From:
rrc961@mizzou.edu
Date: 2002-09-01 02:37:15 UTC
Subject: RE: Bob C: Ferret Caretaker Quiz
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <14343087.1030847835661.JavaMail.root@scandium>
Angela wrote:
> I see your comments below, but I am still baffled why Americans seem so steadfast about feeding kibble (I understand this one for convenience - I feed this stuff too) and supplementing it with duck soup - why not raw meat - I just don't understand. Why go to all the trouble of cooking meat and making duck soup when you could feed raw meat?
The answer is fear. Rightly or wrongly, bacteria SCARES people. Bacteria are something people cannot normally see, they cause harm, they kill. Bacteria are the "evil spirits" humans have battled for our evolutionary history. To most people, they are frightening at a visceral level. It is very unlikely people who fear bacteria will ever listen to the safety issues of feeding raw meat, nor how most issues are either so overblown or rare that most objections are moot.
Cooking food solves the problem, and pacifies the frightened. While I personally feel it is unnecessary in most cases, if common sense and real-world evidence held value, we would all eat more raw fruits and vegetables, lightly cooked meat, and NO processed carbohydrates. Goodbye to Pepsi and tacos? No way! ;-)
The other issue is meat and what you mean by the term. If you mean "whole, uncooked carcasses," then I have no real comment because they are nutritionally perfect (if healthy,well-fed adult prey animals). But if you mean chunks of raw muscle, then a diet composed of significant amounts of meat is not healthy. Meat lacks the proper calcium-phosphate ratios that maintain healthy bone and biochemical buffers. In the wild, muscle meat is consumed with bits of bone, so the problem is directly solved. Raw muscle meat is an EXCELLENT treat and major component of a complete diet, but by itself it is nutritionally inadequate.
> Cooking meat changes the chemical structure and destroys some nutrients. Bob also says in one of his replies about frequency of feeding that ferrets are essentially polecats and haven't changed much - so wouldn't raw meat as primary feed be much better?
See above.
Thanks for the opportunity for discussion.
Bob C