Reptile & Amphibian Forums

hi, i recently heard of making monitor loaf to feed my blue tongue skinks.
i was wondering if anyone here could give me feedback on how healthy the loaf is for monitors, and where i can find a recipe
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1:8:0 leopard geckoes
1:1:0 giant day geckoes
2:2:15 bearded dragons
0:0:9 cuban/green tree frogs
2:1:0 crested geckoes
1:2:1 corn snakes
2:4:0 ball pythons
0:0:1 blue tongue skink
0:0:1 florida ribbon snake
1:0:0 yellow rat snake
3:10:? furry composters (rats)
1:1:0 ferrets

I know I will be killed and discredited for saying this. But it is an unfortunate fact in our economy that people are going to use this diet, hopefully as a suppliment with the whole animals. I have seen bad wrong recipes floating around, and people adding ingredients haphazardly without understanding the calcium/phosporus ratio. Get this wrong and your animals get metabolic bone disease. I write this only to prevent suffering of those animals.

So I asked around, ahem, the area where the people that invented the diet. The reason they stopped using the diet is that the same food mixed in the giant zoo kitchen was also fed to their carnivorous birds and they didn't want to chance them getting exotic Newcastle disease. However, they did raise two groups of Komodo Dragon youngsters for a year and found no difference in their health and growth with the group on a rodent diet. Also raised a couple generations of Ackies. The original recipe calls for

10 pounds of ground Turkey
90 grams of steamed feed grade bone meal
2 crushed Centrum vitamin pills

Post mad cow disease steamed feed grade bone meal has become hard to find. You want your calcium/phosphorus ratio to be 2:1. So by figuring it out in milligrams and using easy to find human calcium pills I got this OKed by you know who. You have to use the human calcium pills WITHOUT vitamin D because the vitamin D is in the Centrum vitamin already. It is a fat soluble vitamin, it builds up and can be overdosed. They do make straight calcium carbonate pills, you can find them in grocery and drug stores. Here is the recipe. It gives a 2:1 cal/phos ratio. You should give them at least one whole prey item after eating this to give roughage and to "clean their teeth".

1 pound turkey burger
2 1/4 crushed 600mg calcium pills (without D)
1/4 Centrum vitamin pill, crushed

Turkey meat has only 60 mg calcium per pound and it has 708 mg phosphorus. Thats really bad. The 1/4 vitamin adds 50 mg calcium and 27 mg phosphorus. So to bring that ratio to 2:1 I added 1360 mg calcium (2 1/4 600 mg calcium pills).

Please don't abuse me too much for this. Yes, I feed it to my monitors but its not all I feed them. I have 10 monitors! Three adult giant species and 7 subadults at the feed em all they can eat stage. Its like the lion house out there. Anyway, I post this diet so people will balance it correctly with easily available items.

Do not feed hearts and gizzards. The ca/phos ratio is so bad in those its off the graph.