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Post by pinkprincess91 on Sept 11, 2008 13:20:21 GMT -5
I've read a few of the posts... But.. I wanna make sure. I just started his little "Raw Diet" thing like 2 days ago, By curiosity! My mom raises rats. She feeds them organic food, So she knows what is in they're system. We also have snakes here, that's why we have the rats. About 4 weeks ago we had 5 rat mama's give birth within 3 days of each other... so we have a lot of rat babies! We fed him a baby rat 2 days ago, He killed it, but didn't eat it. So we left it in his cage... By morning it was gone. Okay - We gave him another that night, om nom nom. He loved it... But before the rats.. He was having an interest in KILLING food before eating it.. It started with a bug (Cicada) He loved it... Gave him another 2 days later, he ate it. I'm just curious how often I should feed him baby rats, how big is the limit do you think... And how can I switch up his variety on food?
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Post by Heather on Sept 11, 2008 15:08:06 GMT -5
He's doing well I just pilfered this from one of Giuli's answers: "80-90% rodents is good. Quail, chicks, lizards, bugs, fish, and eggs can make up the other 10-20% of the diet" . The one thing you will have to remember that it can't all be baby prey...You have to feed older too as you need the nutrient dense bone of older animals...I don't think I would allow your little one to hunt full sized rats. I did and in my way of thinking it was a big mistake. I believe that prey shouldn't suffer and the rats were too big for my guys to get a firm death grip. They did do the job in the end, but I won't make that mistake again. So to get adult rats into them, I feed frozen. I'm hoping to start my own mouse colony and will start feeding mice once that's set up. They will be allowed to kill their own dinner again. I feed a full mix of ground raw (my own mix and premix, it's really the cat's food but we all share around here ), whole meats or frankenprey, frozen prey (quail, rabbit & rats) and live prey (at the moment silly local mice who think this is a warm safe place to hang out....very silly mice ) I hope that helps answer your question. There will be others who pop in that will probably add to this. ciao
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Post by josiesmom on Sept 21, 2008 22:01:12 GMT -5
You can offer him as many baby rats as he wants to eat at one sitting. Depending on how big the pup are and how big he is will determine how many he'll actually devour. But ferrets will happily kill many more than they will actually eat in one sitting. Usually a meal will consist of one or two rat pups.
As Heather noted though, don't feed JUST pups as his main source of nutrients. Mix up the ages of the rats - as well as other natural foods.
I'm happy to hear you have allowed him to be the predator he can be!
Cheers, Kim
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