thank you Stacie!!!

Srlb -

I'm not sure where you get your info on Natural Balance recall being due to too much protein. Natural Balance does NOT know what is causing the problem and it is not just dog food. They have recalled the cat food too.

As to concerns of the "too much protein" in the cat food is a joke. Cats are obligated carnivores. The higher the protein, the better. I feed my cats a 40% protein food - one of the highest you can find except for evo. As to feeding it to gliders - if you are worried about too much protein in a couple pieces of kitty kibble, then don't bother feeding your glider any chicken - it has more protein! Its more about balancing out the protein with the proper amounts of fruit and veggies. Even if it was 100% protein then you would just feed less and more fruits & veggies.

And I looked at my bag at home - no garlic. Petfooddirect is posting the wrong ingredients - I wonder how many of their foods they sell, they do that with?

Cosmo, I get my information striaght from my distributor. I own a pet store and not only carry this food, but also recommend it as it is the second on my list of good foods. So I would say if that is what I am told by the people I personally order it in to stock it, I am sure I can believe that they would have some reason given to them to tell me to pull it off my shelves. And yes you are right, the cat food did indeed get pulled as well. Once again, the distributors were told to have the stores pull it because of protein.

I am not trying to start an argument with you on cat food, I am trying to bring awareness up to those who are not sure of foods to feed to their gliders. I have asked in a previous thread on diets for those who feed cat food and have been to share pictures of their gliders with us so we can see how well it does for them. I havent seen a pic yet. Maybe I have overlooked it, but I dont think that is the case.
In the past I have even suggested different cat foods to people who feel they HAVE to feed it.

Yes, cats are indeed obligated carnivores, but gliders are not and I believe people should take that into consideration.

Just to let you all know, I just got off the phone with one of the people from Natural Balance. They called the store to make sure I heard about the products needing to be pulled.

It is NOT considered a *recall* but a sales suspension. Dogs and cat owners were complaining of vommiting and loose stools. They are doing more testing, but they believe it is either too much protein OR too much fat in the product. And it is only for the venison and rice, which I am sure nobody feeds this to their gliders anyway.

I still believe that feeding cat food is not the best alternative, however, that is just MY opinion. I do understand that some do not have access to feed other diets that have been successful over the years and really feel they do not have a choice in the matter. Just please do your research on gliders and look at pictures of gliders that are on certain diets and keep an eye on their coats.

Peggy, what is the first on your good food list just out of interest?

I've used cat food for 5 years, I've had loads of people that change from Leadbeater mods to cat food tell me how much the coat improves shortly after they've made the change. I'm not a snap happy glider owner, but here are a few pictures of some of my joeys and some adults.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/moorie999/Gliders1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/moorie999/Gliders2.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/moorie999/Glider0002.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/moorie999/girlies0002.jpg

Srlb as said by moorie before, you can see some of my gliders in my avitar that have been brought up on cat food as part of their diet. but if you want more glider pictures here are some

http://www.dns-forums.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=612 (first and second post by Fixx) one of nikki and eccles girls, as you can see she has a lovely grey coat and if the diet was bad for gliders she would be brown or orange from day 1)

http://www.sugar-lumps.com/forum/index.php/topic,185.0.html (posts by loulou) as you can see nikki the adult has a lovely grey coat and so do her joeys

hope this clears things up a bit

completely off topic but i have no pc atm so will not be around much but moorie uses a similar diet so theres no worry there.

Moorie, the number one food out there for me personally as far as the cat food and dog food would be the Canidae and Felidae. However, Wellness brand has just come out with a new cat food that I am researching called CORE. It contains no grains at all in it.

I am not saying you dont have good looking gliders and please I am not trying to bash anyone that chooses to use cat food, however, not everyone that will choose to use catfood will sit down to figure out the proper ratios and quantites that a glider should have.
With that being said, although there is not a lot, I do see some seperation in fur on the very first picture that you have posted. Granted, joeys are not going to have that because they get their nutrients from mom and if a mom does not have enough for the joeys we all know that she will either one, cannibalize or reject them. Not saying this is happening at all to you but I am trying to keep this as an "open to the public" type of thing.
Now with the seperation of fur and the clumping that takes place, what I am trying to bring to everyones attention is when the seperation is there all the time, it is a sign of a lack of nutrients/vitamins somewhere along the line. Do we know what exactly? Of course not, that is why we all need to do research and studies.

eccles, first of all unfortunately the first link would not allow me to see the pics, even after I clicked on the links over there. In the second set, you can see the face, but not the body of the adult glider.



This is not so. Some gliders do indeed have a different color to them if on a bad diet, however, not all gliders do. And almost no joeys ever have a bad coat color when they are still nursing on mom. Some older gliders just smell stronger than normal and most of all you can tell by their overall coat appearance. Such as Spike when I took him in, my first rescue. He was fed seed cakes for birds and although his coat was the normal grey he smelled HORRIBLE!

