Pet Punter

Archive for the ‘Feeding Your Pet’ Category

Carbohydrates are the major energy source for most animals, but the cat can, in fact, survive without them. The cat’s main natural food sources, birds and mice are relatively low in carbohydrates, apart from what is found in the stomach of the prey. Carbohydrates are a cheaper energy source than protein-rich meat and fish and are usually incorporated into most commercial cat foods. Carbohydrates should not make up more than 40 percent of the diet.

It can provide a beneficial boost of readily available energy at times of growth, pregnancy, nursing or stress. They are also a useful source of fiber, which, although not digested by the cat, provides bulk in the faeces. A wild cat could obtain fiber from the fur, feathers or stomach contents of its prey, but he domestic cat obtains in from most commercial cat foods in the form of cellulose or plant fiber.

The range of specialist foods now available makes feeding marine fish straightforward. Formulated foods are available for some marine invertebrates. It is important that the food matches the dietary needs of your fish. You may need to use different types if you have vegetarian and more omnivorous species sharing the tank. Feeding small quantities, several times a day, is recommended to prevent food being wasted and polluting the water. In some cases, as with seashores, you will need to set up a brine shrimp hatchery to maintain a constant supply of food. Brine shrimp are obtainable in the form of eggs, which are then hatched in a well aerated aquarium of heated water.

Checks on other aspects of water chemistry, such as the nitrite level and pH, will also be required. Use a pipette to extract water samples from the aquarium. Using a test kit, you can compare the color change in your water sample to an accompanying chart to determine the result. Should the pH fall below 8.0 then you will need to replace a quarter of the volume of water, checking the specific gravity as well. The nitrite level will give a good indication of the efficiency of the filtration system, and a filter maturation product is helpful for this purpose. It will peak at a figure of about 15 parts per million and should fall back to zero to confirm that the chemicals is being converted to nitrite. Watch the fish first introduced to the tank, as they will be vulnerable to develop signs of the parasitic illness known as velvet disease.

You can feed your rodent a seed-based diet, which contains cereals such as wheat and flaked maize or, preferably a pelleted diet, which contains all the necessary ingredients to keep rats and mice in good health. If you are not feeding your rodent a pre-formulated diet you may need to use a supplement to compensate for any nutritional deficiencies. Sprinkle the supplement over the rodent’s favorite tidbits. When it comes to fresh food, it is best to offer it in small amounts on a regular basis. Although it will not contribute greatly to the protein intake, it will provide valuable vitamins and minerals. Large amounts of fresh food eaten at one time can trigger digestive upsets.

Avoid using mixes that contain significant proportions of oil seeds, such as sunflower or peanuts. These are not recommended for rats and mice on a long-term basis as they are likely to provide skin irritations. There is no harm in offering another treats, such as small subes of cheddar cheese and raisins. The occasional sunflower seed or nut can be used when taming your rodent to feed from the hand. Attempts to hand-feed could lead to bitten fingers. A water bottle that attaches to the rodent’s quarters and an earth ware food container are both essential.

For most snakes, especially when they have been tamed, feeding is straightforward and you need only leave their food in the vivarium. You may have to use forceps in the case of more reluctant eaters; these must be blunt ended to avoid any injury to the snake when it strikes. Slowly wave the food item in front of the snake’s head, encouraging it to lunge at the item and not at your hand. Not all snakes like hunt on the ground. As a result, particularly for a nervous individual, food may have to be provided off the floor on a raised feeding shelf. Make your snake’s food is carefully prepared, and then frozen food is thoroughly defrosted before it is fed to the snake.

Prepared snake food have a high palatability, but you may still need to carry out what is described as “odor manipulation” when introducing new food to the snake’s diet. These reptiles rely very heavily on scent to determine what is edible. You will need to rub the new time, such as the complete food known as snake sausages – which resemble sausages in appearance – with a dead mouse or whatever the snake has been eating previously. This will transfer the familiar scent to the new food, making it palatable to the snake. Once the snake is eating the new food readily, there will be no need to carry out this procedure.

