Re: Cat chow for grindals?

[Barry Cooper <bjc3 at cornell_edu>]

This is off topic, but as a veterinarian, I will reply.

My take on these postings is that they are from the fringe. If you buy 
reputable brand pet foods you are getting good stuff. If you buy cheap 
generic stuff, well, you get what you pay for. Good quality pet foods 
provide better balanced diets than we used to feed in the days before they 
were a "multi-billion dollar business". In the early days of my career in 
veterinary medicine one of the most common diseases we saw was caused by 
calcium-phosphorus imbalances in meat based diets. We virtually never see 
that any more.

My sister insists on feeding her dogs cassaroles that she cooks for him. He 
is a beagle and weighs at least twice what he should. I keep trying to 
convince her that she should feed him a small cup of good dog chow twice a 
day. I will be in Australia in a few weeks but don't expect to find the 
dog's diet has changed.

People like to talk about feeding their animals "natural" diets and 
complain that pet foods contain offal. Do they know what the natural diet 
of similar animals in the wild are? They eat the whole kill, guts, lungs, 
everything. And don't get me started about dogs' attraction for horse 
manure, but it does contain lots of vitamins.

To get this back on topic and back to grindal worms: I feed my grindal 
worms on good quality kitten food, which is supplemented with vitamins, 
including vitamin C, trace minerals, etc. The grindal worms do 
fantastically well on it, with high productivity and my opinion is that the 
worms are gut loaded with those supplements, which are good for my fish. 
Fish have an absolute requirement for vitamin C and I like to think I am 
providing it in their diet.

A final comment about grindal worm cultures: Based on comments by others 
here I have tried using Walmart's worm bedding as the culture medium. I 
don't know what's in it. It obviously has a lot of peat, but I suspect also 
finely shredded bark or even finely shredded wood. At any rate, I have been 
impressed. It does not compact as much as my previous peat/potting soil 
mix, which helps to prevent the cultures getting anaerobic. What impresses 
me most is how clean the worms are. I can harvest lots of worms with hardly 
any "dirt". I can often pick globs of clean white grindal worms right off 
the surface of the culture. I recommend trying it.

Barry

At 02:25 AM 3/11/03 +0800, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I was about to add variety to the grindal's diet when my diggin' around
>brought this up;
>http://www.nexusmagazine.com/Petfood.html
>
>hmm... wonder what's in trout chow... maybe I should just stick to
>rolled Quaker oats...
>
>Regards,
>Ronnie Lee
>Singapore
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