Q: "Is Gerber's baby food good food for ferrets?"
 
A: Baby chow?  I think it is pretty good for Gerber.  Charging 80 cents
for a small bottle of chicken baby food that costs just a few cents to
make?
 
Gerber's baby food has a long history of being recommended for ferrets,
including recommendations from me.  I will no longer recommend it as a
diet, although I don't think you have to stop using it.  I think it is
fine as a supplement, even as a short-term diet.  However, I can no
longer suggest it be used for more than a week or so because while it
is effective in supplying a ferret's energy needs and perhaps most of
their protein requirements, it falls very short in other areas and might
actually result in fat-soluble vitamin deficiencies.  Let me explain.
 
The label on Gerber's baby food says the food meets 0% vitamin A, 0%
calcium, 4% iron, and 15% zinc requirements for infants.  This alone
makes it an unsuitable long-term food for ferrets.  Try to raise a ferret
kit on this and it could develop rickets, or even develop malnutrition
and die from a lack of essential amino and fatty acids, and/or vitamin A,
D, E, and K (among other things).  Ferrets need food with the calcium to
phosphorus ratio of at least 1:1, and better still if it is around 1.3:1.
Meat is phosphorus rich, and a diet of low calcium meat leads to rickets
in growing animals and calcium deficiencies in grown ones.
 
Additionally, while the fatty acid or amino acid profiles are probably
sufficient for developing infants, it is likely the ferret will not be
getting some essential ones specific to their species.  The label lists
only three ingredients: finely ground chicken, water, and cornstarch.
There is 7 grams of fat, 8 grams of protein, and 2 grams of
carbohydrates, with no sugars or fiber.  I don't know the actual moisture
content because there is no requirement to publish it, but I do know
chicken is about 70% water and Gerber's adds additional water to the
recipe, so the moisture content is greater than 70% (but see below for a
better estimate).  The starch is probably added not so much for energy
since the food is very fatty, but to "jell" or "thicken" the ingredients
so the food looks thicker and the consumer doesn t have to mix the
water-meat mixture before feeding.
 
There is a way to convert the human-oriented ingredient analysis to one
in line with pet foods.  The moisture content can be estimated with
simple math.  The jar has 71 g of food, so if you subtract the 8 g of
protein, 7 g of fat, and 2 g of carbohydrate, you have 54 g of everything
else, which is water with a few salts (sodium and potassium are listed).
Do a simple percent calculation to get the percentages of the rest of the
values.  Ok, so we approximately have 76% moisture, 11% protein, 10% fat,
and 3% carbohydrate.  To convert to a dry matter basis, just subtract
the percent moisture from 100 and divide the various percentages by the
resulting product and then multiply by 100.  In this case, 76 from 100
equals 24, so we would divide each number by 24 before multiplying by
100.  This would mean Gerber's baby food would be 11/24 x 100 = 45.8%
protein, 10/24 x 100 = 41.7% fat, and 3/24 x 100 = 12.5% carbohydrates.
There would be some ash because both sodium and potassium are minerals,
but the amount would likely be 1% or less.
 
(continued in the next post)
[Posted in FML issue 4648]