Egg Yolks & Taurine (2 questions)

[crystalineshadow]

I now have five ferrets and I have a couple of questions on how to keep them their healthiest. I feed them their organ meats in a soup, which currently I am feeding once every four days. I mix up 5-6oz beef livers, some heart meat, some chicken gizzards, some ground turkey, and some water along with a little powdered egg shell, a little olive oil, and two boiled eggs and give them half at a time.

What I am wondering is, with 5 of them, how many ounces of heart (I am currently using mostly chicken hearts) will I need to give them each week to insure that they are getting the appropriate amount of taurine? I do tend to make up several batches of soup at once and freeze them, which I know will degrade the taurine a bit. Also, I would like to add raw egg yolks to their soup and was wondering how many would be basically the maximum number I could add and if I am putting in several raw yolks would I be safe in leaving out the boiled egg? I am basically using bev's meat mush recipe ( www.ferretvillage.org/viewtopic.php?t=18889 ) and just doubling it, using liver for the organs in one batch and ground meat for the other batch. I would prefer to just use raw yolks instead of the whole boiled egg, but I'm not sure if the egg white has some necessary components in it. Now that I have five ferrets, I may do a larger than double batch, I haven't decided yet.

In case their ages make a difference to the taurine needed, my ferrets range from 5 months to 5.5 years. 1@ 5mo, 1@ 9-10 mo, 1@ 2yr, 1@ 3-4yr (I think), 1@ 5.5yr

Thank you for your help, all of you guys are the greatest when it comes to answering questions.

[sherrylynne]

I don't think anyone really knows quite yet just how much taurine ferrets really need. They do need some, but as to an amount??
The raw yolks are not a problem. You can leave out the cooked for them. Maybe give the hard boiled for a treat?
I try to give mine one good feeding of hearts a week. Whether beef, chicken, pork, or whatever I can get. If you can't get a lot of heart, any good, dark muscle meat will work. The more a muscle works, the more taurine. That's why hearts are ideal. Thigh muscle works as well, though.

[Heather]

The egg (raw) is the perfectly balanced food. Shell, white and yolk when eaten in it's entirety provides a perfect balance of nutrients. Somewhere along the line, we as humans decided to perfect the perfect food and made certain decisions about the poor egg and drawing conclusions that were only partly true because we decided to only use parts . So, in answer to your question about eggs. You can feed about 2 or 3 small eggs a week (white and yolk, you can feed shell too if your furbabies will eat it). I discovered that feeding more than that number resulted in rat tails, as to the reason why I'm going to guess a biotin absorbtion problem but I'm only guessing. Which is the same when someone tells you that ferrets need a certain amount of taurine in their diet. They do, but as Sherrylynne pointed out, no one is quite sure how much. That's the problem with ferrets. There is no concrete information about nutritional requirements, because though they're true carnivores and they're normally lumped in with cats their nutritional needs are similar but not the same. So following in that vein here's an excerp of an article regarding cats and taurine.

##Taurine is an amino acid (AA) talked about when referring to feline diets. For cats, unlike most other mammals, taurine is an essential amino acid, meaning that cats can not synthesize their own taurine from other building block amino acids as can dogs and even humans. Thus it is essential that cats take in adequate taurine in their diet on a regular basis.

With prolonged deficiencies of taurine, cats can develop central retinal degeneration,resulting in blindness. Dilated cardiomyopathy is another real risk. In this condition, the heart dilates, its walls become thinner and weaker, making the heart less effective and resulting in a form of heart failure.

It is considered fact at this point that cats do require taurine. It is even fairly widely agreed upon that cats should consume 1000mg (1 gm) or taurine per 2.2 lbs of food. The discussion begins with the question - Is my cat getting enough with the diet that I am feeding??

It turns out that this question is more difficult to answer than might at first be thought. We know that taurine is supplied almost exclusively by meat and seafood. Vegetables contain little to no measurable taurine as a group. Taurine is broken down by heat, thus, cooking meat will destroy over half to maybe 2/3 of the taurine that was available raw. It is difficult to calculate the amount of taurine actually supplied by a particular diet given the variables- baking vs boiling meat results in losing different amounts of taurine, meat from the chicken leg has much more taurine than that from the breast, and the list of variables goes on and on.

To give you an idea of the amount of taurine in foods, I will provide this list but please understand, these numbers are not concrete.

beef muscle 10 mg/oz raw 1.7mg/oz cooked

beef liver 5.5 mg/oz raw

lamb13.5 mg/oz raw 3.6mg/oz cooked

chicken 9.5mg/oz raw 2.3mg/oz cooked

fish 36mg/oz raw

shrimp 48mg/oz raw

nutritional yeast 30mg/tablet or 1/2 teaspoon

Given the inexact science behind figuring these numbers and the known dangers of under-feeding this essential amino acid to cats, I do recommend supplementing taurine in cats who are on a homemade diet. For most cats, I find that 75-100 mg of taurine per day is about right, although for some cats, I have seen this number climb close to 300 mg per day. Taurine is not stored by cats and would be very difficult to overdose. Many times you will find that you are dosing a “pinch” given the capsule size you are able to find. This approximating approach should work just fine. With taurine and cats, a little excess is definitely preferable to not quite enough.##
ciao

[Darlene]

I'll have to start giving my cats a taurine supplement. I'd imagine a health food store would carry it.