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Post by bluedragonshai on Mar 18, 2020 13:55:19 GMT -5
what about gerbils? my wholeprey supplier sells them and hamsters too so might be an idea for extra rodent options,
loving this thread btw, starting my two on frankenprey my boy eats mice weekly and has tried a rat but stuffing a mouse with the new meat is genius,cant imagine blending them though YUCK, but you are one hardcore ferrant for doing all of this!
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Post by PatienceTheVirtue on Mar 18, 2020 14:20:31 GMT -5
I love how long you've been updating this thread! It's a fantastic resource, I hope I remember it if I ever face similar issues.
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Post by Corvidophile on Mar 18, 2020 18:03:30 GMT -5
Could never feed a gerbil, one of my heart pets was a gerbil. But hamsters I could feed. He was ok with eating guinea pigs for a while but eventually stopped eating them, I’m thinking of buying them ground and trying them out next. They have a less, uh, “exotic” scent to the meat than mice do, haha. I’m really not keen on grinding any more whole prey myself- I just found a little hunk of dried mouse fur and meat on my wall today that I missed.
Thank you for the read, it’s been a bumpy road feeding him as you can see, though I had smooth sailing for a few years in the middle. Just wish he had kept his adventurous palette.
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Post by Corvidophile on Mar 20, 2020 8:32:12 GMT -5
Last night he got the piece of mice mince that had the extra tails in it that were caught around the rear of the blade, ate around them. Dashes my hopes to feed him whole mice again any time soon.
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Post by Corvidophile on Mar 22, 2020 17:33:39 GMT -5
I couldn’t come up with Hare Today’s 10 pound minimum order without breaking the bank, so I tried My Pet Carnivore. They had whole ground beaver and muskrat and no minimum order, so I grabbed that and some beef heart to balance out the taurine. Let’s see how this works out.
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Post by Corvidophile on Mar 24, 2020 20:33:02 GMT -5
Another tail piece showed up last night in the mince, I was excited when it was gone with the rest this morning as I took his dish to clean but then I found it this afternoon in the corner of the cage, petrified and licked clean. Foiled again.
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Post by Corvidophile on Apr 2, 2020 12:09:30 GMT -5
Finally got My Pet Carnivore’s beaver and muskrat yesterday, I’ve been defrosting one of them slowly. Emailed them to ask about heart content when I saw it wasn’t a “whole prey” grind as I understood it from Hare Today’s offerings (entire animal), but a selection of meat, bone, heart and liver mixed at 80/10/10. They say they don’t regulate the heart, so I’ll add some of my own a few times a week. excited to try him out on it since I’m running out of mouse.
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Post by Corvidophile on Apr 6, 2020 14:29:24 GMT -5
He’ll now eat half beef, half muskrat IF I mix in a few drops of salmon oil. Same thing with the mouse, needs salmon oil or he won’t touch it. He also eats around the bone shards, so I’m gonna be adding a dash of bone meal to his muskrat meals before serving. Perhaps he’ll eat the bone shards in time but I doubt it. Too big and hard for his dainty palette. He does eat mouse bone though.
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Post by Corvidophile on Apr 14, 2020 14:35:34 GMT -5
Ok, I guess it’s the low quality of this meat grinder or something instead of mice being a particular pain to grind, because I just ground up two pounds of beef heart and it took me half an hour! Kept getting stuck and backing up just like before. In the end when I took it apart it was just jammed with stringy tendons whirled around the blade. I think I’m done with this grinding at home business, maybe I’ll try a blender next time.
Anyway, the heart is now being frozen in individual cubes and the beaver just came out of them ready to feed. He’ll eat 100% muskrat with no trouble now, just a dab of salmon oil needed. Once the heart is cubed I should be able to switch over to making the muskrat and beaver a larger part of his diet since I can balance it out.
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Post by Corvidophile on Jul 4, 2020 20:33:26 GMT -5
Interesting dinner tonight, fledgling finch I found on the sidewalk and took home. I euthanized it and gave it to him and he ate it right up. Glad he’ll still eat bones at least in some format! Maybe I’ll try and find quail locally.
He now eats about half beef Better in the Raw, and half a rotating combo of ground beef heart, ground muskrat and ground beaver, plus an egg once a week. Doesn’t touch nonground meat anymore except for this finch tonight. And, he still won’t eat the bone shards in the muskrat and beaver, so I add a pinch of bonemeal to those meals. Also still needs the salmon oil dripped on top of the heart, muskrat, and beaver. He was once so adventurous an eater! How the mighty have fallen into pickiness. Still glad that he’s eating more variety than just Better in the Raw.
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Post by Corvidophile on Oct 23, 2020 7:41:50 GMT -5
Running out of the muskrat beaver and heart tonight. Introducing ground turkey to the rotation, then if that’s accepted and digested well, ground pork. Both mixed with Better in the Raw, who discontinued their ferret specific packaging and now only advertises to cat and dog owners. They sent out an email when they were discontinuing, saying the cat formula made with beef is the same as the ferret food, so that’s what I ordered this time around. When the last of the mice (there are only two left) are ready to go, I’ll grind them up and feed them to him with intestines included to see if he’ll eat them like that, as I plan on ordering a bunch of ground whole carcass mouse from Hare Today soon but I need to be sure he’ll eat them with intestines first.
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Post by Corvidophile on Oct 30, 2020 17:47:44 GMT -5
He hates the turkey but I’m still trying to get him used to it, haven’t given up completely on it yet. He’s eating 3 oz a day now, 2.5 of which is beef and the rest turkey. It’s split into three meals so he gets two meals of beef and the final one of half beef, half turkey. Have to use a lot of salmon oil to get him to eat it, and it’s still not guaranteed he will, sometimes he’ll only eat half of it or none at all. Sometimes he’ll come back to it later and finish it off, though. Wanted to wait until he was eating this ok before introducing pork but I may give up and switch to pork to see if he likes that better, and keep the turkey cubes in the freezer for trying at another time.
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Post by Charlie on Oct 30, 2020 20:01:06 GMT -5
I'm so sorry to read that Winnipeg isn't eating well these days and it's a struggle to get him to eat. It's too bad that he started to dislike mice as that was one of his favourite meals. Did this all change since he developed insulinoma?
Charlie wasn't a fan of chicken or hearts so I switched him to beef heart and he's been great. He gets mouse 3 times a week and variety of other meats but no chicken.
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Post by Corvidophile on Oct 30, 2020 20:22:17 GMT -5
Yeah, the eating problems started when he started developing the blood sugar problems. On the prednisolone he’ll eat tons of ground beef now, but it’s very difficult to get him to eat anything else.
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Post by Corvidophile on Nov 4, 2020 21:40:50 GMT -5
Slowly making progress, he’ll now reliably eat 50/50 beef/turkey every night, got ahead of myself and offered him pure turkey and he ate a few bites and left the rest overnight. Went back to 50/50.
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