiculoneuritis in dogs, a paralysing condition linked to Campylobacter. It is uncommon. It is also severe, and it is the sort of low-probability, high-cost outcome that we think argues for cooking.

The nutritional argument is a wash, and that decides it

The usual defence of raw is that cooking destroys nutrients. Some of that is true — thiamine is heat-labile, and it is destroyed by cooking. But thiamine is short in every home-cooked bowl regardless, which is why a corrected bowl supplies it deliberately rather than hoping the meat carried it through. And raw fish and shellfish carry thiaminase, an enzyme that destroys thiamine outright, so raw is not reliably the thiamine-sparing option either.

Meanwhile the minerals — calcium, zinc, iodine, selenium — do not care whether you cooked the meat. They were never there in sufficient quantity to begin with. Cooking costs you a vitamin you were going to have to supply anyway, and buys you the removal of a pathogen risk you cannot otherwise remove. That trade is not close.

If you cook it, cook it properly. Chicken through to the centre, no pink, no rare. Then let it cool — cats will not eat food at serving temperature and hot food is a burn risk. Bones out: cooked bone splinters, and we do not use bone in the bowl at all.

What we actually do

Our base is fresh, boneless, cooked muscle meat — chicken, mutton, farmed fish, egg. Boneless because cooked bone is a hazard and raw bone is a different set of risks. Cooked because the pathogen argument is one-sided. Then the residual micronutrient gaps get closed by weight-dosed sachets rather than by hoping the ingredients happened to cover them.

Every gap is measured against NRC 2006.

Build your pet's bowl →