SPRINGBORO, Pa. — Even rabbits can’t breed fast enough for Tracy Murphy’s customers.

At Hare Today, her small farm here, Mrs. Murphy spends seven days a week slaughtering, packing and shipping rabbit. She’s buying rabbit herds from neighbors and building an extra shelter to boost capacity to 500 female breeders from 200. Her freezers — two walk-ins and a bank of industrial units in a converted garage — are chockablock with whole four-pound rabbits, ground meat in five-pound tubes and sticks of jerky.

"When she started, I thought she was nuts," says her husband, Patrick. "Two years later, I quit my job to work for her."

Mrs. Murphy’s frozen-bunny concern caters to cat owners — and business is booming. While rabbit isn’t an everyday human dish, at least in the U.S., its lean meat and mild flavor piques the feline palate. Lately, cats are gobbling up rabbits almost as quickly as Hare Today’s chest-high grinders can reduce them to a crunchy mince.

A fringe contingent of cat owners has long rejected branded kibble in favor of raw rabbits, chickens, mice and other small animals. But interest has surged this year following the discovery that wheat gluten from a Chinese supplier adulterated with the industrial chemical melamine had made its way into dozens of brands of commercial cat and dog foods. The Food and Drug Administration recorded 17,000 complaints within several weeks of the first announcement in March. Some 4,000 were reports of pet deaths.

"All of a sudden, the idea of making your own food didn’t seem so insane," says Anne Jablonski, who works for the federal government and also runs catnutrition.org, an online collection of raw-feeding advice. Ms. Jablonski and other proponents point out that cats, in their natural environment, are carnivores that eat animals raw. So they shouldn’t eat bits of meat padded out with grains and cooked in cans or baked into kibble.

By biological design, a cat "is lacking the ability to process those carbs efficiently," says Lisa Pierson, a Los Angeles-area veterinarian who switched her own cats to raw food nearly five years ago. In felines, carbohydrates contribute to obesity, diabetes and related diseases, says Dr. Pierson, who gives nutrition pointers on catinfo.org2. "What we are doing to our pets is basically right in step with what humans are doing to themselves in terms of nutrition."

At Hare Today, Mrs. Murphy estimates she’s selling about 1,000 pounds of raw rabbit each week. Her sales are up about 20% since the pet-food recall. Wholefoods4Pets, a Washington state rabbitry, charges $6.10 for two pounds of coarsely ground rabbit ("includes head, bones, organ meats," according to its Web site). Its proprietor, Mary Whitney, says she "hasn’t even stopped to think" how much more she’s selling since March. "I lost customers because I had to put them on hold."

Kelley Foust had been feeding his cats Eukanuba from a can for years. Last November, Racer and Bullseye — previously "the picture of health," he says — began vomiting. Their kidneys failed. He tried different foods and medication, racking up $2,600 in veterinary bills. In March, Mr. Foust saw the Eukanuba he had been buying on the recall list. "I had been feeding them poisoned food," he says. "It’s not an easy thing to go through. I’ve cried, I’ve lost sleep."

A spokesman for Procter & Gamble Co., the maker of Eukanuba, says the company is individually addressing customer concerns.

Now, Mr. Foust buys four whole, skinned rabbits each month. Once a week, he defrosts one, chops it into a dozen pieces and puts it into a grinder. One rabbit, mixed with supplements including vitamins and raw organic egg yolk, serves the pair for a week. Mr. Foust’s cats are energetic again, he says.

Many vets are wary of raw feeding. The American Veterinary Medical Association urges caution. The FDA says raw diets may be nutritionally incomplete. There’s also the risk of transmitting bacteria to humans. In a newsletter, the agency warned owners who use such food: "Don’t allow your pet to lick your face right after it has eaten."

Pet-food industry representatives say commercial feed is safe and carefully formulated by veterinary nutritionists. They characterize the recall as an aberration. Duane Ekedahl, president of the Pet Food Institute, an industry trade group, says commercial brands’ sales are recovering. Cat- and dog-food sales in the U.S. topped $5.1 billion last year, not including figures from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to Information Resources Inc.

Raw feeders tout rabbit as ideal for cats because it’s more substantial and cheaper to breed than the archetypal mouse. It’s relatively low in fat. More subjectively, they say, cats eat it up.

"The biggest problem is that once people start feeding rabbit, [the cats] don’t want anything else," says Sandy Arora, an educator in central Virginia, who runs a cat nutrition forum, Holisticat.com, where about 200 paying subscribers swap recipes and equipment tips.

Raw-feeding owners share a certain dedication to the regimen. Some fill freezers with shipments from companies such as Hare Today and RodentPro.com. Animals, when thawing, may seep. Making the raw food, owners say, requires bleach for sanitizing, as well as fortitude. Dr. Pierson, the veterinarian, says she felt queasy "the first time I sent a rabbit head through the grinder."

Holisticat’s Ms. Arora is a vegetarian, but feeds her cats mice, rats, rabbits, Cornish game hen, quail, pheasant and chicken. For Thanksgiving she buys Missy, Pigpen, Trikki and Puma a small heritage-breed turkey from a nearby farmer. She hews larger animals into pieces or grinds them. Smaller creatures go on a tarp on her kitchen floor. Pigpen doesn’t care for mouse tails, so Ms. Arora snips them off.

Rabbit is pricey compared with cans, kibble and even other raw meat. Bev Nelson of McKeesport, Pa., stopped using commercial cat foods after the March recall, first borrowing some chicken from a raw-feeding friend. Mitsy, her Siamese-Burmese, initially turned up its nose. Soon, Mitsy and Ms. Nelson’s other cats were hooked.

That went double for rabbit. They "went nuts," she says. But at $21 for her two-pound order — about $3 a pound, plus shipping — she says she told a pair of her cats, " ‘You two had better get a job.’ "