This archive article (written 2009–2016) contains advice that may be out of date and is waiting for veterinary review. Please check with your vet before acting on it. About our articles
| Feeding Pet Rodent |
| Feeding Your lovely
Pet Rodent: All the families of rodents eat a wide range of foods. Most rodents are herbivorous, plant eaters, eating a wide range of plant materials, including seeds, stems, leaves, roots, and flowers. Many of these species eat primarily seeds. Some species, such as the grasshopper mouse, eat insects and spiders. Other species, such as the Australian water rat, are primarily carnivorous (meat-eating), preying (eating animals for food) on small fish, frogs, and mollusks. Many are to some degree omnivorous, eating both plants and animals. Still others have highly specialized meals, eating only a few species of invertebrates, animals without a backbone, or fungi. Gerbils, hamsters, mice and rats have similar nutritional needs â high-quality commercial food pellets with an occasional seed treat and a constant supply of fresh water. There are a few differences, though. Hamsters, gerbils and mice eat mostly grain products, and hamsters like an occasional insect. Rats go for both vegetable and meat products. Buy commercial pellets instead of a seed mixture, which won't have enough nutrients. Your pet needs a pellet ration with about 16 percent protein for gerbils, hamsters and young, growing mice. Adult mice need a little less protein, and rats need a diet of about 22 percent protein. In three-to-five months, the pellets lose their nutritional value, so buy only as much as you can use in that time, and check the date the food was milled to ensure it hasn't sat on a shelf too long. You should feed the pellets from an overhead or elevated bin in the cage, so the food won't be contaminated by animal waste. But it's normal behavior for your pet to stash some food throughout the cage â or in hiding places around the house after an escape. If you're feeding well-balanced pellets, you probably don't need to add supplements to your pet's water. The supplements can form disease-causing bacteria in the water and give it a bad taste that deters your pet from drinking. |
| Rodents need to chew
and gnaw to wear down their front teeth, which are constantly growing.
Chew-sticks from the pet store, pieces of fruit-tree branches or bark
should be placed in the cage for that purpose. Balanced diet for pet rodents: An optimal diet for rodents in chemical carcinogenicity studies should be nutritionally adequate for growth and maintenance without excesses of high energy and growth-enhancing nutrients. Purified diets are expensive, and standardized purified diets for long-term studies are not yet established. Purified diets caused per portal lipidosis, hemorrhagic diseases and calcification of tissues in rodents. Diet restriction will result in consumption of most food during the resting phase. This will cause increased activity during the resting phase with a shift of nocturnal cycle and associated changes in physiological processes. Diet restriction may modify the carcinogenic responses to chemicals, and the practice is labor intensive. Decreasing the fat and protein content to adequate levels with a slight increase in fiber content and making the diet available only during the normal feeding period (night) may decrease the energy consumption, slow the growth and lower the body weight gain by 10â20%, with a substantial decrease in the prevalence of spontaneous tumors in the pituitary and mammary glands. We should take advantage of the biological similarities between rodents and humans to enhance the utility of rodent studies; however, mimicking the diet and feeding procedures of humans without a thorough understanding of the physiology of the altered rodent may not be useful. Contaminant concentrations of the diets should be as low as is practical. Each lot of diet should be analyzed for macronutrients and labile micronutrients with complete micronutrient analyses of randomly selected lots. |