Kazko is a sugar glider born in 1997. Kazko's Diet is a plan that takes a time tested approach to managing the diet dilemma.
Kazko's Diet was built from trial and error over time and is simply designed to offer a variety in each food group for each feeding. The goal is to never feed the exact same spread every night, instead, modify it to allow for different sources of each group.
There is no official list of items, those lists exist everywhere, but instead, a list of groups. 25% protein, 25% fruit, 25% veggie, and 25% blend. This is very much like the old human four food groups concept except that the fourth group is not simply dairy, it is a generic group that I call blend where you can use dairy, yogurt, other sources of calcium, protein powder, ... and you can also experiment with other blended diets and also supplement calcium and other vitamins if you choose to.
Some suggestions for each group are listed below but are in no means a limitation. Use judgement and learn what you can by reading other diet plans and food resources and figure out for yourself what is good and not good to feed.
PROTEIN: 25%
turkey - ground
chicken - breast, ground, baked, boiled, ...
shrimp
fish
pork
soy in any form
cooked egg
beef - ground, brisket, ..., is very safe, but use less of the time
FRUIT: 25%
blueberries
peaches
pears
apple
melon
mango
papaya
any fruit...
VEGGIE: 25%
green bean
carrot
corn - is ok but use less
collard greens, spinach, sweet potato, ...
most any veggies, cooked, raw, diced, whatever they will eat...
BLEND: 25%
flavored yogurt, dairy or soy based - never use diet, natural only
nectar mix
cottage cheese
rotate or experiment with any of the other diet blends such as Healesville, bml, ...
occasionally add a fiber source such as a natural cereal, pasta, perhaps dried out french bread to chew on.
The blend category is a catchall and the place where you can experiment with things and find something that your sugars like. It could be sweet, it could be blended or liquid vegetable. You can add supplements here if you wish to, but if you feed yogurt often and you feed a wide and varied spread weekly, then you really will not need to supplement at all. If you do supplement, you will need to do more research as some brands and types of supplements are showing to be bad for the animals long term. Liver damage is a growing issue as of late probably due to over supplementing or possibly from the sources of some of the supplements such as Calcium from oyster shells or K3/Menadione which is banned from human consumption and should also be for animals. Sugar gliders do need a source of calcium but it does not have to be paramount or in every day feedings. Yogurt seems to do the job very well and can always be added to any of the blends you decide to work with or just use it in rotation with other things like I do. Dark leafy greens are a good source of calcium as well and can be added to any blend.
And I almost forgot the most important category:
TREATS:
hand fed mealworms, no more than 6 per animal
dried yogurt drops, once or twice per week
honey on the finger
sunflower seeds and pistachios
The diet goal here is to vary things often. Feed shrimp one night, then ground chicken the next, then ground beef the next, left over brisket the next, ... Keep large variety bags of frozen veggies and fruits in the freezer. Your freezer will become busier than it has ever been when you keep sugar gliders. Some times you may have fresh things in the fridge and some times you may find yourself chopping and preparing fresh things for freezing.
Click here for some photos of an average night feeding for any of my colony cages. One 7" flat divided baby bowl is for the whole cage of 8 gliders. A single glider needs very little food daily; Something like 2 corn kernels, 2 chunks of meat, 2 chunks of fruit, some blender, ... just not much at all, so it is good to dice the food up as much as you can to keep one animal from hogging it or eating too much.
Some of the other "official" diets are proving to get gliders fat quick and to kill them at early ages from liver failure, so do your research and feed stuff that you would stick in your own children's mouths. Too much sugar and too much supplementing will tax the tiny bodies.
In the video below you can see that I prefer to use a small open top type personal blender for ease of access and tweaking the project at hand. Super easy cleanup and they dont take up much space and are easy to stow.
BLENDER MIX RECIPE
I have normalized into using a very basic recipe for my blender mixes. I will sometimes add things to it to flavor it one way or another as in the video above, but the basic mix is following Ruth's original research on the Leadbeaters Mix from the Taronga zoo.
In a small blender add these ingredients and blend to a very smooth mixture:
1 cooked egg
1 cup of cooked oatmeal (1 cup dry, add water then microwave)
1 cup water (can use other liquids/juices if you want)
This is the base that I will use by itself in rotation with yogurt. On occasion I will add greens to it or fruit or maybe orange juice or whatever suits my fancy at the time to see if they will like it more or less.
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