Healthy Treats Advice Please

Rolo is 9 weeks and 2 days old! She absolutley loves dried mealworms and I ration her to 4 or 5 a day as treats as I am aware that they are fattening.

I have started using chicken, mince, fruit and veg to supplement her diet at meal times and she always leaves a clean dish, so far so good!

I was wondering if there are any alternative healthy treats I could try instead of the mealworms?

Thanks in advance for your help.

i am no expert but my little girl loves locost hopper...i give them to her in her playpen [live]
she took a short while to relaize they were food but its obvious she loves them now and soon
finds them. i also used to feed her dried mealworms but now feed live ones she prefers them.
have to admit not keen on keeping live ones but never mind,she is a spoilt and much loved
hedgie
i have used this site to find most of my info and am sure you will get lots more help

Live mealworms, roaches (I've tried dubias and discoids so far), locusts, crickets, butterworms are all gut-loadable, and so healthy. Dried, meh, they aren't gut-loadable and don't contain the enzymes used to break down the chitin (it is removed in the freeze-drying process), so they are a little like root veg chips - they are better than true junk food, but are still processed food.

Roaches have a good meat to chitin ratio, have about half the fat, twice the protein, and 50-100% more fibre than gut-loaded live mealworms. Crickets have about the same protein as live mealworms, but slightly less fat (depending on which species you go for, black field crickets are more fattening, banded, brown house and silent brown apparently have less than mealworms). I don't actually have any data on locusts (need to find that out), but I'd imagine they were similar to crickets.

If your hog likes waxworms, but is prone to tubbiness, you might want to try butterworms. They look like a waxworm's bigger, angrier (they are red, makes them look scary, but they aren't really) cousin. Slightly less protein than a mealworm, but less than half the fat (about the same protein as a waxworm, but a 5th of the fat of one of them!). They are grub-like though, so if you've tried waxworms and they've turned their nose up, this may be an issue (Bodhi won't eat grub insects - no waxies, no butterworms, no calci-worms).

Mealworms shouldn't be fattening per ce, but it depends on how much exercise your hog gets. At 9 weeks old, I was free-feeding live mealworms - up until just past wheeling (12 weeks), when you actually find out how much your hog runs (to make sure they don't suddenly drop in weight). But Bodhi is pretty good with weight, she self-moderates, and so I still free feed.

That said, there was a discussion a while ago about a correlation between cage size and obesity in hogs. Bodhi just got back (earlier this week) from 2 weeks in a viv rather than her pen, and gained over 20g! She's already dropped down by 10-15g (and she gets a handful of mealworms, usually at night, with a smaller handful fed during the day). Ergo, I'm sold on the idea that a larger cage = more exercise = less obesity. But now I am REAAAALLY off tangent!

welly really over eats when he has access to mealies so he is always monitored to stop his belly dragging around. i read some when on here it's fine to free feed mealies for the night so welly gets home at 175g and in 1 night he in up 10g

You only need to start worrying about weight at 350g (or even 400g) in my opinion. They should be gaining plenty when they are that young (assuming your hog is under 12 weeks - which at 175g, I really hope they are!).

he is 6 weeks and 5 days so yeah hes a babie

Then fattening him up is your primary concern Or at least, weight gain at that age is a fairly good thing.

oh good he can go have some nana and green trees then! he's 7 and 5 days sorry he was 6 and 3 when i got him

izzyhoglet wrote:oh good he can go have some nana and green trees then!

banana and broccoli i will need lots of paper towels l8er

Ah.

You should be feeding a tablespoon of fresh per day (some folk say a couple of times a week - I prefer variety ergo variety is good for the hog, ergo I ignore them ). This should include fruit, veg and mince/chicken breast/egg. Banana and brocolli are obviously in the fruit and veg sections But don't be too upset if your hog doesn't eat the fruit/veg. Tbh, they are insectivores and secondary opportunistic carnivores. How much 'greens' they would eat in the wild is dubious. Bodhi probably eats a couple of mouthfuls of fruit/veg (at best!), but mostly it gets used to make the tasty tasty mince slightly more problematic (enriching!) to get hold of.

ah i'm sneaky i mash broccoli mince and banana in and he eats a bit of everything including fruit and veg! but he much prefers meat!