Raw Food Diet Micro Farm/ Small Farmers

I was wondering if you had information about feeding mice, rats babies, medium size, and adult and full grown mice to dogs, and cats

i couldnt get information on how to factor it in. it was cheap and i knew where it came from.

you could say feed them
the mice arent eating dog food or anything weird. they are eating natural food, rice, corn, oats, worms, bamboo leaves, veggies, fruits, black solider fly larve, worms, and wax worms... kept indoor. but i cant get a nutritional value on them. inside of a raw food diet.
seems like most of the feed options arent really organic when it comes to mice, and rats. so i couldnt get a price range on what that type of mice, or rat would be worth to someone

the only information i got is in relation to reptiles and im not sure how that applies to puppies, hedge hogs, cats, and other somewhat meat based

It seems like to me that if you could feed your mice, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs. mostly from garden it could be a time investment but still pretty cheap overall.. more meat based lemonade stand of sorts.

I guess it depends on the size of the dog.. I don't see a problem with feeding cats mice, home raised mice would be 'cleaner' than the wild ones they catch and eat. But just one species isn't much of a complete diet, so you'd want to make sure they get other things too, even eating prey model I'd want to rotate and vary the protein types. My german shepherds eat 2lbs of meat a day though, would be a challenge to feed them on mice I suspect! I do throw them baby rabbit kits that die, and those are appreciated.

My dogs work on my farm to protect the heard. Therefore I specifically raise extra quail, rabbits, guinea pigs, and rats for their feed.

I also use live traps all over the farm to capture wild food for them, since the chipmunks always outsmart the dogs

the chipmunks always outsmart the dogs

I've mostly lived on the west coast, where we don't have chipmunks.
I've often wondered what the real difference was between chipmunks & squirrels.

You just settled that question: they are the same (squirrels always outsmart the dogs too).
I guess that they are equal.

Now, to go name 'my' squirrels Simon, Alvin & Crow Meat.
(Not really. The crows carefully watch the squirrels bury the peanuts, then go rob them while the squirrels go back to the neighbor's house to get more.)

We are in washington state on the sw coast and have probably 5 different species of chipmunk. The most prolific being the townsend's.

I feed the dogs live rodents to encourage them to chase vermin. but freeze the quail because birds are off mlimits

Dustin Powers wrote:We are in washington state on the sw coast and have probably 5 different species of chipmunk. The most prolific being the townsend's.

I feed the dogs live rodents to encourage them to chase vermin. but freeze the quail because birds are off mlimits

do you notice any health issues. do you have the rabbies shot? i always wonder about that .. for working dogs / cats(if you got a barn) if it's a good idea to give it to them

I have a wolfdog so, he does best on a RMB (Raw meat and bone) diet. I do give him a little high quality kibble so he will eat it if he ever has to live on that but mostly he gets raw meat and bone.

The base of his diet is chicken since those are easy for me to raise for him but he also gets rabbit, quail, venison and, occasionally beef and rodents from around our small farm as well (either he catches them or we catch them in live traps.)

I wouldn't feed him only rodents, or only any one food and, he does nibble on blackberries, pumpkin and sweet peas when they are growing or I give it to him in the case of pumpkin. He likes sweet potatoes as well so gets a little when I get them from the farm that grows them near us.

Were we in a more populated area, I'd hesitate to feed wild rodents but, here there is little change they ate poison and, wild canines certainly eat them and are fine so, I let my wolfdog have them. He's 3.5 now and never had a single health problem and, I have had him since he was 8 weeks old.

We have fed our dog with rabbits, fed young and whole.
This, along with eggs and our scraps makes her look very good.
One time she got worms from them.
The rabbits get the worms from the local coyotes.
The coyote drops a poop containing the worm's eggs, the rabbits eat the grass next to the poop and the eggs. The rabbits incubate the eggs into little pockets of worms. You can identify the pockets during butchery.
If the dog eats the worm sac, the dog gets the worms, and the cycle repeats.
This type of cycle is common in rodents.

Freezing the rabbits with the worms in them for a day or so will kill the worms, and then you can feed them to the dog without fear. For us, that's covenient, as they come in big batches (sometimes as many as 15 per kindling).

