I'm starting to think I'm just not feeding him enough. He doesn't have set meals, I give him a big bowl of food and he picks at it throughout the day. He doesn't actually eat much on his own. When he does go to eat, he has the tiniest amount. Can someone please just tell me what's the best thing to feed him. I've been giving him raw chicken muscle meat mixed with kibble and last night I gave him just raw chicken and raw egg. When we got him he was eating chicks and biscuit (the bowls were next to each other). I'm really quite confused.
I should give him raw meat and it should include bones and skin etc, but I should also boil the bones to make them soft? Doesn't that just cook the meat? I am very confused as to what I should be feeding him and in what quantities?
Edit; I just found worm eggs in his poo. It looks like hookworm. He has an appointment at the vets later today so hopefully we can get this all sorted out.
I'm sorry that the little guy has worms. That could explain alot.
Make sure that you take a sample of his poop to the vets. Take some paper and a pen also. Write down everything. We get emotional over our little ones and sometimes it's hard to remember all that a vet says.
If you are feeding Whole Prey, he will be eating everything from the head to the tail. Bones, skin, organs and all.
None of that is cooked.
The Frankenprey menu is designed to mimic eating Whole prey. It's based on a week's menu.
7-9 meals of Bone In meats.
Bones are the Non Weight Bearing bones of an animal the size of a chicken or smaller.
Think chicken wings, cornish game hen, quail, rabbit, mice.
Your little guy is a baby and will need to build jaw strength, but he will learn.
3-4 meals are Muscle meats.
Heart is a muscle meat and he will need one and a half meals of heart. That will make up ten percent of what he eats in a week.
Other muscle meats will be beef, lamb, pork, turkey etc...
Two meals will be Organs.
One meal of Liver plus another organ.
Organs are secreting organs like kidney, spleen, brains, pancreas and thymus
His second Organ meal will be half heart plus 1/4 liver and 1/4 other organ
Liver is five percent of his weekly menu and the other organ is five percent.
Fat equals energy for ferrets and skin has fat in it. Once he is on a balanced menu plan, you will look for fatty cuts of meat.
All of this is raw.
When I mentioned bone broth, I was talking about making a Bone Broth for a sick ferret and explaining that you needed to make sure that he wasn't getting cooked bones. They can splinter.
Your Carnivore stew had bones in it and I wanted to make sure that you weren't giving him cooked bones.
It seems confusing at first. The more that you read, the better understanding you will have.
Don't let it get you confused.
What I did was to build myself a board and look at it everyday. That helped alot.
Now, I have a whiteboard on my fridge and can just glance at it.
Here is my first board (that's Juliet approving of it) and I have stayed with the basic menu and then tweaked it, as I learned what works best for my five.
Heather, Crazylady, NancyL, are all breeders and can offer you good advice for starting off your new boy.
Best of luck at the Vet's. I'm sure he will be fine once you get this all cleared up and he doesn't have any nasty worms.