Cat food for dubia

[millertime89]

Originally Posted by KORBIN5895

But do they look healthy? I have known several but they never looked good.

sorry, thought that was implied by my post, yes I do. I work with one and she's probably the healthiest person I've ever met.

[candyraver69]

Originally Posted by KORBIN5895

Wait! I said vegan not vegetarians! What are they? There is a difference. The vegetarians I know tend to look healthy but I remember going to a Borders bookstore when a bunch of vegans were there handing out the meat is murder pamphlet. One chick came over and gave me a pamphlet and asked me if I knew the evils of raising "meat animals". I looked her dead in the eye and said I totally agreed with her and that's why i hunted and killed my own food. She looked like she was gonna puke

I bet the look on her face was priceless. ROFL

[jarich]

Originally Posted by candyraver69

The difference between gutloading and feeding cat food directly to your reptile is that just the gut is full of the cat food, and you are still getting the nutritional content of the rest of the prey animal. It's the difference between having a pizza with pineapples on top and just eating a pineapple. Good enough analogy? Sure the reptile is getting some catfood, but in a package deal. I don't think cat food is "bad" for reptiles, just in pure form not balanced as eating the prey item... although as we agreed, some preservatives in some brands very much could be bad. With your third argument, I'm not arguing that feeding your roach a balanced diet would be the ideal situation, but at what cost? You have to weigh the benefit against the cost. And again, just feeding the roaches fresh food will nilly is NOT a balanced diet, and I think would be sub-par to cat food.

After all, is it healthier for a person to eat a nasty prepared frozen dinner with a variety of food groups like a TV dinner with veggies, meat, cheese, and grains, or just eat fresh apples all day? Neither is the best solution, the prepared food isn't perfect, but it's pretty balanced, where if you only ate apples, even though they are fresh food items, it's not got everything you need. Come on now... surely there are people here that know a vegetarian/vegan human can be nutritionally sound if they really carefully plan their diet to include everything they need, but the vast majority are depriving themselves of needed nutrients? Same concept applies here. If you are willing to really throw down the time to plan a balanced diet for your roaches, by all means do it! It's just far more complex and time consuming than your average person is going to want to deal with. Otherwise we would all be breeding our own rats fed on a fresh diet (no lab blocks at all, just FRESH food) for snakes rather than buying them from a breeder like rodentpro.

Your analogy works well about the pizza, because its exactly my point. Pizza isnt healthy! Will it kill you? No. But is it healthy? Again, no not really (unless, like Congress, you believe pizza sauce is a vegetable ). As to your idea about vegetarians, most of the vegetarians I know are actually much more healthy than I am. The reason is because they pay much more attention to what they eat. So again, thank you for bringing up that point. Will a 'willy nilly' fresh diet improve them? Of course not, but that was never what we were discussing here. Our roaches will be healthier too if we pay more time and attention to what they eat, and therefore they will be healthier food items for our reptiles. Wouldnt it be better to improve the diet of our feeder items so much that we never needed to dust or supplement again? I think its possible.

As to your point about costs, we arent talking a huge difference. Each week I spend about $12 on food in total for around 1000 roaches (today I spent $3 for green beans, $2 for bananas, $1.50 raisins, $3 for kale, $1 for squash and I estimate the amount of cost from their dried food bags to be about $1.50). Now that is here in New York City, where everything is expensive, so Im sure it might even be cheaper for others. I know that feeding them just a bunch of dried cat food is cheaper, maybe only $3 a week or so (Im just guessing here). But if a few bucks a week is too much to improve your animals life, then perhaps we are having the wrong discussion.

[candyraver69]

Originally Posted by jarich

As to your point about costs, we arent talking a huge difference. Each week I spend about $12 on food in total for around 1000 roaches (today I spent $3 for green beans, $2 for bananas, $1.50 raisins, $3 for kale, $1 for squash and I estimate the amount of cost from their dried food bags to be about $1.50). Now that is here in New York City, where everything is expensive, so Im sure it might even be cheaper for others. I know that feeding them just a bunch of dried cat food is cheaper, maybe only $3 a week or so (Im just guessing here). But if a few bucks a week is too much to improve your animals life, then perhaps we are having the wrong discussion.

When I used the term "costs" I wasn't referring to money at all. I was talking about the time you would take planning the diet, chopping fresh food up each day, etc. The roaches eat so little it's negligent really the dollar amount of the veggies unless you have a TON. Time is money though!

[jarich]

Im not sure that there is much to it really. No chopping required at all, so its just washing the veggies and sticking them in. Literally takes about two minutes. And since I shop for them at the same time I shop for me, the planning phase isnt much more. Its really pretty simple!

[stephanbakir]

I feed my dubia colony and it costs me roughly 0$ :P got an apple tree out back, and I feed them whatever we don't eat, and anything that falls on the ground gets frozen for them over winter.