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Post by mustelidmusk on Jun 30, 2008 22:59:05 GMT -5
Egg shells do provide calcium. Bones also provide more different types of nutrients because they have different types of tissue on the ends (cartilage) and some marrow in the center. So, don't give up on feeding bone. I'm so absent-minded these days - sometimes completely brainless    but I just remembered that bone can be boiled to soften it up. In fact bone can be boiled or stewed to the point where you ca smash it between your fingers. You may want to start out boiling the chicken bones to make them fairly soft at first. as your ferret start eating them, you can boil them less and less over time to gradually get your ferrets used to raw bone. If you try this, you may want thread stips of meat onto the boiled bone to have raw meat on cooked bone. Here's another possibility.... If you have a health food store, you can probably find human grade ground bone as a nutritional supplement for people. You want to stick with a human-grade supplement ince pet grade bone meal commonly has lead in it (lead gets stored in the bones). -jennifer |
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Post by molson901 on Jul 3, 2008 11:02:00 GMT -5
so yesterday i smashed up some chicken neck and bones again but i mean smashed it w. like a mass not a hammer so it was beyond recognizeable and molson ate it up as soon as it went into his cage but i dont know if he actually ate the bones since my boyfriend is the one that went to take out the left overs this morning. (hes supposed to let me know what was left tonight) but i gave him more this morning to see it for myself when i come home tonight. im pretty sure he had to have eaten some cartilage though since it was all smashed up together and cut into tiny pieces. when i watched him eat for a while yesterday i know at some point he was chewing on bones cause he was squinting and bititng hard (lol it was very cute) but im not sure if he ended up actually swallowing it.
either way hes working on the tearing the meat apart, i witnessed that! he worked really hard and ended up tearing a pretty big piece of chicken gizzard on wednesday into small pieces. i didnt want to cut it into small pieces cause last wed. i gave it to him in small pieces and he LOVED it so i wanted to see if he would work for it and he did! he also did the same for the chicken neck\back meat. so thats good news, right?
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Post by Forum Administrator on Jul 3, 2008 11:09:36 GMT -5
Great news! Keep working on getting him to eat those bones (sounds like you are making good progress) Can you start a seperate thread in the "Natural Diet Newbies" section and post a quick update on everything that Molson is currently eating? (what meats, etc) That would be great! This way we can moniter your progress better if you have a thread in that section  |
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Post by Heather on Jul 3, 2008 13:13:34 GMT -5
If your furbaby will not ... absolutely...not eat bone and he's eating ground mix add 1 tsp of ground up dried (not cooked...please do not cook same problems as cooked bones, just wash the little cusses ) egg shells to 1 (one) cup of ground raw mix. Actually, you can salt your chunked meat with this too. A lot of people use their coffee grinders for this, I use the old fashioned method of mortar and pestle. I always keep a supply of ground egg shells in the fridge in case of desperately ill fuzzy and I use it in my raw soup mix. It has roughly the same calcium/magnesium mix as bone. It has worked for cat people for years (cats also can be finicky about eating bone...go figure) Anyway, I hope that helps you out a little bit Ciao |
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Post by molson901 on Jul 3, 2008 20:30:04 GMT -5
ok 2 questions..first one just cause im realllly not sure but at the same time i think i am lol egg shells...its ok if like lets say i make srambled eggs and smash the leftover shell into it right?
2nd; ground mix?
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Post by Heather on Jul 3, 2008 22:47:57 GMT -5
Are these eggs for you and your using the shells for the ferrets or are we talking about mixing the ground egg shells into the raw scrambled eggs? I've found that if the chunks of egg shell are too large they won't eat them...that may be just my guys (they're spoiled brats sometimes  ) I just take the shells on their own and clean and dry and then grind. Ground mix....ground up meat, offal?? My ground mix includes ground up meat, offal, bone, and raw egg. I give the recipe to my butcher and he grinds it up for me Ciao |
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Post by molson901 on Jul 4, 2008 10:39:39 GMT -5
well thats nice of him! lol and i ggive molson the scrambled eggs sometimes but he doesnt eat the whole thing. forgive me if i sound dumb but whats offal? and does your butcher ground up all that and mixes it together for you? or does he just ground up the meat and givees it to you like taht and you mix it w. everything else? i have befriended my near by butcher yet so i dont know if he would do that for me...lol but maybe i sjhould get some recipes for molson lol
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Post by Forum Administrator on Jul 4, 2008 14:38:33 GMT -5
Offal= Organ meat  |
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Post by Heather on Jul 8, 2008 22:33:56 GMT -5
My butcher supplies me with my ground meat and ground bones, there will be some offal (organ meat) in the mix, but not enough in my opinion. I add the rest of the offal (to bring it up to a more natural mix and purchased at a grocery store) and the eggs. I would have been surprised if Molson ate the whole scrambled egg That's a lot of egg for one fuzzie, I"m not saying that he couldn't (Napoleon can and does) but it's rare. A few years ago, I asked my butcher for rmb (raw meat and bones) mix and he thought I was crazy...he now sees it as a financially beneficial. He has quite a few customers now who request his "dog food" blend. I buy it by the case, about 45 lbs. at a time. ciao |
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Post by molson901 on Jul 10, 2008 20:27:26 GMT -5
what exactly is your recipe of all these egg offal bone meat mix?
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Post by Heather on Jul 10, 2008 23:29:16 GMT -5
A recipe....hmm I haven't thought about that in a few years. Not that I haven't done it but I no longer think about the amounts, I've made it that often. Let's see. 8lbs to 10 lbs ground meat and bone (8 to 10 tsp of ground egg shell if not using bone). 3 or 4 organic eggs. approx 1 to 1.5 lbs of liver and hearts (the gibblets are eaten as treats, they would be very upset with me if I ground them up lol) sometimes more, if I don't feel that there appears to have been much attached to the ground bones. Approx. 1 tbsp of marine or arctic vigor oil for every 2 lbs of ground food, mixed in defrosted meat. Really simple. ciao |
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