Most larger parrots are traditionally fed a seed mixture mainly comprising sunflower seed and peanuts and lesser amounts of foods such as flaked maize and pumpkin and safflower seeds. In comparison, cocktails and parakeets are offered a higher percentage of cereal seeds in their diet, such as canary seed and millets, including millet sprays as well as groats, which are particular favorite of Pyrrhura concurs. Seed mixes for budgerigars consist exclusively of small seeds, notably millet and canary seed, which can be provided more easily in a seed hopper than in an open food container.

As with seed mixes for finches, however, even the best of these diets will not meet all the nutritional needs of the birds. They are generally deficient in the key dietary ingredients such as Vitamin A and calcium, which is why comprehensive vitamin and mineral supplement will be required, along with daily portions of fresh, diced fruit and greenstuff. In recent years, manufacturers have developed a range of complete diets suitable for small parrotlets up to large macaws.

It is not always so easy to persuade birds to sample them, in spite of the fact that they have a superior nutritional value to seed. Young parrots that have been hand-reared on complete diets in a liquid form will usually continue eating them, once they are weaned, but older individuals that have lived on sunflower seed for years can be very reluctant to sample something new. Certain types of parrots are worse in this respect than others, with cockatoos being reluctant to try unfamiliar foods, including fruit and greenstuff.

Bird seed is deficient in number key ingredients, and you will need to supplement the bird’s diet to make up for these shortcomings. Some seed mixes contain vitamin and mineral supplements coated on to dehulled seeds, so that they will not be wasted as there is no husk for the bird to remove. Other mixes can contain added pellets of nutrients, although birds will often avoid eating these nuggets, choosing to eat only their regular seeds, and it will be less easy for you then to monitor their diet. Grit will supplement mineral requirements and will assist in the birds digestive process.

As an alternative, try a vitamin and mineral powder, which will stick well to damp greenstuff, or a similar product added to the drinking water. Feeding fresh natural foods, such as chickweed, dandelion and seeding grasses can also help to compensate for any deficiency. Calcium is essential mineral and is particularly important for the hen during the breeding season as it is the main constituent of eggshells. Cuttlefish bone is a valuable source of calcium, and this will also help to keep the birds’ bills in trim as they peck at the powdery surface. Scrape a little off the surface at first to make it easier for them to start nibbling.

Dogs are adaptable creatures. They can, for instance, utilize protein foods, like meats, for energy if their intake of carbohydrates is deficient. They must, however, be provided with a minimum level of each of around thirty nutrients, including the vitamin and minerals, if they are to stay healthy. All the modern prepared foods and the great majority of home-mixed diets, will provide an adequate supply of essential nutrients. Some animals’ protein is essential to maintain a dog’s health. A vegetarian diet for dogs can be devised but requires skill, although there is no doubt their dogs do not need the level of animal protein in their diet that is commonly provided.

Some fats are also vital in the diet, providing certain essential fatty acids, and acting as carriers for the fat-soluble vitamins. Carbohydrates from the bulk of most diets, including normal dog foods, whether commercially compounded or home-mixed. Provided your dog’s diet has a reasonable and the foods are not themselves wildly out of the ordinary, the owner’s concern need only be with the actual quantity given to the dog, and the total calorie provision.

The obvious and cheapest way to feed a dog is to give it biscuits alone. They offer the highest calorie content, weight for weight, of any food except pure fat, and dog biscuits are cheaper to buy than canned foods. But this is misleading because a diet that consisted solely of dog biscuits would be seriously deficient in protein and it would be deficient in fats, vitamins and minerals.

Obesity: One of the commonest afflictions in the dog is simple obesity. Owners will frequently not see it and one acknowledged, it may still be extremely difficult for them to understand that reducing the dog’s food intake is not cruel. The obesity diet has its part to play by enabling the owners to feed a low-calorie diet to the dog, which will satisfy the hunger pangs while reducing his intake of nutrients. The diet needs to be balanced by sensible variations of other important nutrients.

As an example, if you wished to reduce your dog’s weigh to 20kg, using the slower scale you would need to feed not more than 600 calories a day. Without resourcing to a special diet, this could be achieved by a total daily feed of 115 g of meat and 130 g of biscuit mixer. This is not a lot of food on a large dog’s plate, and it explains why special reducing diets, which give bulk and fill the dog’s stomach, are popular.

