Toucan Treatments and Raw Cat Food

This last week has been marked by the planning of animal diets both at the aviary and home. Every animal, including yourself, has an optimal diet that will keep them running smoothly well into their twilight years. Our job is to find out what that ideal diet is and strive for it.



For Gracie, The National Aviary’s elderly Swainson’s toucan, finding the perfect diet is a little tricky. As you may remember from earlier posts, Gracie has Iron Storage Disease. This disease is common for captive Ramphastids, and though keepers and zoo veterinarians have been treating birds for this disease for many years, theories on the disease’s cause and treatment are numerous.



Taking these theories and weaving them into a treatment regimen is the task that Dr. Fish has charged the interns. This assignment has required us to delve into the latest research available on Iron Storage Disease and tailor a treatment that will keep Gracie happy and healthy through the remainder of her retirement.



Toucans are fruit eaters and the obvious first step is to identify fruits that are low in iron. There are many such fruits and all the fruits that she is currently fed are relatively low in iron. Mission accomplished? Not by a long shot. Iron content is not the only factor in iron absorption: vitamins C and A greatly facilitate the absorption of iron, so foods low in those vitamins are essential.

When you create a chart that displays the milligrams of these nutrients per gram of food you can start to get an idea of the ideal diet for Gracie but this is where the easy part ends. First, to assume that pears are the perfect food for Gracie because it is low in all the “bad” nutrients doesn’t take into account that pears are low in just about everything. What good will pears do Gracie if they merely don’t do damage; the ideal foods should also provide her with “good” nutrients. What are those? Vitamin E for one; Gracie needs her tocopherals to protect her cell membranes from oxidation. Going back over the list of foods low in the “bad” nutrients we get a couple hits: papaya and mango are great sources of vitamin E. The next problem to solve: will she eat it? It turns out that she loves papaya, a fruit that is usually a staple for most captive toucans, but she won’t touch the mango. Is it because the mango that we have been forcing on her is not perfectly ripe and gooey sweet? To answer this question we have determined to begin ripening the fruit ourselves in the aviary hospital.



Fruit ripening is a topic that I am not ready to talk about. It will require equipment- bins, bags, and a refrigerator- and a lot of research and refinement. I am both looking forward to ripening fruit and dreading it. More on this subject later.

So Gracie is closer to eating her perfect foods and I am closer to understanding the process of research and treatment of animal requirements.



On the subject of optimizing the diets of animals under ones care, I have begun feeding our two cats at home a raw diet. Like most cats, Che and Wendell have lived their entire lives (7.5 and 3 years respectively) on a diet of dry commercial cat food. A little research confirmed what I already suspected: cats are obligate carnivores and as such, are built to eat meat and only meat. Take a quick look at the ingredients on a commercial bag of dry cat food. Hopefully meat is the first ingredient, but corn is usually a major component along with other grains and vegetables. These cheap fillers work a frightful number on a cat’s digestive system. They were not meant to eat these needless ingredients and consequently will live much longer, healthier lives without such things.



It is important that when feeding a raw diet to cats one doesn’t just throw them a slab of meat and call that a meal. Cats require other nutrients that they cannot get from just animal flesh. In the wild a cat will also eat some of the organs to glean essential nutrients that they couldn’t get otherwise. The kidneys and heart of an animal contain many vitamins and minerals that a cat needs to survive. Taurine, one of the few known naturally occurring sulfonic acids, is extremely important for a cat’s health; without it a cat will go blind and eventually experience heart failure.



For Che and Wendell’s food I took two plucked and gutted free-range hens from a local Amish farm and ground them, bones, skin, and liver included, into a nice paste. This was difficult at first but I soon learned to only put a small piece into the grinder at a time. To the resulting eight pounds of raw chicken burger I mixed water, eggs, taurine powder, vitamin E powder, vitamin B-complex, salmon oil, and iodized salt. Most of it went into the freezer for later, but a small tub of it went into the refrigerator for the week’s rations.



I expected that Wendell would gobble it up and that Che would be skeptical, but it was just the opposite. Che took a few tentative sniffs before diving right in, but Wendell didn’t even regard it as food. I had anticipated a little trouble at first; anyone would balk at such a radically different diet if it was introduced all at once. I solved this problem by mixing pureed baby food meat in with their chicken. I found that Wendell would eat the mixture with little trepidation at a ratio of 1/1 on the first feeding. The second feeding I was able to reduce the baby food by about 10% with no obvious effect in his acceptance. This radical diet change is going to be a little hard on their systems at first but tremendously salubrious in the long term.



I have greatly enjoyed these projects as they have taught me much the importance of recognizing the very specific nutritional needs and tastes of different species and individuals. Hopefully both the cats and Gracie, the toucan, will live long, healthy, and inexpensive lives