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Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2016 10:18:21 GMT -5
Hi! I joined this forum because I desperately want to switch my 2 babies to a correct diet. My ferret Eva passed away 17 days ago from insulinoma (the worst disease a ferret can get!) and I want to do everything I possibly can to make sure my 2 girls never have to go through what Eva went through. If I decided to buy whole prey food from the pet store (adult prey and frozen),and give one animal per day (I would leave it in the cage for my ferrets to eat during the day), would that be a balanced diet? If so, besides adult mice, what else can I feed them? How would I go about to get them used to whole prey? They already eat blended raw meat (like a soup) but they haven't quite gotten the solid part down yet. Thank you very much!  ? |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2016 10:30:17 GMT -5
It's fine to give them an animal every day as long as you change what animal you are feeding them each day, other whole prey you can feed them is rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, hares, pigeons, quails, chicks, ducks, squirrels and some types of fish. Getting them started on eating birds is easy, you start off by feeding them the wings of the birds with the feathers and eventually give them the whole bird, getting them to eat the other prey is a little more difficult than starting them on birds but they get the hang of it pretty quickly, you will want to remove the guts from the prey at first and when they're eating their food without the guts then give them the prey whole. If you feed them fish, then be careful about what fish you give them as some fish are poisonous to ferrets, they're only supposed to have fish once a week, same with egg.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2016 10:35:21 GMT -5
Where would I go about to buy these different whole preys? I'm pretty sure I can find adult mice at the pet store. I live in Canada and I guess it's harder to find whole prey than in the UK.
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Post by Corvidophile on Jan 17, 2016 10:44:24 GMT -5
Most whole prey feeders buy online, unfortunately I'm in the States and not sure which companies are based in Canada, you'll typically find better prices online than in pet stores. But to start out, grab some mice from pet stores because you have the option of only getting a few. Try offering them untouched, sometimes ferrets surprise you in knowing what to do! If uninterested, try cutting open the chest so they see there's meat in there. If they're still unsure of what to do, this might seem gross, but remove the mouse's intestines and spoon soupie inside the body cavity.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2016 11:04:48 GMT -5
Where would I go about to buy these different whole preys? I'm pretty sure I can find adult mice at the pet store. I live in Canada and I guess it's harder to find whole prey than in the UK. You can get mice, rats and quails from here Recorp www.recorp.caIt might be an idea to feed a raw and whole prey diet rather than just a whole prey diet. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2016 11:36:17 GMT -5
Will feeding them raw and whole prey benefit them more than just feeding whole prey?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2016 11:38:08 GMT -5
Because I checked the prices for a whole prey diet and it seems extremely pricey...
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Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2016 12:41:02 GMT -5
Mine are on a raw and whole prey diet, I haven't had any problems relating to it. Both diets have better health benefits than kibble, both raw and whole prey put together seems to have worked best for mine.
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Post by Corvidophile on Jan 17, 2016 13:18:00 GMT -5
It depends on availability in your area. Let's say because adult mice are so expensive, you can only afford to have them occupy 30% of your ferrets' diet. But because of unavailability of other types of whole prey, the only other things you can buy are day-old chicks. Well, a diet consisting of 70% day-old chicks and 30% adult mice isn't very balanced, those day-old chicks don't have an appropriate nutrient profile for taking up so much of the diet long term. In this case, you'd be much better off doing the meal plan called frankenprey, where you go about shopping for human meat in proportion to what you'd find in an adult animal of a typical species a ferret would eat. You can still make 30% of the diet adult mice though, because those ARE fairly good as a long term feeder animal for meeting a ferret's nutrional needs.
Also, keep in mind unseen costs: I didn't wanna do whole prey either for cost reasons until I remembered I was spending gas money driving to far off locations for uncommon organs, lots of little plastic bags to portion out meals, and lots of time shopping and prepping. That time personally was the highest cost to me- it made me too grumpy to cook dinner in the house so we went out to eat those days, and I could only do it when work was light that day and the day after because standing up making so many little baggies pinched my lower back.
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