Raw Cat Food and Bird Flu: What the FDA Has Actually Found

Raw feeding for cats was a niche argument about nutrition until the winter of 2024. By January 2025 the FDA was tracking H5N1 avian influenza in domestic and wild cats in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington that was associated with eating contaminated food. The argument is no longer mainly about nutrition. It is about a virus that kills up to 70 percent of the cats it infects, and about which processing steps stop it.

The short answer is that heat does, freezing does not, and the FDA now treats H5N1 as a hazard every covered manufacturer using uncooked poultry or cattle material has to plan for. The longer answer is worth having, because it tells you exactly which products the concern applies to and which it does not.

What H5N1 does to a cat

Cornell's Feline Health Center is blunt about the stakes: H5N1 "can cause serious, even life-threatening illness in cats," and up to 70 percent of infected cats die of the infection. Dogs can catch the virus too, but the FDA notes they usually show mild signs and low mortality, and at the time of its notices H5N1 had not been detected in dogs in the United States. This is a cat problem first.

The early signs are the ones any owner would dismiss for a day: fever, loss of appetite and lethargy. Cornell describes how quickly they can progress to discharge from the eyes and nose, sneezing, coughing, laboured breathing, and neurologic signs such as incoordination, tremors, seizures and blindness.

Cornell lists the known and suspected sources of feline infection as raw (unpasteurized) cow's milk, raw meat and poultry products, contact with infected livestock or poultry and their environments, wild birds, and infected people and their clothing. Food is only one route, but it is the one an owner fully controls.

The cases that tied it to the food bowl

The link is not theoretical. Three episodes in 2025 show how it was established.

Wild Coast Raw, March 2025. Wild Coast LLC of Olympia, Washington, recalled lots of its frozen Boneless Free Range Chicken Formula raw food for cats, sold in 16oz and 24oz tubs in Washington and Oregon. The recall followed sampling by the Oregon Department of Agriculture that found the same strain of H5N1 in affected cats and in the product, with further sampling by the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

Savage Cat Food, March 2025. Cornell's summary of a New York City Health Department report describes two presumptive cases and a third suspected case of H5N1 in city cats. Two were believed to have come from eating raw cat food made by Savage Cat Food. The third cat had not eaten it, but had been exposed to one of the cats that had.

RAWR Raw Cat Food Chicken Eats, September 2025. A cat in San Francisco ate product from lot CCS 25 093, fell ill with H5N1 and was euthanized. Whole genome sequencing by the USDA's National Veterinary Services Laboratories put the virus in the cat and in the open bag in the same cluster. The FDA then collected two retail samples of a different lot, CCS 25 077, and both were positive for influenza A, with sequencing on one confirming H5N1. The genotype was B3.13, which the FDA says had already been found in other brands of raw poultry-based pet food associated with illness or death in cats.

The detail in the RAWR notice that matters most for anyone with a freezer full of raw food is this one. The FDA states that the virus lineage involved was detected from about November to December 2024 and "is no longer circulating." A cat in 2025 was infected by virus from a lineage that had stopped circulating months earlier, carried in a frozen product with a sell-by date of October 2026. Freezing did not make that food safe. It kept it.

What the FDA now requires of manufacturers

On 17 January 2025, the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine determined that cat and dog food makers covered by the Preventive Controls for Animal Food rule, and using uncooked or unpasteurized materials from poultry or cattle, must reanalyze their food safety plans to include H5N1 as a "known or reasonably foreseeable hazard." The examples it gives are uncooked meat, unpasteurized milk and unpasteurized eggs. The agency reissued that notice on 30 September 2025 as a reminder ahead of the autumn migration season, when detections in wild birds and poultry flocks typically rise.

The FDA names two ways a manufacturer can control the hazard. One is a process control: a heat treatment step capable of inactivating the virus. The other is a supply-chain control that provides assurance the ingredients did not come from infected animals, with sourcing from healthy flocks and herds as part of it.

Read carefully, that requirement tells a buyer three things.

1. It is a planning requirement, not a product standard. The rule makes a covered manufacturer analyze the hazard and decide on a control. It does not publish a list of raw products that have passed anything.
2. It covers poultry and cattle material specifically. A raw formula built on those ingredients is squarely inside the concern. Other proteins are outside this notice, which is not the same as being cleared.
3. The process the FDA trusts is heat. The notice says H5N1 moves to cats and dogs through products that "have not undergone a processing step that is capable of inactivating the virus, such as pasteurizing, cooking or canning," and that heat treatments have been shown to inactivate H5N1 in meat, milk and egg products.

If a raw product's packaging describes a different kill step, such as high-pressure processing, that step is not among the ones the FDA's H5N1 notice names. Ask the manufacturer what evidence it holds for that process against H5N1 specifically, and treat an answer about bacteria as an answer to a different question.

Freeze-dried is still raw

It is easy to assume that freeze-dried raw food and freeze-dried treats sit in a safer category, because they are shelf-stable and do not look like raw meat. Cornell's advice closes that door directly. Its first protective step for owners is to refrain from feeding "raw (even freeze-dried raw) meat-based foods and treats and unpasteurized dairy products."

Freeze-drying removes water. It is not the heat treatment that the FDA's notice relies on, and the RAWR case shows frozen storage carrying the virus for months. A treat pouch in the cupboard deserves the same scrutiny as a tub in the freezer.

The bacterial risk was there before the virus

H5N1 made the headlines, but the FDA's position on raw pet food predates it. In a two-year surveillance study running from 2010 to 2012, the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine screened over 1,000 pet food samples. It added 196 commercially available raw dog and cat foods in the second year. Of those, 15 were positive for Salmonella and 32 were positive for Listeria monocytogenes.

