Sugar Glider Diet: Kazkos Diet

26 August 2009

I just want to say that kazkos diet is a great place to start when looking at foods to feed your gliders. In Australia one of the local Zoos has been breeding and keeping Sugar Gliders since the early 1960’s. There diet has been developed over the years and the latest was added to by an animal nutritionist who added the bird vitamins. After some discussion

s we think this may have come about because of the ease to which these vitamins can be added to many diets. Here it is not recommended to add the reptile vitamins as these were designed primarily for reptiles although I don’t understand therefore why the bird vitamins were added for sugar gliders other than perhaps they are more gentle to the digestive s

ystem of gliders.

Kazko is a sugar glider born in 1997 and I believe that Kazkos Diet is a plan that takes a time tested approach to managing the diet dilemma.

Kazko’s Diet was designed to offer a variety in each food group for each f

eeding. The goal is to never feed the exact same spread every night, instead, modify it to allow for different sources of each group.

There is no official list of items, those lists exist everywhere, but instead, a list of groups. 25% protein, 25% fruit, 25% veggie, and 25% blend. This is very much like the four human food groups concept except that the fourth group is not simply dairy, it is a generic group that I call blend where you can use dairy, yogurt, other sources of calcium, and you can also experiment with blended diets and supplement calcium and other vitamins

if you choose to.

Some suggestions for each group are listed below but are in no means a limitation. Use judgement and learn what you can by reading other diet plans and food resources and figure out for yourself what is good and not good to feed.

PROTEIN: 25%

  • chicken - breast, ground, baked, boiled, …
  • shrimp
  • fish
  • pork
  • soy in any form
  • cooked egg
  • beef - ground, brisket, …, is safe, but use 25% of the time or less

FRUIT: 25%

  • blueberries
  • peaches
  • pears
  • apple
  • melon
  • mango
  • papaya
  • any fruit…

VEGGIE: 25%

  • green bean
  • carrot
  • corn - is ok but use sparingly
  • collard greens, spinach, sweet potato, …
  • most any veggies, cooked, raw, diced, whatever they will eat…

BLEND: 25%

  • flavored yogurt, dairy or soy based - never use diet, natural only
  • nectar mix
  • cottage cheese
  • rotate or experiment with any of the other diet blends such as Healesville, bml, …
  • occasionally add a fiber source such as a natural cereal , pasta, perhaps dried out french bread to chew on.

The blend category is a catchall and the place where you can experiment with things and find something that your sugars like. It could be sweet, it could be blended or liquid vegetable. You can add supplements here if you wish to, but if you feed yogurt often and you feed a wide and varied spread weekly, then you really will not need to supplement at all. If you do supplement, you will need to do more research as some brands and types of supplements are showing to be bad for the animals long term. Liver damage is a growing is

sue as of late probably due to over supplementing or possibly from the sources of some of the supplements such as Calcium from oyster shells or K3/Menadione which is banned from human consumption and should also be for animals. Sugar gliders do need a source of calcium but it does not have to be paramount and in every day feedings. Yogu

rt seems to do the job and can always be added to any of the blends you decide to work with or just use it flavored in rotation with other things.

And I almost forgot the most important category:

TREATS: 110%

  • hand fed mealworms, no more than 6 per animal
  • dried yogurt drops, once or twice per week
  • honey on the finger

The diet goal here is to vary things often. Feed shrimp one night, then ground chicken the next, then ground beef the next, left over brisket the next, … Keep large variety bags of frozen veggies and fruits in the freezer. Your freezer will become busier than it has ever been when you keep sugar gliders. Some times you may have fresh things in the fridge and some times you may find yourself chopping and preparing fresh things for freezing.

resource: http://sugargliderpetguide.com





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