Can answer this privately or publicly! Was just curious if you know of the Avian Raw Whole Food Nutrition FB group with Jason Crean & if you had any thoughts on good resource or no. I've been in it for ages out of casual interest.
So I don’t use Facebook anymore and can’t see any of their content as a result but I’ll use this as an opportunity to talk about raw fed parrots in general!
((Since I can’t access any of their info none of this is reflecting on the page or the biologist who created it either))
I love the idea but it’s likely not the ideal way for the majority to feed their pets. Raw feeding just isn’t very accessible for a myriad of reasons: sourcing ingredients, prep time, expenses with the tools needed for prep, and the severe amount of guesswork.
Getting things balanced properly is hard! We don’t have a lot of data on parrot nutrition, even some of the articles I shared today notes that some nutrient ranges they were using was from data on chickens because we simply do not have the numbers for parrots yet! That’s a tricky thing to try to figure out when scientists themselves haven’t even studied it yet.
Some pellet brands have done feeding trials and there are pellet specific studies to show the long term effects of that brand! No we don’t have all the data yet but the data we do have is pointing at (good) pellets to be the safer feeding option when it comes to nutrient availability and consistency.
On top of that produce changes a lot. The quantity of set vitamins in each produce item will be different every time you purchase that produce. In season, out of season, different fertilizers, shelf life, they all affect nutrient density, unless you’re testing produce yourself with your in-home lab you won’t know exactly how much of each vitamin your bird is actually getting. You’ll have an estimate, but you won’t know for sure, that can make homemade diets very risky.
Obviously parrots exist without extruded food nuggets, obviously they are capable of surviving on raw foods, and yes ideally I would love for us to be able to provide as close to a wild-type diet as possible to them! But presently we don’t actually know what that looks like. Until we have more solid information on what their diet exactly needs I wouldn’t personally feel confident trying to formulate it myself.
Having a group run by a biologist sounds awesome and I hope there’s lots of new information, studies, and data to be gathered there so we can get closer to that goal!
