Why Are Pellets Bad??

Please post why you dislike pellets and why we shouldnt use them as a diet. Hopefully this thread will help someone in the future.

Well I personally started researching wild gliders after I got Jasper & Zoey from PP. I wanted to know what their natural diet was. When I learned "how" they eat their food, pellets just didn't seem logical to me. They are hard and dry....how can a glider smoosh to extract the liquid if the food you are feeding has no liquid in it?

Why we don't have a nice moist canned food for gliders is beyond me. Some nice moist chicken with various veggies mixed in???? No different than the foods we feed our cats & dogs. And they even have the fresh foods now that are kept in a refrigerator in the pet food section of many stores.... we could do the same for gliders.

I can only assume it's because gliders are still considered "exotics" and in the scheme of things, not many people own them so it wouldn't be financially beneficial to any current company to produce such a product..... but I can't wait 'til it finally happens, and I have confidence that it will.

Now I do offer Mazuri Monkey Biscuits and Happy Glider pelleted food as "leave in the cage" items. I personally do this for dental health, not nutrition...altho I do feel as far as a hard food goes, these rank "up their" in the nutrition they offer. While I don't rely on these items for any nutritional benefit, I don't want to give them total JUNK in any type of food I offer them....but that's my logic on the pellet debate.

I don't offer pellets right now because Snappy doesn't like them, but I can see the reasoning behind using them like J&Z said.

I think that it is important to have some type of shelf stable food that you can feel comfortable using in an emergency or as a leave in the cage type of food. What would happen if you lived in an area where there where hurricanes and you had no power for a day or two, maybe even longer? Those are the instances where I could see using some type of high quality pellet food.

I plan to use the diet my breeder uses..its leadbeaters she tweaked a bit..seems similar to others I have looked at. She has a pellet food, but says it is really just something to leave in the cage during the day in case they want a snack...not to be the main component of their diet, but a "snack" that wont spoil or attract flies or anything.

Pellets do not mimic a wild gliders diet nor could a prepackaged diet replicate the fresh gums, pollen, sap, and insects found in their natural diet.

Pellets are manufactured in large facilities that are not up to human grade standards, anything can be in those ominous chunks.

All pellets claim to be fully balanced diets on their packaging even though a captive gliders diet has not received enough attention in scientific settings to know for sure what a glider needs, therefore you know right away they are already lying to you.

As J&Z'sMum pointed out, Sugar gliders break their food down in a very special way, a way that requires many liquids for them to properly extract nutrients otherwise they may become malnourished. They also have a ceacum for breaking down gums and vegetation that are often deemed "indigestible", many of the pellets do not contain things like pollens, gums, nectars, or the like but are instead a generic pelleted food meant for rodents that was repackaged with a Sugar Gliders face on the front.

Most pellets are extremely high in Iron, I don't think it is just a coincidence that one of the leading causes of death in gliders in kidney/liver failure, this usually happens because of an abundance of toxins like excess vitamins.

PS. I am well aware of how popular cat and dog foods lack basic nutrition, they are often far removed from the animals natural diet and that is why health problems in pets has become so common. These products are also produced in a way that is dangerous almost as if a living creature wasn't going to eat it. These foods barely keep domesticated animals alive, how in the world would basically the same food keep an exotic animal alive?