Food type	Samples	Salmonella positive	Listeria positive
Raw dog and cat food	196	15	32
Dry cat food	120	1	0
Semi-moist cat food	120	0	0
Dry dog food	120	0	0
Jerky-type treats	190	0	0

Canned food was not part of that study. The FDA's conclusion from it is unusually direct for a regulator: "the single best thing you can do to prevent infection with these foodborne bacteria is to not feed your pet a raw diet."

A 2025 study from Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine, published in Communications Biology, found Salmonella, Cronobacter and E. coli in raw and partially cooked cat foods sold frozen, refrigerated and freeze-dried. Two findings from it bear directly on raw feeders. The team uploaded five Salmonella strains from the raw samples to the federal database used to match human salmonellosis cases, and some human cases were genetically very similar to them. And DNA fingerprinting showed some labels did not match the meat inside, including products containing chicken that was not listed. An owner choosing a non-poultry raw formula to sidestep bird flu is trusting a label that the study showed is not always accurate.

What to do with this

For a healthy cat on a commercial diet, the decision is not close. Feed cooked, canned or kibbled food. Cornell's list of protective steps starts with refraining from raw meat and unpasteurized dairy. The FDA asks owners to weigh the H5N1 risk carefully before feeding uncooked meat, and notes that both the CDC and the American Veterinary Medical Association discourage uncooked meat diets for pets. And the benefits owners usually want from raw feeding do not require it.

If moisture is the reason you feed raw, canned food delivers it, and canning is one of the three processes the FDA names as capable of inactivating the virus. The case for water in a cat's diet is set out in our wet vs dry cat food guide, and none of it depends on the food being uncooked.

If protein is the reason, compare on a dry matter basis before assuming raw wins. A canned food's guaranteed protein looks low only until the moisture is taken out, which reading the protein line on a cat food label walks through in two minutes.

If your cat is on raw now, move it across the way you would any diet change, over a week or more, rather than stopping one day and starting another. A cat that refuses the new food outright should go back to a familiar food rather than go hungry, and the schedule in switching a cat's food without GI upset applies. A cat with a medical condition that a diet is managing needs that change planned with its vet.

If you keep feeding raw regardless, the FDA's handling guidance is specific. Keep raw product frozen until use and thaw it in the refrigerator, never on the counter. Wash hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds after handling it. Do not rinse raw meat. Clean bowls, utensils and surfaces with hot soapy water, then disinfect with a solution of one tablespoon of bleach to one quart of water. Cover and refrigerate whatever the cat does not eat, or throw it out. The FDA also advises against letting a raw-fed cat lick your face, which matters most in a household with a baby, an older adult, a pregnant person or anyone immunocompromised. Raw meat is also one of the routes by which a cat picks up Toxoplasma, covered in our guide to litter and toxoplasmosis in pregnancy.

Check the lot numbers on anything already in the freezer against the FDA's recall and advisory pages, and keep the bag until it is finished so the lot code is available if a problem comes up. And keep the cat indoors and away from wild birds. Cornell's avian influenza resource page lists outdoor cats, farm cats and raw-fed cats among those at higher risk.

Questions people actually ask

Can cats get bird flu from raw cat food?

Yes. The FDA has linked H5N1 cases in cats to specific lots of raw cat food, including RAWR Raw Cat Food Chicken Eats lots CCS 25 093 and CCS 25 077 in September 2025, where genome sequencing matched the virus in a cat to the food it ate. Wild Coast Raw and Savage Cat Food products were also associated with feline cases in 2025.

Does freezing raw cat food kill H5N1?

No. In the RAWR case the virus came from a lineage the FDA says stopped circulating around December 2024, yet it infected a cat through a frozen product in 2025. The processes the FDA names as capable of inactivating the virus are pasteurizing, cooking and canning.

Is freeze-dried raw cat food safer?

Not for this purpose. Cornell's Feline Health Center advises owners to refrain from feeding raw meat-based foods and treats, and names freeze-dried raw explicitly. A 2025 Cornell study also found Salmonella and other bacteria in raw cat foods sold frozen, refrigerated and freeze-dried.

Is canned cat food safe from bird flu?

Canning is one of the processing steps the FDA names as capable of inactivating H5N1, along with cooking and pasteurizing. That is why the FDA's concern centres on uncooked and unpasteurized ingredients rather than on conventionally processed canned and dry foods.

Can dogs get bird flu from raw food too?

Dogs can be infected, but the FDA notes they usually show mild signs and low mortality compared with cats, and at the time of its notices H5N1 had not been detected in dogs in the United States. The bacterial risks of raw feeding apply to both species.

What are the signs of bird flu in a cat?

Fever, loss of appetite and lethargy early on, which can progress quickly to eye and nose discharge, sneezing, coughing, difficulty breathing and neurologic signs such as tremors, seizures, incoordination or blindness. Phone a vet immediately, before arriving, and say what the cat has eaten.

Sources

• FDA CVM: Cat and Dog Food Manufacturers Required to Consider H5N1 in Food Safety Plans (January 2025, reissued September 2025)
• FDA CVM: FDA Outlines Ways to Reduce Risk of HPAI in Cats
• FDA CVM: Tests Show H5N1 Contamination in Certain Lots of RAWR Raw Cat Food Chicken Eats
• FDA: Voluntary Recall of Wild Coast Raw Boneless Free Range Chicken Formula Raw Pet Food
• FDA: Get the Facts! Raw Pet Food Diets can be Dangerous to You and Your Pet
• FDA: Tips for Safe Handling of Pet Food and Treats
• Cornell Feline Health Center: H5N1 Avian Influenza and your cat
• Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine: Avian influenza resource center, cats and dogs
• Cornell Chronicle: Deadly pathogens found in commercial raw cat foods (September 2025)