Newts and Salamanders eat livefoods but it may be possible to persuade them to ear small goldfish pellets when they are living in water. This is a safer option than other aquatic livefoods available from fish-keeping outlets. Tubifex worms, for example, are likely to introduce unpleasant bacteria into the water, while daphnia, or “water fleas”, may bring parasites or even predatory insects with them, and these could attack tadpoles. The best option when providing livefood is to breed your own. Although daphnia can be cultured in a water tank outdoors, there will be less risk of disease if you use terrestrial livefoods such as whiteworm.

These can be breed at home with little effort, and can be used when these amphibians are both on land and in water. You cannot buy supplies of whiteform in the same way as other livefoods, such as mealworms, but you can usually acquire starter kits. To cultivate whiteworms, you will need a clean plastic container with a lid, such as an empty margarine tub. Half fill the tub with a peat substitute and then, with a pencil, dab some holes in the peat. The holes should be partly filled with damp bread, which has been moistened in milk and will has been moistened in milk and will act as nourishment for the worms. Divide the culture up and cover the worms, placing the lid on top to prevent it drying out too quickly. If kept at a temperature of 20⁰ C it should be possible to harvest from the culture after about one month. Lift out the worms with tweezers and drop them into a saucer of dechlorinated water, which will keep them apart from the substrate, and offer them to the amphibians. Whiteworms are a very nutritious food and are especially valuable for young amphibians.

There are various prepared diets available for the most popular types of lizards, such as green iguanas and bearded dragons. These diets are often in pelleted form and although the foods can be fed in a dry state, they often prove to be more palatable to the lizards if they are moistened with water before hand. Even so, it is still a good idea to offer a range of fresh foods, ranging from sprouting pulses, such as mung beans, to alfalfa, can be grown quite easily even if you do not have access to a garden.

Other vegetables that can be fed to reptiles include carrots and cabbage in small quantities. Green lettuce contains little in the way of nutrients, however, compared with red-leaved variants. Some lizards will eat fruit, including grapes, apple and melon, but avoid rhubarb, which could be toxic because of its oxalic acid content. While larger lizards can munch whole leaves, food should be cut up into pieces, which can be swallowed without difficulty, particularly in the case of carrot. Provide the food in a bowl that cannot be tipped over easily. It is a good idea to sprinkle over a vitamin and mineral supplement to maintain the nutritional value. Read the labeling: overdosing is harmful, especially over a period of time.

Insectivorous Lizards: Catering for insectivorous lizards requires the use of a supplement as these foods are known to be deficient in terms of their calcium: phosphorous ratio and this can be a cause of metabolic bone disease. There are now various ways of improving the nutritional values of the main types of livefoods to compensate for the nutritional deficit. One effective way of doing this is known as gut loading. This involves feeding smaller livefoods to the lizards’ standard invertebrate livefood diet. The benefits should then be passed on to the lizards when they eat their regular food. Similarly, crickets can be sprinkled with a nutritional balancer prior to being fed to lizards. Crickets are available in various sizes, and it is possible to choose a suitably-sizes cricket to meet the requirements of the lizards. This can be useful when rearing young lizards as they can then be fed on an ever-increasing size of food as they develop and grows.

Mealworms also range in size from the mini-mealworms through to giant mealworms, which are actually a different species. The giant type is only suitable for the biggest lizards, such as fully grown water dragons, but the smaller sizes will be eaten by a variety of lizards. Their tough outer-body casing means they may not be easily digested in some cases, especially by small lizards.

The tortoise is primarily herbivorous in their feeding habits but, in general, fruit should not be offered to them. Instead, provide a wide variety of vegetable matter, including wild plants, such as dandelion leaves and flowers, or chickweed and cultivated crops, such as alfalfa, tomatoes and cabbage.

While ordinary lettuce contains little other than water, the red varieties of lettuce have a much higher nutritional content. Always the pet owners have to provide the food for tortoises on a low-sided tray, such as those used as plant stands, to prevent it being dragged around the vivarium and contaminated on the substrate.