Practical Tips
1. Feeding Basics
2. More About Feeding
3. Nutrients
4. Practical Tips
5. Recipes
When you feed your mice, you should always do it in the same order. This way the possibility of forgetting to feed a tankful of mice. If a mouse or a group of mice needs special diet or feeding arrangements, you should put a note about it on the tank so you have it easier to remember this. Tanks with sick mice in it, should always be fed last. This way you can prevent spreading of diseases.
It's Hyacint's food bowl, nobody else's! |
You should monitor closely, how newly weaned babies can use their water bottle. It can happen, that they either do not know how to drink from a bottle yet, or they can't reach it, which leads to the babies not getting enough the liquid they need. You can give them a piece of fresh, moist fruit or vegetable. For example apple, cucumber, lettuce and tomato are good. If you keep the food bowl on a separate level, always check that the babies can reach the level and get to eat. This is especially important for newly weaned babies, because the mother produces less milk and the babies are starting to eat more solid food.
Mice do not necessarily need a food bowl at all. Many mice use the feeding bowl as a toilet, which causes the food in the bowl to go bad. You can try and prevent this by lifting the food bowl to a higher level.
Some strains of mice, especially those that are or have in the background Red or Fawn, have obesity in them. The same situation is with some strains of Black Eyed Cream and Pink Eyed White. Obesity is as unhealthy for mice as it is for humans. Furthermore it also lowers the fertility of females.
You should not try to get a fat mouse to loose weight by cutting its food portion to a minimum. Too little food also means too little nutrients, which may lead into malnutrition instead. You should give your obese mouse a lighter diet by switching from growth lab blocks to maintenance blocks, or by picking out most sunflower seeds and nuts from a seed mix. However, nuts and sunflower seeds contain lots of vitamins, so you should give them to your mice in small amounts. You can also cut down the amount of seed mix given, replacing it with vegetables.
Noddyn Smaragd, a cream buck |
Finally, few words of warning about additives. Some additives and colourings have been found out to cause cancer. Due to our pet mice (especially females) having tumours from time to time, you should consider this fact when feeding the mice(and why not when choosing the food you eat yourself). Avoid brightly coloured pellets and others in the mouse's diet. Mice couldn't care less what colour they it is. Colourful "pellets" are usually there only to please the owner's eye: subconsciously we believe that the food is versatile when there are lots of parts in different colours. Do not feed your mice meat, which has been grown using hormones or fruit/vegetables/crops grown using lots of pesticides. These are harmful to you and even more so to your mice!!
Always peel fruits (apples, pears and such) and wash vegetables before giving them to your mice. Do not give candies and other things like that at all. Food with lots of fibers (vegetables, grains) have been found out to lessen the possibility of getting cancer, so give plenty of them as additional food.
# Reminder - When you collect fresh food from the nature: do not forget to worm your mice!!! You should worm your mice twice a year, if you have lots of mice, they travel back and forth to be mated or on other trips, you get new mice from other breeders and sell mice to new homes. Check suitable medicines and portions from your vet. Make sure that each and every mice does eat its portion of the medicine. Remember to use different medicine every other time you worm them, and change beddings during worming. This way you can prevent unpleasant surprises and your mice can use all the energy they get from their diet and grow according to it and their genetic background.
On to next feeding article - Recipes!
Text: Minna Koivu.