About 1/3 to 1/2 of my recent emails have been concerning the Chicken Gravy formula; mostly supportive comments by people using it, but also quite a few questions. Most I will defer until I have more time, but I will answer a few now. Q: "Do you always give it as a paste or gravy?" A: No. I sometime pack it into sausage casings and make a "Chicken Sausage" that I can later cut chunks from. This will crumble a little better, and is drier, so ferrets on limited fluids can enjoy. Also, it takes up less space, is easier to store, and is easy to turn into a gravy or soup later. And it looks cool in the 'fridge. Q:"Is it better raw?" "Do you cook it later?" A: It's always better for carnivores to eat foods as raw as possible. However, the small amount of cooking called for in the recipe will not destroy nearly as many nutrients as done by heating the paste that is made into kibble. Plus, the vitamins are replaced later, so nutritive losses are minimal. As for cooking, I sometimes give the ferrets a treat by crumbling some of the Chicken Sausage into a skillet, and lightly browning it in olive oil, but that's about it. Q:"Do you ever mix it with other foods?" A: Yes. I sometimes soft boil a few eggs and mix it 50:50 to the Chicken Gravy. Yolks are better raw, and whites are better cooked, so don't use raw eggs (raw egg whites can cause anemia). Sometimes I'll toss in some finely chopped fruit or raisins. Other times I gross myself out and drop in some earthworms. Yeeech! When I make Turkey Gravy, I always add a few cranberries because they are so festive. Q:"Do you need to fortify it with bone meal [or other substances]?" A: Not if you make it like in the recipe. The included bone, the intact carcass, the fat and nutrical and honey do all that. You have to remember, a ferret can only absorb so much at a given time and excess nutrients are left in the corner. You have more than enough iron from the meat and red bone marrow (there is a lot more iron in muscle as myoglobin than in the blood as hemoglobin); adding brewer's yeast is overkill. The same is true for calcium salts; the bone does more than enough. Also, the nutrients are roughly proportionate to each other, and adding one thing might make the use of another difficult, or even draw nutrients from the ferret's body to balance the excess. You don't really need to add anything to this mixture. An exception might be an electrolytic fluid (pedialyte) to cut the gravy to a liquid to use as a duck soup with ferrets having an electrolytic imbalance, but thats an exception. Q:"The honey and nutrical worry me. Is it too much sugar?" A: I don't think so, especially when compared to the sugars metabolized from the starches in an equivelent amount of kibble. This recipe will make a gallon of stuff, depending on how wet you make it. Four tablespoons of honey is small, and even adding in the nutrical carbohydrates, the amount is a tiny percentage of the total food volume. If you are worried about sugars, be worried about the approximately 50% starch carbohydrates included in each mouthful of kibble. THATS a lot of sugar, even if it is metabolized more slowly than the glucose in honey. Look at it this way. Assume a ferret can metabolize 100% of the food it swallows. It can't, but for this argument, lets assume it to be true. Also, lets assume the tube of nutrical, honey, kibble and oatmeal brought the total up to 2 cups of pure sugar (it would be far, far less). The ratio of non-carbohydrates to carbohydrates would be about 8 pints (1 gallon) to 1 pint (2 cups), or 8:1. The actual ratio would be much less than 8:1, but less assume this worst-case example for the argument. Kibbles are approximately 50% to 70% carbohydrates, required to form the hard, shaped biscuit. Assuming the lowest range, 50%, that would make the non-carbohydrate to carbohydrate ratio 50% to 50%, or 1:1. Now, assuming only 25% of the kibble carbohydrates turn to sugar, and 100% of the Chicken Gravy sugars are utilized, the ratio would still be 4:1 for the kibble and 8:1 for the Chicken Gravy. Remembering that carbohydrates are nothing more than long strings of sugar, which food has more sugar? At the very worst, Chicken Gravy has half the sugar of kibble. In reality, and not this kibble-biased argument, Chicken Gravy would have much less than a tenth of the sugar of kibble, and since I suggest removing the kibble once the ferret accepts the new food, the amount of sugar would even be less. Now, see why I say the honey in Chicken Gravy is inconsequental? One person argued the sudden jolt of honey-based sugar would be worse than the slow release of kibble-based sugar, but I ask how 4 tablespoons of sugar in a gallon of gravy constitutes a "jolt?" They aren't eating 4 tablespoons of honey in each serving. The honey is *VERY* diluted, and in reality is less than the 5% glucose given in IV fluids. That is glucose sugar directly injected into veins. Is that a jolt, and if so, why do vets use 5% Dextrose solutions? (Some do use Ringer's or plain saline with insulinomic ferrets) But, if you aren't swayed by the simple-sugar facts and are still worried, you can cut the amount of honey in half or so, but I suggest not changing the amount of nutrical, which is included for fatty acids and vitamins. You don't want to change that, and nutrical and ferretone/linatone are the cheapest, fastest and most complete way to add them without buying a scale and doing lots of nasty math. Bob C and 19 Mo' Ferrets Fantasic nipping the Brown Poop Cowboy [Posted in FML issue 2655]