# What's in YOUR food mix?!



## TzusnHedgies (Sep 25, 2012)

I'm very interested in nutrition and I love to hear what people have chosen to feed their pets! I'm sure there's a lot that I can learn with developing my own mix. My baby hedgie is still on the food from his breeder. I bought 2 foods to mix and maybe should add a 3rd.

Anyway, what do you feed?!


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## hedgieteen (Jun 11, 2012)

My baby, Pandora is 15 weeks old today. I feed her 1/3 Royal Canin BabyCat 34 (breeder food), 1/3 Natural Balance Ultra Reduced Calorie Formula, and 1/3 Blue Buffalo Chicken and Turkey (I think that flavor.)

Thanks for askin ;D


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## TzusnHedgies (Sep 25, 2012)

Interesting! Gonna need a whole lot more replies. lol


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## ktdid (Aug 7, 2012)

I've been feeding Fitz Purina One Beyond Chicken and Oatmeal and just started mixing in Natures Recipe Hairball. He really likes the new stuff and his poops have been so much better since he has been eating it.


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## Erizo (Jul 25, 2012)

My girl is a runner. She runs ~3 hours a night and runs hard. 21 sq. ft. C&C cage, so lots of runaround room. She will only eat a certain volume of food, so I've had to make a number of changes to her diet. She is getting 15 large mealies per day. She gets 1/2 ounce (1/5 jar) of Gerber-or-Beechnut turkey-or-chicken baby food with 1 gram of Solid Gold / Innova kibble mix ground and stirred into the baby food. She free feeds about 3 grams of Royal Canin Babycat 34 (34% fat) per night. Right now, she is holding steady (but just two weeks) at 316 grams; down from a peak of 338 grams, but up from a bottom of 290 grams.

She is a preference eater, only eating her first choice before eating her second choice, and so forth. That has actually been quite helpful, because it helps as far as manipulating her choices (so far, at least). I am hoping that she will continue to hold steady or start to eat a little more. I can't lower the baby food much more and would rather not have her eating 100% Royal Canin. She likes the Solid Gold and the Innova kibbles, but because she is a preference eater she stopped eating them when the addition of a high fat offering became necessary. But, she likes the the baby food even more, so am able to smuggle in a bit of the other kibbles by grinding to a powder and stirring in. The texture is grittier, but she doesn't seem to mind.

I think that for most people and most situations, two staple foods is plenty. If you have a preference eater, then two foods is a whole lot easier to manage; plus you'll never use up the bags before they expire. My girl's situation is a bit more complex because of her high activity level combined with the limit of the volume that she will eat. It has required very close monitoring to keep weight on.

When she was a baby, she was drinking 1/4 cup of water per night (12 tsp.). When her metabolism shifted and water and food consumption dropped, her water consumption dropped to only a tablespoon (3 tsp.). She drinks so little that it became impossible to measure her water. I ordered a graduated cylinder from a laboratory supply company. She drinks only 12ml - 16ml of water per night. I don't know how she lives on that, especially with all of her running, but she's been at that level for quite a while now.


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## TzusnHedgies (Sep 25, 2012)

The other night, my guy ran for 8 hours straight (really fast!) on his wheel and didn't eat ANY food or drink ANY water. He just went to sleep after he ran on his wheel. What I experimented with last night was taking the wheel out when he woke up. I figured that there wasn't much else to do in there, so he would probably eat and drink as an activity. It worked! He drank a lot of water and ate almost all of his food. He loves freeze dried mealworms, grasshoppers and crickets and will go after those first! So I think that I need to put down the kibble first and when he's finished with that, I'll add the bugs. I hope thatI don't end up having to go to the lengths that you do! But you have to do what you have to do in order to keep them healthy. I need to buy a scale ASAP so that I can monitor his weight!


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## AngelaH (Jul 24, 2012)

Thistle eats Sunseed Hedgehog food (I know, not a popular choice here, but she was on it before I found this forum and really likes it) and Purina One Beyond. She also gets a few mealies a week. I can't get her to eat any fresh fruits or veggies. She was on Briskys hedgehog food when I first got her 6 months ago and I just got that phased out.


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## Tabi (Jun 24, 2012)

My hoggies eat 1/2 blue buffalo chicken and rice and 1/2 natures recipe indoor w/ hairball control


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## Immortalia (Jan 24, 2009)

I'd meant to mention it in your wheeling too much thread, but be really careful feeding freeze dried bugs. The process makes the chitin of the bugs very hard to digest, and it has been known to cause impactions, which then lead to death.