Currently our dog is on a high quality kibble, but that is only because we had a baby last year and let the husbandry slide a bit. Our rabbit production was low because of a weak buck. I didn't realize until late in the season. That being said, we are restocked with two new bucks and a doe, all unrelated to each other, to get back to some hybrid vigor.
We use organic pellets all winter (they look like food), not the plastic-like conventional ones.
In the spring, summer and fall, they get fresh cut grasses, legumes, vegetable waste, and twigs.
We would love to phase out the pellets, but have too many rabbits at the moment, and much of our pasture goes to pigs.

PS we have tried colony method. It was exciting, but not as easy as cages, to say the least.
They dug deep holes and I had to hunt them Elmer Fudd style, even though they were our livestock.
One time I shot the wrong one.
One time I had to dig up a whole litter when their mom was killed.

our dogs get eggs, any meat scraps, bones and some dairy to supplement the kibble.

I have read that raw eggs are bad for dogs, opinions?

We plan to start feeding our dogs rabbits. Freeze them first and feed them whole? They are New Zealand whites.

imo raw eggs are not bad for dogs, sounds like 1980's salmonella fear to me

Raw eggs can tie up B vitamins. So you can counter that by feeding some brewer's yeast. Or cook the eggs. I mostly don't worry about it with my LGD. He's a pretty big dog, eats various things like grass and goat poop that have some vitamins, and gets goat milk almost daily in season. He seems fine, but the eggs are probably 10-15% of his diet at most. If I was feeding more than that, I'd hard boil them first.

Thank you for the replies and the help. This is a wonderful website.

Randy

Steve Hoskins wrote:We have fed our dog with rabbits, fed young and whole.
This, along with eggs and our scraps makes her look very good.
One time she got worms from them.
The rabbits get the worms from the local coyotes.
The coyote drops a poop containing the worm's eggs, the rabbits eat the grass next to the poop and the eggs. The rabbits incubate the eggs into little pockets of worms. You can identify the pockets during butchery.
If the dog eats the worm sac, the dog gets the worms, and the cycle repeats.
This type of cycle is common in rodents.

Freezing the rabbits with the worms in them for a day or so will kill the worms, and then you can feed them to the dog without fear. For us, that's covenient, as they come in big batches (sometimes as many as 15 per kindling).

Currently our dog is on a high quality kibble, but that is only because we had a baby last year and let the husbandry slide a bit. Our rabbit production was low because of a weak buck. I didn't realize until late in the season. That being said, we are restocked with two new bucks and a doe, all unrelated to each other, to get back to some hybrid vigor.
We use organic pellets all winter (they look like food), not the plastic-like conventional ones.
In the spring, summer and fall, they get fresh cut grasses, legumes, vegetable waste, and twigs.
We would love to phase out the pellets, but have too many rabbits at the moment, and much of our pasture goes to pigs.

PS we have tried colony method. It was exciting, but not as easy as cages, to say the least.
They dug deep holes and I had to hunt them Elmer Fudd style, even though they were our livestock.
One time I shot the wrong one.
One time I had to dig up a whole litter when their mom was killed.

have you thought of doing the colony method but laying down a layer of metal below them?

Tim Wells wrote:our dogs get eggs, any meat scraps, bones and some dairy to supplement the kibble.

raw eggs are not bad but i wouldnt give my dogs raw eggs unless i knew where they came from. for example your own ducks, chickens, or quail.

eggs from cage chicken farm are just scary. i doubt your dog can get anything from it. but i wouldnt give them to my dog. im not sure what kinda bug those places are breeding and we feed whole egg crushed shell and all

great video, going to build it today.

Thank you

Our eggs are from our free range chickens. We have fed them lots of raw eggs, and then heard it was bad.
We have one dog that has skin issues, and it seems to have gotten better since we cut eggs out of the diet,
but we also upgraded the dog's food.

Randy Gibson wrote:great video, going to build it today.

Thank you

personally id love to build this.. myself then put all the babies im going to keep out on pasture.. all the boys and girls i dont plan on keeping but.. im more a cuy person then rabbit. ... good luck to you i hope you put some video out there

no video, but I'll take some pics.

The skin issues suggest that you were feeding too many raw eggs without supplementing B vitamins.

He was stealing eggs off the porch when the chickens chose the wrong place to lay their eggs.

We fixed it to where he could not get to the wayward eggs and his skin condition has improved greatly.