For Shron and others who labor over preparing chicken tissue, may I
make the following suggestion that hopefully will ease your labors
considerably.

First, I shall tell you that the cooked long leg bones of the chicken
are superb for ferrets. Why is this? This is because the ferret, as
intelligent as he is, will not chew, splinter and swallow the medullary
canal particulates of a long bone, as will the dog, cat, and some other
mammals.

The ferret will, instead, chew and consume the soft and somewhat crispy
epiphyseal cartilages that terminate both ends of long bones, these
bones being of course cooked bones and with the leg muscles and tendons
attached. This is pretty much the way you'd pick up and eat a KFC leg
as well.

It would seem that the suggestion to pulverize the naked chicken bones
in a high speed blender, especially for their calcium(Ca) content, is
not really necessary in view of the fact that the ferret will eat the
long bone mid-sections without the ferreter using a blender for that
purposeless purpose. I rather suspect that the suggestion to grind
up chicken bones was an afterthought by that poster to utilize the
"left-overs" after removing most of the chicken tissue and adding the
Ca element as a rather weak and simple excuse/justification for doing
so.

If you feel that supplementing Ca is somehow terribly vital for your
ferret's nutrition, and you know that there are no other sources of Ca
available (not if he gets chicken) then you may do the following: Pull
up the USDA National Nutrient Database for Std Reference, Release 18,
and there you will see listed a food source that yields 1104 mg Ca per
0.75 C of General Mills Whole Grain Cereal. You certainly don't need
the entire 0.75 C added to your blender, but a mere pinch will be
sufficient if you regularly repeat the pinch of cereal every soupy
feeding.

On the other hand, a teaspoon of crushed, ripe and cooked tomato added
to the mix can substitute for the cereal, in the event you don't have
any in your cupboard just now.

Don't forget...we're going on a trip down the esophagus of my imaginary
10,000 ton ferretus maximus, so stay tuned. Omigod****

Also, do I have any more contributors to the ferret water consumption
studies? I really need your help, please. And don't forget the ferret
poop.

EdawareLip InSki

****Omigod = FYI the term Omigod can be broken down to two words: Omi
and god. Omi is a German word and diminutively means Grandmother. God
is from whom Rush Limbaugh (my hero) receives the Almighty's Truth when
he says, Truth on loan from Goddah, with the emphasis of the final
syllable. Kinda get a kick outa that.

[Posted in FML 6074]