I bought drumsticks, carved the raw meat off with great difficulty (unlike the ease of so doing after cooking), kept the meat to stir fry for a salad, and gave the drumsticks to my cat and kitten. Suspicious and hesitant at first, they soon fell in love with the things. The only problem was that they carried the bloody bones about the living room, leaving them in random places after they were done, and I had to go looking for them so that I wouldn’t discover them a week later . Plus, they left raw chicken juice on the floor here and there, and bits of bloody raw meat or bone or cartilage stuck in the cat’s nap box’s liner rug, which I then had to wash. Oh, and one day I came home to find that Maya had actually broken one of the big thigh bones in half – how, I do not know.
It was a good idea, the raw, meaty bones, and the cats loved them, but it is a tad messy if you don’t have a restricted, non-carpeted area like a balcony to feed them on.
On another note, scientists have supposedly found a flawed gene in cats which prevents them from tasting sweets. They then surmise that this is what makes them finicky eaters, and even go so far as to claim that this drove them toward a purely carnivorous diet, although this logic is flawed; it could be that once already purely carnivorous, the mutation of this gene was not selected against as it would be in an omnivorous population; i.e., not all traits are adaptive – they merely have to genetically paired with an adaptive trait, or not be counter-adaptive, or occur in a nonselective environment (low threat), to survive.
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/07/25/feline.sweet.gene.ap/index.html