If you insist on feeding the freeze dried bugs, be sure to feed it in very very limited amounts. I wouldn't go over 5 bugs per feeding, and if you're giving them daily, I wouldn't go over 2 per day maximum. It's just something that can be very scary, and because they're so small, and being exotic, emergency surgery will be difficult and expensive if your hedgie gets an impaction. 

If you are insect squeamish, you can buy live, give them some veggies for 24 hours, then toss everything into the freezer to kill them. Then you can just take them out to thaw as you need them. And the gut feeding prior(allowing them to have the fresh veggies for 24hrs) make them more nutritious for your hedgie as well.


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## TzusnHedgies (Sep 25, 2012)

Thank you Immortalia for the warning on freeze dried bugs! I came across that information yesterday and freaked out about how many bugs I've given Caramel! I immediately put him in a bath of warm water where he swam around (but his feet could touch the bottom). I massaged his tummy a little too. He didn't go to the bathroom at all, which I've never seen in a hedgie that's in warm water. When he got out I gave him 1cc of plain pumpkin. Starting at about 8:00 tonight he's been randomly coming out and running around, drinking water and eating kibble. There was poop on his wheel too. So hopefully he's okay. I'm not giving him any bugs for at least a week! And even then only a couple, and not everyday. A long time ago I had a bearded dragon and kept crickets to gut load crickets to feed to them. It was so disgusting! I ended up with another "pet" and they were so nasty. The smell made me want to throw up and there were tons of dead crickets to clean out everyday. I don't know anything about doing the same with mealworms. I'm confused that freeze drying them makes them dangerous, but freezing doesn't. What's the difference in the process?


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## Lilysmommy (Jan 7, 2009)

Mealworms are MUCH less of a pain than crickets. Really, from what I've read, crickets are just one of the worst insects to keep/raise/breed, with smell, noise, trouble, etc. Mealworms are quiet, don't smell almost at all (especially compared to cricket smell), and don't usually die in the amounts that crickets do (if they do, there'd be something wrong with the set up they're being kept in, like grain mites). Here's a thread talking about how to raise them - viewtopic.php?f=6&t=46 It's really very, very easy, I raised them for at least a year for Lily.

The difference in freeze drying and freezing is that freeze drying takes all the moisture out and (if I remember what I've read correctly) removes or impairs some of the natural enzymes the worms have that help a hedgehog to digest the chitin. Frozen mealworms don't go through that drying process - once they're thawed out, they're pretty much returned to how they were when they were alive, just...dead. If that makes any sense. :lol: Frozen/live mealies aren't completely 100% safe - too many of them can still cause constipation, but the number is much higher than that of freeze-dried mealies/bugs.

If you do still want to feed crickets, the frozen method for them really does work well. I did that for the last few months I had Lily (maybe longer, can't remember), and I used them as hiding treats in her cage. She loved the game and once she'd sniffed them out the first few times and figured out my main hiding places, it was her nightly routine to, after I put her back in her cage, make rounds of her cage to eat all of her hidden crickets. It was so much fun to watch her!


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## TzusnHedgies (Sep 25, 2012)

The cricket game sounds fun! Except that I hate crickets and I know they'd also be jumping out of the cage. *shiver up my spine* Mealworms are so gross that can barely handle them when they're dead. If they were moving around I would throw up! I have a phobia of maggots. (Can barely even see or type the word), so anything similar just freaks me out!  I'm going to stick to freeze dried bugs, but in extreme moderation.


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## Immortalia (Jan 24, 2009)

The crickets are hidden when frozen, which means they're dead and not jumping around. It is MUCH safer than feeding freeze dried. 

But if you insist, be sure to squish all your hedgies fully formed poop between paper towels every night. You want to make sure there is no undigested chitin. And you will need to watch like a hawk, because pooping doesn't mean there isn't a partial blockage that can slowly get bigger over the time. So I'm not sure how many you fed prior to all this, so you're not out of the woods yet. Just keep watching and smearing any fully formed poop to look at the contents. 

You might also want to start adding oil(like a capsule of flax seed oil) to the food weekly, to ensure some lubrication. Then you can bump it up to a capsule every 2-3 days.


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