Once again, I really want to stress, I am just trying to bring awareness to diets, especially to the newcomers we have. I dont want someone to think, "Wow, we can buy cat food and feed it" and not researching and learn there is much more to it and the intensity that needs to be put into a gliders diet. Unfortunately it is not only the cat food that I see this happening with. I have noticed there are more than one diet out there that could possibly lead newcomers to feed the wrong things because of lack of research or just that the rest of the diets are not listed other than the staple.

I would also like to apologize to the originally poster as this thread has seemed to go completely off course for the most part (although we are discussing cat food which would be Carolines diet)and maybe if there is anymore to continue with this we can open a different thread?

LMFAO Peggy, I'm not surprised at your fault picking at all, in fact I was expecting it, if I'd posted that I'd fed bml I'd be getting 'oooh, what a lovely glider'!! I've seen plenty of pictures of gliders fed on other diets with fur seperation, I've seen countless pictures of wild gliders with fur seperation! Fur seperates when the glider bends, it's not glued together it's all seperate hairs. I doesn't mean because it's in a photo that it's there all the time, his head is practically folded under his body!!

Also Peggy, joeys DO have bad fur colour, my Dinx came to me with her mother as a rescue, she was brown, I had another rescue mother and joey, the joey was orange and very poorly as was the mum (severe HLP)! So yes, the diet does affect joey colour. I've had numerous rescue gliders that once they are on the diet I use the coat changes colour, I have had numerous comments from other people in the UK that they are amazed at how much the colour changes (to grey) when they change diet to what I'm feeding. I know gliders can have different pelt colours, indeed I have all kinds of greys!

I also meant to post but kept forgetting, I had another glider on rescue, he came to us blind with huge fatty deposits in his eyes - I don't know what he was fed with his previous owner, but now the fatty deposits are gone and he can see.

I understand that you don't want newbies thinking they can get away with feeding cheap cat food and an apple, which is why we stress it's only a small part of Carolines and our variation of the diet. We want to stamp out the lies and myths that have struck fear in to the heart of glider owners with respect to cat food (and lumpy jaw!).

I don't think the thread is too far off course, afterall the issue with Caroline's diet is the cat food.

It seems the recall has to do with the Rice protein (not protein in general). It contains the same poison found in the other foods that have been recalled. It effects only the venison formulas, because that is the only form that uses this rice protein. This is scary because it can happen with ANY petfood. I wonder if someone is purposely trying to poison our pets?

There is no garlic in the DVP Natural Balance ultrapremium cat food. There is also no added iron or sodium. It's Ca:p ratio is excellent. We can all face "recalls" and problems from foodstuffs - even from our fresh veggies and fruit. Eating is a risk. Life is a risk.

I like all of the ingredients in felidae except the added iron w/vitamin c. So I chose the DVP Natural Balance chicken (not venison).

Fur separation is a criteria used in the fur industry when grading pelts. In live animals that have short dense fur, when it just separates because it is too thin and does not roll back, this is a fault. You have to run your hand over the pelt or animal to check roll back. These animals that have cat food and hps in their diet do not have these sorts of thin coats. And poor coats can result from not enough balanced omega fats in the diet. Thinner coats result from too few hair follicles and though follicles will not produce good hairs on a bad diet, the potential for a truly beautiful coat can be determined by the prenatal and juvenile diet. A very poor diet for the mother glider will not produce lovely joeys but it would have to be horrible to produce cannibalization. We don't know exactly why mothers cannibalize their joeys. Inbreeding and the coats of the parents are also factors in our gliders' coats. And then there are the color variations that affect hair thickness. So you can't necessarily challenge folks to post photos of their gliders to prove their diets are good and get objective results. Moorie and eccles are modest as to their success in the UK w/gliders. We don't have a monopoly on glider knowledge here in the USA.

The amount of protein in a kibble food is entirely relative to the rest of the diet ingredients for total protein. I see pinned diets on the forums that are 50% protein. I personally think that is too much unless a breeder has observed that their breeding females need this. Our captive, caged gliders can have several pregnancies per year which is very unnatural for gliders. Wild animals tend to breed more when water and protein foods are extremely abundant. With Caroline MacPherson's diet, the animals can self regulate the amount of protein they eat.

My gliders sometimes leave some cat food and eat all the veggies/fruit. Or sometimes they leave some of the veggies and chow down on their few bits of cat food.

I think that we have been very clear that our gliders don't eat a simple or cheap diet. Mine certainly don't. The folks at Whole Foods Market love to see me coming to buy food supplies for my gliders. They know it's for the gliders because if I ate what I buy there for the gliders, I'd be thin and gorgeous even at my advancing age!