Mazuri Tortoise Diet for a Greek

[alexandsnakes]

Anyone used Mazuri tortoise diet as part of a Greek tortoise's diet? I know it's meant for galaps and aldabras, but I've moved out to Saskatoon and it blows chunks as far as finding healthy variety for my tort. It's possible to keep her out here, but lacks variety. I was thinking of Mazuri for the fibre and vitamin/minerals which would give me a bit more room to expand her choices, but since I can't find it locally I thought I'd check it out before I pay to get some shipped over here.

Thanks
Alex

p.s. Anyone in Saskatoon keep tortoises?

[eyespy]

Mazuri is one of the better brands of turtle/tortoise foods but nothing beats plain old grasses, weeds and flowers for any of the Mediterranean torts. High in fiber and moisture, no grains, no preservatives which can build up in the liver. A tortoise block is a nice way for your tort to get the vitamins and minerals the commercial diets contain plus keep his beak filed down.

Even a brown-thumbed girl like me can grow the grassland and flower grazing mixes that are becoming popular. You might want to check with your local herp society to see if anyone nearby sells them. Here's a link to what I use, but I'm not sure if it can be shipped across the border or not:

http://www.turtlecafe.com/showproduct.pl?prodid=33

[alexandsnakes]

Yes, that's the kind of diet I fed at home. Now I'm stuck in a city where all the green stuff is sprayed, I have no garden, and product selection is scanty and usually pretty slimy. So that's why I want to know about Mazuri... she tends to refuse hays when I add them in.

[zhiv9]

I feed mazuri to my redfoot and sulcata as a regular part of their varied diet - which includes grasses and greens for the sulcata and greens and fruit for the redfoot. They both love it.

HTH

[eyespy]

My major beef with processed diets is that they are primarily grains fortified with a select group of vitamins and minerals and that they almost always use ethoxyquin, a potentially toxic preservative which has been implicated in fatty liver disease and tumor formation. There are none of the naturally occuring antioxidants and phytochemical that a tortoise would get from a fresh plant diet and very low moisture content which can make preservative toxicity more serious. Grains are easily converted to sugars in the digestive tract, and high sugar diets can kill off the beneficial bacteria in the hindgut that helps tortoises ferment their food.

According to the ingredients published on the Mazuri website their tortoise foods are no exception.

Ground soybean hulls, ground corn, ground oats, dehulled soybean meal, wheat middlings, cane molasses, brewers dried yeast, soybean oil, wheat germ, dehydrated alfalfa meal, dicalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, salt, DL-methionine, choline chloride, menadione dimethylpyrimidinol bisulfite (source of vitamin K), pyridoxine hydrochloride, d-alpha tocopheryl acetate (source of natural vitamin E), cholecalciferol (source of vitamin D3), biotin, calcium pantothenate, ethoxyquin (a preservative), vitamin A acetate, riboflavin, L-lysine, nicotinic acid, thiamin mononitrate, cyanocobalamin (source of vitamin B12), folic acid, manganous oxide, zinc oxide, ferrous carbonate, copper sulfate, zinc sulfate, calcium iodate, cobalt carbonate, sodium selenite.

[alexandsnakes]

Yes, that's exactly what I wasn't a big fan of with them. If the first few ingredients hadn't been grains, I wouldn't even be asking this question.

zhiv9, how long have you been using it?

[zhiv9]

I've been using it for about a year. I feel differently than eyespy, since the greens and grasses we are feeding them aren't going to have the same antioxidants and phytochemicals as the ones they normally eat.

Mazuri was formulated by a Phd nutritionist based on the diets of galapagos tortoises. This means that rather than trying to find a food that looks like what a tortoise might eat, they instead looked at the nutritional content of a tortoises diet and created a diet that replicates that nutritional content as closely as possible.

30 years ago(before i was born) a lot of people were making their own dogfood because they felt that a pelleted dog food wasn't as good. Some of the "home made" dog food was nutritionally sound but a lot of them were too heavy in one nutrient and lacking in another. Since then it has generally been accepted that the best choice is a formulated dogfood. I bring this up because it illustrates that it takes years for people to accept a "complete diet" for any animal. It took years for dogs and parrot keepers(like myself) are still arguing about it.

To sum things up, chances a diet of grasses and greens is nutritionally lacking in some way. I feed mazuri as a supplement to help make up for whatever might be lacking. I also buy it to support a company that has actually put some research in to their tortoise diet, unlike the reptile companies like, T-Rex, Rep-Cal, ZooMed etc.

My 2 cents

Adam

[eyespy]

The 2 zoos where the Penn vets consulted back when I still worked there, Philadelphia Zoo and the Elmwood Park Zoo, both abandoned formulated diets in favor of a natural food diet after serum levels of minerals and vitamins A, C and E all dropped.

Of course one of those vets did move on to form her own herp nutrition company so maybe a grain of salt is needed. Still, her products don't contain grains or toxic preservatives.

[alexandsnakes]

eyspy or zhiv9, do either of you use frozen foods in your tortoise's diets? Another option I was considering is harvesting my tortoise garden at my mother's house when I go back for Thanksgiving in a month, and hauling it all back here and freezing it. It wouldn't be the only part of her diet, but then I could suppliment the fresh stuff that's kind of reliable out here with stuff like pesticide free dandelion, grape leaves, clover, etc, and I was thinking if I left the thawed kinda mushy leaves in with the dry hay over night, that might make it a tad more palatable...

[eyespy]

I freeze mulberry leaves so that I still have them in the winter and they work just fine. Never tried other frozens as I grow my own stuff in window boxes for winter use.

[Linds]

I've used frozen veggies before, and I have frozen fruit for my tortie (a lot of the good exotic fruits my redfoot enjoys can be purchased really cheap in china town). Everything gets soggy.....fruits and veggies hold their shape best, but leafy stuff is gross... big slimy masses. I guess you could give it a shot and see what happens. Still have many of the same nutrients, just reduced some.

[zhiv9]

I tried mixing a variety of greens and grasses with a little fruit chopping it up and freezing it, but it became gross and slimey. Especially the greens lose all form when frozen and thawed. So I don't try to freeze food for them anymore. Generally I try to feed them a little bit of everything.

HTH

Adam

[albinoman]

I have 9 redfoots all of them love Mazuri, I gave them a lot of greens some fruits and 2 times a week some mazuri, they will go first for the mazuri and fruits then the greens

[eyespy]

Dogs and cats choose antifreeze over meat because of the sweet taste. Doesn't mean it's good for them.

Mazuri has a very high percentage of its calories coming from grain, meaning just a few second's contact with saliva will create sugar in the mouth, making it palatable. That doesn't mean it's the best food source. The results I've seen show a significant decrease in essential minerals like copper, zinc, magnesium and manganese when fed Mazuri and other formulated diets.

If you do choose to use it, ideally it should be like croutons in a salad, not the main course.

[albinoman]

I did not say is the best food for tortoise, I just give mazuri twice a week as a complementary food, I try togive my tortosie a very good green selection, some fruit may be like 10%