Is anyone good at raw food math!? It's a tricky one!

[chiara]

Hey everyone,

A friend had been feeding her dog raw but decided to stop, she had over 10kg of food and gave it to me for free which was amazing. The percentages don't quite work out but I know I will be able to put two foods together to make a balanced meal. I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around the best way to do this. I have attached photos of each raw food. The duck has 70% meat, 30% bone, 0% offal. The beef has 87% meat, 0% bone, 13% offal.

How much of each in grams would I have to use to equate to around 80% meat, 10% bone, 10% offal? Any help would be much appreciated. 


photos.app.goo.gl/DKPMZYw5bft19nDL7

photos.app.goo.gl/BTLQ3q6dmxkPhg4D6

[unclejoe]

Wow that's quite a gift!
Make it easy on yourself and alternate the 2, or just mix together. you could add organ/offal to the one lacking if you want. Not every single meal needs to be perfectly balanced. Polecats are opportunity feeders. I saw a video of a polecat chomping on a deer carcass in the snow and it was all muscle meal. The poley didn't bother alternating between meat and guts.

[Corvidophile]

A one/one mix is just adding the two numbers and then dividing by two, so 78.5% muscle (perfect), 15% bone (a teensy high but good for some ferrets), and 6.5% organs (too low by a significant amount). I would add some liver (just 3.5% by total weight) to the diet and call it a day! Perhaps just feed a switch off of these two foods and add a liver meal a week (this would add 7.1%) or every other week (this would add 3.55%). They don’t get iron or vitamin A poisoning easily being carnivores, so I would go with the ease of doing it every week.

Edit: oh I forgot, this is marketed towards dogs? You’ll need to add a taurine source then, like chicken or duck hearts. They need to be 10% of the total weight of the diet. They count as muscle meat. So you’ll have to figure that, if you feed the two foods at a ratio of one/one with one liver meal a week, your percentages will be 74.95% muscle, 11.45% bone, and 13.6% organs. If you add 10% hearts (or approximately two and a half heart meals a week) you’ll be feeding 84.95% muscle (a little high), 6.45% bone (too low) and 8.6% organs (a little low). Tricky indeed once you add in the heart. So to correct this, I would add a pinch of bone meal to each feeding, and one and a half liver meals a week.

In conclusion, if you want to do it entirely holistically, If you feed them twice a day (14 meals a week), you’d be giving them two and a half servings of heart, one and a half servings of liver, five servings of the duck food, and five servings of the beef food, with a sprinkle of bone meal added on top of each meal.

Edit #2: If you want to take a shortcut, you can skip the hearts and buy taurine supplement marketed towards raw cat feeders and mix it into the food. That way you can feed, per week, one liver meal, six and a half duck food meals, and six and a half beef food meals, with 500mg taurine per day added in.

[chiara]

Thanks so much for your in depth reply really helpful. The duck food has duck heart in it, and the beef food has beef heart. I think if I do half and half and through in some extra liver. I have some other more balanced meals so I will alternate with them too to make sure things are balancing out. I just googled and seen the taurine powder, seems handy to have, I may order some, I already put calcium powder on each meal, can too much taurine be bad? Would it be good to put a pinch on each meal as a standard to ensure enough taurine? I think I may order some chicken hearts and feed them once a week to make sure! That could be a better idea I suppose, if Lola will eat them 🙂

[Corvidophile]

There has never been a ceiling reported for taurine content in either cats or ferrets, so I wouldn’t worry about overdosing them on it. It’s a water soluble amino acid that’s readily peed out in too much quantity. Great that the foods include heart though!

[eclipso]

Perhaps 1/3 of duck to 1 of beef?

Since 1/3 of the duck would make the bone 9% and that would be added to the beef, so it would make the bone 9% and the keep the offal at 13%. I'm not too sure that this is how you do the math...hmm...

I think the simplest thing would be alternating would even it out, but just give more beef than duck to not give too much bone.

[chiara]

I think I might do a bit of that eclipso, and maybe add some more liver on here and there. I also just ordered some air dried chicken hearts 🙂 and some air dried chicken necks, hopefully she likes them

[Corvidophile]

Air dried meat is fine, but dried out bone in the necks is not- it splinters when bitten and can pierce the throat and everything else on the way down.

[chiara]

Oh I didn't realise that air dried bone had the same effect as cooked bone, silly that they are making them as treats then! Thanks will bin them when they arrive

[Corvidophile]

If you happen to know anybody with pet rats or mice, they can have them. The way their incisors are they pulverize the bone into powder when they chew it.

[chiara]

Luckily they hadn't been dispatched yet so I messages the lady on Etsy to ask for 2 portions of the chicken hearts instead. While we are chatting about food, Lola likes to stash her meat, sometimes I can find it all, sometimes i can't and I see her eating old dried meat occasionally. It's like she is making her own jerky! Should I be worried about that?

[Corvidophile]

Ah yes, ferret jerky, the bane of many raw feeders existence, haha. It’s usually safe as the meat typically dries out before it rots. If it smells sour, throw it away. Otherwise ferrets have very short digestive tracts and very strong stomach acid, so the bacteria load that would make us humans sick is ok for them to eat. Polecats eat carrion in the wild, so they’re set up to handle it.

[chiara]

Haha yes it is the bane my life! I love to let her free roam when I am home, but she just stashes her meat everywhere, I just see her darting across the living room with chunks in her mouth haha it does make me laugh, I can live with it just have to do regular checks everywhere frequently, she has specific hides in her cage for eating in peace, not sure how else to stop the stashing

[unclejoe]

You should set up some sort of feeding den/bin for feeding raw, and give her a chance to chow down before you let her out to terrorize the house. Just a thought.