Okay what about this??
You're getting there. I love that you are working on this and trying hard. It's not easy with toddlers, a husband and everything else that goes along with that.
Tweaking time:
You have a red meat meal and that's great.
Quizz Question: Why is a red meat meal important?
You list chicken heart once as a muscle meat and once as an organ. That's probably a 'typo'.
Heart is a muscle meat.
Heart is going to be source of Taurine. Tongue is also a source of Taurine.
That gives you 3 meals of Taurine sourced Muscle Meat.
You want to keep the Taurine sourced Muscle meats to ten percent of what they eat in one week.
You only want 3-4 muscle meat meals and you have five.
Right now, you're menu is still heavy on chicken. I know chicken is easy to find and offers small bones but since Cornish game hen is really a small chicken, it would be nice to find another animal souce/protein for Bone In meals. Quail would be great and so would rabbit. Can you find those?
Quail comes in a six pack and is usually in the freezer section.
Duck would be great. Duck is pricey but if you can find duck gizzards or duck wings, that would be very good. You can also buy a duck and portion it out. You will get a good number of meals.
You want 7-9 meals of Bone In meats and you have 7. Since Ghost is young, I would go up to one more Bone In meal.
There are two reasons that we don't want your menu to be too chicken.
One is that different animal proteins offer different nutrients. The more animal meats that you offer, the more their nutritional requirements are covered.
Two is that chicken is a common allergy or intolerance. It may be the hormones or additives that they inject into chickens or it could from the farm chicken's diet. It's just that we see too many ferrets develop problems with chicken and that can lead to Irritable Bowel disease and an unhappy little ferret. Plus vet bills make an unhappy ferrent.
Onto the Organ meals:
You list beef kidney and chicken liver as two separate meals.
Liver needs to be five percent of what they eat in one week.
The Other organ, kidney in this case also needs to be five percent of what they eat in one week.
Figuring that out is not hard and not an exact science. A ferret in the wild doesn't eat some liver and then think, hey! I have reached my five percent.
We just don't want too much liver because it remains in their system and can build up and their kidneys can't flush it.
To figure it out, think that Bubba may eat 3 ounces a day times 7 days. That is 21 ounces.
Five percent of 21 ounces is 1.1 ounce. So, he gets 1.1 ounces of liver in one week.
Simple enough.
Organs are very rich. If you feed them all five percent of the liver in one serving, they are going to have loose poops and possibly a tummy ache.
So, we break those two organ meals into two meals.
One is Liver plus another organ
One is Liver plus another organ and a half meal of hearts.
I do organ meals in the morning and follow them with a Bone In meal for dinner and that helps firm things up.
This is all part of the fun of feeding 3 ferrets and one young little skin girl. You're a mommy and feeding is a big part of your life. I remember those days. I had two, a boy and a girl and they ate very differently. My son would not each much of anything and that was stressful.
I didn't have anyone to help me, but you do.
You're really ahead of the game and doing much better than the average new ferrent.
You should give yourself a pat on the back. You're a good Mom!
:wave3: