sometimes i want to cry

[the Turtle Shepherd]

I am new here and I will probably make many enemies by saying that sometimes i want to cry when i think of what people feed their poor animals in captivity, please read all the ingredients, don't just glance at the first three, read all, preferably out loud so that it actually sinks in, for you will be tired when you are done it is chemical after chemical after chemical, just substitute all those ingredients pretty much with a word chemical and tell me honestly, would you eat it? Let's see:
Ingredients
Timothy Hay (ok, go pick some fresh grass of the lawn - mission accomplished), Ground Soybean Hulls (why? because in the wild all turtles and tortoises get pilled edamame served to them daily? at which turtle restaurant? because i want to a number to tell my turtles, anyway if you believe they must have it - get the frozen soybean pods and feed defrosted), Dried Beet Pulp (ok, totally approve, except get a fresh one and shred it,now that's a treat they will drool for), Oat Hulls (again: what? give them some soaked oatmeal flakes if you think they are too skinny), Wheat Middlings, Ground Oats, Dehulled Soybean Meal (again, all these bits of grass seeds you can pick of the blooming grass on the corner, they are just grass seeds with fancy names), Cane Molasses (why? because turtles get this a lot in nature? here tortoise or turtle we serve fresh grasses and fallen apples with molasses today, how many would you like to order?), Dried Apple Pomace (please, you can shred an apple, can you? I mean, really?), Wheat Germ (I am tired...), Flaxseed (i dont know why someone thought everyone gets these but if they do - please just add some freshly soaked flax seed to the diet with a spoon, from a freaken jar), Ground Aspen(?????), Carrageenan ( i dont even speak this language, do you? turtle person? I mean without research?), Ground Brown Rice (whatever you can give them some soaked brown rice if you must), AND NOW LET THE FUN BEGIN Dicalcium Phosphate, Soybean Oil, Banana Flavor, Calcium Carbonate, Brewers Dried Yeast, Salt, L-Lysine, Dl-Methionine, Choline Chloride, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, D-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate (Natural Source Of Vitamin E), Biotin, Dried Yucca Shidigera Extract, Cholecalciferol (Vitamin D3), Beta-Carotene, Menadione Sodium Bisulfite Complex (Source Of Vitamin K), Calcium Pantothenate, Folic Acid, Vitamin A Acetate, Riboflavin, Sucrose, Fructose, Thiamin Mononitrate, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Niacin, Primalac (Lactobacillus Cultures: Lactobacillus Acidophilus, Lactobacillus Casei, Bifido Bacterium Bifidium, Streptococcus Faecium, Dried Aspergillus Oryzae Fermentation Extract, Torula Dried Yeast), Copper Sulfate, Mixed Tocopherols (Preservative, Form Of Vitamin E; Ascorbic Aci, d, rosemary extract), manganous oxide, zinc oxide, ferrous carbonate, zinc sulfate, calcium iodate, sodium selenite, cobalt carbonate. (PRETTY MUCH TWENTY SOMETHING CHEMICALS and a juniper tree
please don't be angry with me, these are the daily choices we all make...

 

[Big Charlie]

What food is this? Most of those chemicals are vitamins, minerals, amino acids and probiotics, so it isn't as bad as it looks. The sugar has no place in any animal's food. Banana flavor? Are turtles attracted to bananas?

 

[wellington]

What food is this? Most of those chemicals are vitamins, minerals, amino acids and probiotics, so it isn't as bad as it looks. The sugar has no place in any animal's food. Banana flavor? Are turtles attracted to bananas?

Banana does seem to be a favorite actually, even though it's usually not a good thing to feed or at least not very often. I think it's the smell. Out of all the fruit I can think of, banana is one that has a
strong smell. Just a thought.

 

[Tom]

Where did you study nutrition? What degree did you attain?

Have you done feeding trials and published the results?

How about anecdotal evidence from your own herd of tortoises? Did you feed the above foods and notice poor results in comparison to feeding an "all natural" diet with another identical group in identical conditions? In your side-by-side feeding trial did you see a difference in egg production, clutch size or fertility rates? How about growth rate on hatchlings?


Or is your post based on emotion instead of science and fact?

 

[Cowboy_Ken]

I am new here and I will probably make many enemies by saying that sometimes i want to cry,
please don't be angry with me, these are the daily choices we all make...

Well rest at peace tonight, most of us here on TFO do not hold grudges against others simply due to their beliefs. As for "Carrageenan" and what it is, it's a derivative from Red Sea weed and has been used for many years in the food industry as an emulsifier keeping certain foods to have a nice mouth feeling. But as that goes, it's still bad stuff. For further reading, read this link to organic information from Rodales ; https://www.rodalesorganiclife.com/food/is-soy-milk-wrecking-your-gut

 

[the Turtle Shepherd]

this is not meant to offend, i just want to understand why someone would choose to give their beloved pets a diet that it not their natural one. as for getting more out of your pets, more eggs, more clutches, more fertility, more money - let that be on your conscience also. Science behind it is simple: nature did not make that nonsense, turtles do not benefit from preservatives, unless you heard otherwise. and yes, i did my research, and no i am not a nutritionist, I have a psychology degree in case you wonder and want to talk about that also

 

[the Turtle Shepherd]

What food is this? Most of those chemicals are vitamins, minerals, amino acids and probiotics, so it isn't as bad as it looks. The sugar has no place in any animal's food. Banana flavor? Are turtles attracted to bananas?

this is your regular mazuri food, unfortunately all these additives are chemically engineered, fortunately all those vitamins and minerals can be easily supplied by giving torts and turts the actual food, vegies, grasses, weeds especially, there is nothing like a dandelion - load of nutrition! and it is free

 

[the Turtle Shepherd]

Well rest at peace tonight, most of us here on TFO do not hold grudges against others simply due to their beliefs. As for "Carrageenan" and what it is, it's a derivative from Red Sea weed and has been used for many years in the food industry as an emulsifier keeping certain foods to have a nice mouth feeling. But as that goes, it's still bad stuff. For further reading, read this link to organic information from Rodales ; https://www.rodalesorganiclife.com/food/is-soy-milk-wrecking-your-gut

you are sweet, i like you already

 

[the Turtle Shepherd]

Where did you study nutrition? What degree did you attain?

Have you done feeding trials and published the results?

How about anecdotal evidence from your own herd of tortoises? Did you feed the above foods and notice poor results in comparison to feeding an "all natural" diet with another identical group in identical conditions? In your side-by-side feeding trial did you see a difference in egg production, clutch size or fertility rates? How about growth rate on hatchlings?


Or is your post based on emotion instead of science and fact?

ouch, i can feel your anger... sorry to make you so.

 

[the Turtle Shepherd]

What food is this? Most of those chemicals are vitamins, minerals, amino acids and probiotics, so it isn't as bad as it looks. The sugar has no place in any animal's food. Banana flavor? Are turtles attracted to bananas?

bananas are ok, especially when nurturing back to healthy weight. not too much sugar though, just every once in a while. in nature tortoises or turtles dont get much fruit, but when they do get a chance and come across a fallen fruit - they will gorge, that is just quoting Attenborough

 

[Cowboy_Ken]

you are sweet, i like you already

Maybe this is misdirected.
Tom is indeed a very giving man. He contributes a very large part of his own time to help educate newer tortoise members. For the most part he doesn't argue with these folks, even when they are telling him that the kid at Petco told them that rabbit pellets are good substrate for the tortoise, and after all, they work there so of course they know what they're talking about. Tom does all of this on his own time while he could be selfishly just be spending the time with his own herd of tortoises.
All of that said, thank you for your kind words towards me…

 

[Big Charlie]

this is your regular mazuri food, unfortunately all these additives are chemically engineered, fortunately all those vitamins and minerals can be easily supplied by giving torts and turts the actual food, vegies, grasses, weeds especially, there is nothing like a dandelion - load of nutrition! and it is free

Charlie, my sulcata, has never had Mazuri. When I first got him, the pet store sold me a jar of tortoise food that smelled fishy. He never ate any so it got thrown out. I didn't know about any other packaged food until I joined this forum, at which time he was already 16 years old.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a year round supply of weeds and grasses. Charlie is one of the lucky ones. I suspect that since the variety of weeds that grow in my yard isn't that varied, he could be missing out on some of the nutrients provided by Mazuri.

Dandelions are high in oxalates.

 

[ZEROPILOT]

bananas are ok, especially when nurturing back to healthy weight. not too much sugar though, just every once in a while. in nature tortoises or turtles dont get much fruit, but when they do get a chance and come across a fallen fruit - they will gorge, that is just quoting Attenborough

Welcome.
Redfoot (for example) feed on a lot of fruit in the wild. That, dead animals and animal poop make up a large portion of what they consume. No one advocates feeding them poop in captivity. Or animal corpses. We must find other means.
Your point is valid and a LOT of posts have weighed the pros and cons of Mazuri. However, Purina didn't come up with that recipe overnight. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't a marketing person who decided what to make it out of. This is not some FAD food. It's been around for several decades and has been used by many keepers to raise and keep many generations of animals. (mine included) It is also used in zoos worldwide.
It is still used and still loved by most keepers because of the results. When used as part of a varied diet, we get perfectly healthy and thriving tortoises.
Don't be so dismissive. If the matter interests you, do some more digging.
None of us would use the stuff if we thought that any harm would come to our beloved animals.

 

[SarahChelonoidis]

When you want to talk about tortoise nutrition and what diet is best, you really need to specific what species you are talking about, as all species have different natural diets so it doesn't really make sense saying yes or no to certain foods in general.

There is a debate to be had around using packaged tortoise food, but I suspect a lot more research and development has gone into making these foods than you might realize. Sure, many of those ingredients wouldn't be found in any natural tortoise diet, but they fill the place of ones that do and many zoos and long time keepers have kept 100s of animals healthy using them.

I do attempt to provide foods that would be found in a wild diet, but I can only approximate that as I don't, in fact, live in a southeast Asian forest or a South American rainforest. What I can get and grow where I live - even in greenhouses - is only a fraction of the variety that would be found in a natural diet and I have to supplement with local or commercially available fruits, greens, fungi and yes, Mazuri to make a full diet. I also live somewhere with reasonably long winters that further limit my ability to replicate the wild 100%. Packaged food isn't designed to replicate a wild diet but it is designed to provide the nutrients that the natural diet would.

Chemphobia doesn't help anyone. Yes, we use chemistry to extract specific vitamins and other compounds from natural sources or synthesize them entirely to add to foods to make them more nutritious - and that's okay. Making packaged food requires creating a product that has a long shelf life and a uniform composition - the ways to do that often strip a lot of the good nutritious bits from food so we need to add them back in. All food has chemical compounds in it - if it didn't, it wouldn't be food (heck, it wouldn't even be air).


https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/do...chemicals-too/?referer=https://www.google.ca/

 

[Yvonne G]

this is not meant to offend, i just want to understand why someone would choose to give their beloved pets a diet that it not their natural one. as for getting more out of your pets, more eggs, more clutches, more fertility, more money - let that be on your conscience also. Science behind it is simple: nature did not make that nonsense, turtles do not benefit from preservatives, unless you heard otherwise. and yes, i did my research, and no i am not a nutritionist, I have a psychology degree in case you wonder and want to talk about that also

Well, you're preaching to the choir. Most of us here on the Forum advocate a natural diet with pellets on the side, not as a staple.

 

[Tom]

ouch, i can feel your anger... sorry to make you so.

You are not feeling any anger coming from me. That is something in your own head. Sort of like your opinions about nutrition. Just something you've made up.

My reason for addressing your post is to make sure people don't take your emotions as facts and deprive their tortoises of a good supplemental source of balanced nutrition. I used to say the same things you are saying here many years ago. Then I learned better. I was ignorant about this subject. Now I am not.

 

[Loohan]

Your point is valid and a LOT of posts have weighed the pros and cons of Mazuri. However, Purina didn't come up with that recipe overnight. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't a marketing person who decided what to make it out of. This is not some FAD food. It's been around for several decades...

Not really. Decades ago the soy was not glyphosate-drenched GMO crap.

 

[Tom]

this is not meant to offend, i just want to understand why someone would choose to give their beloved pets a diet that it not their natural one.

I will try to help you understand. Please open your mind for the following:

Here is a frequent quote of mine in regards to Mazuri: No one is impressed by the ingredients list, but everyone is impressed by the results of feeding this food.

Next point: NOBODY, and I mean nobody, is capable of feeding a "natural diet". Wild tortoises eat a huge variety of naturally occurring plants in their native habitats. I've researched this a lot. We can hand pick a few of those plant species, or even a few dozen, and try to grow them in our North American backyards and gardens, but many of these plants species are not practical to grow, won't survive in our climate, and there is no way to duplicate the vast number of plant species that wild tortoises have access to. I know of no one that feeds more plant varieties than I do, yet I am not even close to matching what a wild tortoise would eat. Take South Africa for example: There are somewhere between 22,000 and 30,000 plants species in the area where my leopard tortoises come from. Compare this to 2000-3000 species that occur here in SoCal. Over the course of a year I probably offer 2 or 3 dozen different plant species for them to consume. This is nowhere near what they would consume in nature.

as for getting more out of your pets, more eggs, more clutches, more fertility, more money - let that be on your conscience also.

Here again you've jumped to an incorrect conclusion. You think I breed tortoises solely because I'm a profiteering money grubber? You don't know me. Not at all. I don't even break even on the money I make from selling babies, vs. money and time spent loving, caring for, and enjoying my tortoise herd.

Number of babies produced, and the health and vigor of those babies is offered as one measuring stick to judge how well the parents are being cared for. If the parents were not receiving good care and nutrition, a person could logically expect poorer breeding results. If you really had enough experience to be making these unfounded assertions about food and diet, you would already know this. I may not sway your opinion on this matter, but I hope that people reading realize that there are people on this forum that do have enough first hand experience to make these assertions one way or the other.

Science behind it is simple: nature did not make that nonsense, turtles do not benefit from preservatives, unless you heard otherwise.

Nature didn't make beets and soy beans? Are you aware that many preservatives are "natural" vitamins? A quote that I just quickly pulled from the internet machine:
"Tocopherols are a family of vitamin E compounds naturally found in vegetable oils, nuts, fish and leafy green vegetables. The nutritional benefits of Vitamin E (d-alpha-tocopherol) and its importance as a daily part of the human diet have been well documented."

As Zeropilot pointed out, mammal feces and carrion make up a relatively large percentage of the wild diet for some species. By your logic should we offer deer poop and roadkilled squirrels to our tortoises because its "natural"?

and yes, i did my research, and no i am not a nutritionist, I have a psychology degree in case you wonder and want to talk about that also

I don't know what research you have done, but whatever you have discovered has led you to a pre-mature and incorrect conclusion. Please keep researching. In time you will learn what most of us have already discovered.

I have no desire to discuss your psychology degree. That is not in question here. I do have respect anyone who attains a college degree, as that is a tremendous accomplishment, so congratulations on the hard work and dedication it took to earn that degree. My hat is off to you for that.

there is nothing like a dandelion - load of nutrition! and it is free

I agree with you that dandelions are great, but they are not a natural food for any species that is not from Eurasia, and they should not be fed too often or too much either.

Spineless opuntia cactus pads are a great tortoise food. High in calcium, high in fiber, high in water content for hydration, but totally un-natual as every variety is a man made cultivar.

You mentioned bananas. The Cavendish banana variety that we all know and love, and feed to our box turtles and forest tortoise species, are another man made construct. They do not occur in nature. Not a "natural" food at all.

My point is this: Most of the good foods that we offer to our tortoises like mulberry and grape leaves, flowers, weeds and grasses, do not occur in their natural areas. Most of them are also "engineered" by humans in some way or other. "Fruitless" mulberry trees, for example. Or the aforementioned "spineless" opuntia, countless varieties of flowers, or the 2000+ varieties of grape vines available in the world. There is no way to feed a "natural diet", even if you live in the natural area where your chosen species occurs. Ask the people who have desert tortoises and live in Mojave what they feed their tortoises. They do not spend hours a day collecting tidbits from hundreds of plant species.

So when we acknowledge that a true, "natural" diet, is not possible or practical, we can then accept that we must do our very best to provide a good variety of "un-natural" foods that will meet the nutritional needs of the animals in our care. This can be done with dandelions, weeds, bananas, and cultivated grasses. It can also be done, and in some cases done better, with the addition of a man-made, scientifically formulated, well-tested, prepared food like Mazuri Tortoise Chow used as a supplement to the foods you incorrectly refer to as "natural". No matter how hard we try, we cannot always feed the correct balance and get all the needed minerals, proteins and trace elements into our tortoises through dandelions and other weeds. There are variations in the soil that these weeds grow in, and there are seasonal variations, like snow, that make these weeds hard to come by. Mazuri, and a couple of other prepared diets, allow any tortoise keeper to get full balanced nutrition into their tortoises when there is a winter blizzard happening outside, or for the person who lives in a big city surrounded by asphalt and concrete, and any local park is covered in pesticides and weed killers to keep it looking pretty. When used as a supplement to an otherwise good diet, Mazuri can help to ensure that there are no deficiencies, nutritional gaps, or missing trace elements and minerals.

Why would a tortoise receiving good, balanced nutrition make you want to cry? I have no doubt that your intentions are good, but your ideas are based on ignorance. That ignorance can be detrimental to the health of people's tortoises, so I feel the need to refute it. Here is a feeding sheet that I typed up for sulcatas. If you'll take the time to read it, you will begin to understand where I am coming from. http://www.tortoiseforum.org/threads/for-those-who-have-a-young-sulcata.76744/ Like you, I also advocate a closer-to-natural weedy, grassy, leafy diet, but I no longer close my mind to the benefits of using a prepared food like Mazuri to supplement a diet of fresh grown stuff , or amend a diet of grocery store greens. I hope that the posts in this thread, and the decades of first hand experience that are being shared by many posters in this thread, will open your mind too.

 

[Neal]

this is not meant to offend, i just want to understand why someone would choose to give their beloved pets a diet that it not their natural one. as for getting more out of your pets, more eggs, more clutches, more fertility, more money - let that be on your conscience also. Science behind it is simple: nature did not make that nonsense, turtles do not benefit from preservatives, unless you heard otherwise. and yes, i did my research, and no i am not a nutritionist, I have a psychology degree in case you wonder and want to talk about that also

I offer a lot of food items to my tortoises that are not part of their "natural diet" simply because some of what is "natural" for them is not available to me, is not completely understood, or what I offer has superior (or comparable) health benefits. There's a lot we do that is not "natural" for our tortoises, but I don't believe that anything un-natural for them automatically means that it's harmful to them.

Your second sentence above is unclear to me. Are you suggesting that tortoises who eat Mazuri lay more eggs and have higher fertility rates? or are you saying that tortoises who don't eat Mazuri lay more eggs, etc...?

Personally, I think playing Devil's Advocate is completely appropriate in a group setting, but you have to bring more to the table than just buzzwords (e.g. "chemicals and preservatives") without some sort of proof or evidence to support your argument. Can you provide us with some support that a tortoise who is fed a natural diet is more healthy than one who is offered Mazuri?

 

[the Turtle Shepherd]

You are not feeling any anger coming from me. That is something in your own head. Sort of like your opinions about nutrition. Just something you've made up.

My reason for addressing your post is to make sure people don't take your emotions as facts and deprive their tortoises of a good supplemental source of balanced nutrition. I used to say the same things you are saying here many years ago. Then I learned better. I was ignorant about this subject. Now I am not.

everyone loves you , Tom, please... do not bite my head off