From:
"Sukie Crandall"
Date: 2008-11-20 22:41:39 UTC
Subject: [ferrethealth] Re: No idea what's going on here...
To: ferrethealth@yahoogroups.com
Okay, first off, cooked food is more easily digested than raw.
Besides killing off many bacteria and parasites in raw foods
cooking is basically a form of pre-digestion. The slight
difference in amounts of enzymes is in the noise, so if you
go to cooked versions of the raw foods those will be the
most digestible of all.
You can learn about that in these:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/meat/INT-what-is-meat.html
http://forums.egullet.com/index.php?showtopic=40548
Apologies that the second is now a cache so a lot of it is gone which
is too bad because it was downright wonderful. A third old resource
on that is gone now so I guess some month I'll have to devote time
to this sort of thing.
Secondly, an already compromised animal often is at increased
infection risk from raw food, and if the bacteria are constantly
reintroduced trouble can be expected to continue. Not all
commercial raw foods are as clean as the manufacturers like
to say. Here's a professional resource on that score:
http://www.fda.gov/cvm/Guidance/Guide122.pdf
and more
http://www.fda.gov/cvm/CVM_Updates/rawdiet.htm
It is not unusual in zoos which went to raw (not counting the ones
that went back to cooked) for any compromised animal to only get
cooked foods when possible.
In
http://www.petdiets.com/Library/articlelist.asp?subid=18&catid=9&num=16
which is the site of a professor who has doctorates in both veterinary
medicine and nutrition you will notice
BEGIN QUOTE
Article
Pet Foods & Diets : Foods and Feeding
Raw Diets
by Rebecca Remillard, Ph.D., D.V.M., DACVN
This article presents the food safety issues around
feeding raw diets to household pets. It does not
contain recipes. Number of citations = 32
END QUOTE
which unfortunately needs to be bought, but I have read it and it
is very comprehensive and clear.
The reality is that a diet often needs to shaped around
THE NEEDS OF THE INDIVIDUAL and that means that one
which is fine for most healthy ferrets when done right can
not be counted on to be right for one who is ill or has other
modifying considerations.
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