★★★★★
I fed my cats a homemade diet following Dr Pitcarin's recipes and then later branching out on my own, starting when they were around 6 years old and 4 (a male and female). At the time, we had also moved to FL, and I started incorporating garlic (and the citrus fur rub) to stop the fleas. It worked, and I had fed them a steady diet which included fresh, minced garlic.
I started out giving them a pinch's worth of garlic (literally, pinching off a bit from a clove), and then gave them a little more, about a 1/2 clove daily in their shared food. Of course, be prepared for your cats to fight you on this - they will fling the pieces and eat the food quite carefully around it, in the beginning (who does eat raw garlic like apples?), but they will get some of the juices and some pieces will make their way in, maybe a meal that they'd eat in 2 minutes will be gone in 3 hours. They became accustom to it (so much so, when I started chopping garlic, they knew food was on its way and very excited, and I'd giving them varying flows of garlic depending upon their health, the season, parasites, etc. I treated it as a medicine, together always with raw carrots, and they did eat it daily.
I never blended the garlic in a food processor or blender because that's far too severe in terms of the garlic juice and oil that's released. I just chopped. Anyway, my cats lived to 17 and 16.5 years old. No worms, no fleas (I would leash walk them around, and travel with them), very healthy, just with a garlic breath kisses.
My 16.5 year old cat (who started eating garlic and homemade food when he was 4) could have lived longer, I know. He only passed away due to the food recall on science diet, which gave him liver cancer. I fed him that for a week while I was undergoing my finals in my graduation year at college, and I thought that it would be okay for a few days. Never again - I learned my lesson - he was completely healthy and bouncy, and became poisoned and dead within two and a half weeks. The vets I brought him to, just told me it was a shame, but "he's an old cat anyway".
