Cat raw feeding: Breeds and ability to process raw?

Doubtful, cats have been domesticated for centuries, but commercial cat food has been around nowhere near as long. It's been around perhaps a hundred years give or take? That's not enough time to cause any major changes in physiology where an animal can't handle raw food at all. You need many generations to create that change. Considering that many gets still eat a combination of raw and processed food there shouldn't be a selection pressure towards only being able to eat cooked food, and it wouldn't be beneficial to the cat to do away with digesting raw food even if they didn't have raw in such a short amount of time. Evolution can occur in a matter of decades, but what you're looking at takes quite a few generations, and the factors you are looking at haven't really been going on for that long at all in evolutionary terms.

Nah, I think it takes more along the lines of hundreds of years to adapt. Look at humans. We've been eating junk food for many many years and it's still really unhealthy for us :)

The sad part is that commercially available dog food isn't really tested or researched well. They don't test a food for the life of an animal before putting it on the market. They don't even test it at all in many cases. In some cases the only testing they do is to take a handful of dogs and make sure the majority of them don't lose too much weight or die during the several weeks they are on the testing diet. They just make an educated (or sometimes even un-educated) guess and throw it out there for us. Back in the 30s a guy called Pottenger did some research on a cooked diet versus a raw diet and found that his cats fed cooked rabbits suffer similar illnesses and diseases to humans and that cats few raw rabbits were much healthier, reproduced better, etc. It wasn't the most scientific study I would imagine but I think it's important to note that a cooked food must lose some nutritional value during the process. I suspect at this point most commercially available foods provide enough supplements to cover the shortfalls..

Agree with Field Biologist especially since in the case of your cat's breed, the Skogkatten were pretty much all living outside or indoor /outdoor and were hunting their own prey along with being fed , until just 30 some years ago and some of them later than that. i don't think that is nearly enough time for so huge an evolutionary change.

Cats for example have not grown a long digestive tract, They are still very much built as carnivores and predators.

Not true at all. But if you are gonna feed totally raw - research it and be sure the cat gets everything it needs - not a matter of just giving it raw meat and nothing else added.

We feed our cats dry, cannned and raw with no problems - one is a domestic shorthair mix and the others are Ocicats.

You can feed your Wegie raw or at least add it in gradually. Some cats don't like raw and you can always partially cook the meat and then cut up in bite size pieces and let cool and give them "rare" meat.