- Supplies List
- Soup Recipe
- Frankenprey Menu
- Bones & Muscles
- Heart & Organs
- a good blender
- meat cleaver, ulu, or other sharp cutting tool
- poultry shears
- cutting board
- small kitchen scale that weighs in oz and/or grams
- storage containers or bags
- ice cube tray (for freezing soup)
- human grade bone meal powder (preferred) or finely powdered egg shell
- heart meat (1oz per batch of soup)
- organs (1oz per batch of soup, at least 1/2 liver)
- muscle meat (8oz per batch of soup)
You may also need:
- fish/salmon oil
Ingredients:
- 8oz boneless raw chicken (thigh meat preferred)
- 1 oz raw chicken liver (or other raw liver)
- 1 oz raw chicken hearts (approximately 1-2 hearts) or 1 oz other raw heart
- ½ to ¾ tsp bonemeal or crushed egg shell (air-dry egg shell then crush with mortar and pestle or in a clean coffee grinder)
How to Make Soup:
- Weigh out your meat and organs. It is helpful to chop the meat into small pieces first.
- Add bone meal or egg shell.
- Add water until about the consistency of thick cream (no thinner!!). Blending up in a food processor is the easiest.
Warning: Do NOT put whole tendons or bones in your blender or you will break your blender!!
PLEASE USE HUMAN GRADE BONE MEAL POWDER! You don’t want to know what they put in the bone meal that they sell for pets…
*NOTE: This “Soup” recipe is a switching tool meant for ferrets older than ~10 months of age. Younger ferrets, especially young kits, have not yet imprinted on their food and should accept pretty much anything you give them. Please use the Frankenprey Menu if you are trying to switch a ferret younger than 10 months.
**Our soup recipe is not to be used on pregnant jills and infant kits without proper direction or dietary supplements!
CLICK HERE FOR PRINTABLE RECIPE
Monday:
- AM: edible-bone in meat
- PM: edible-bone in meat (or muscle)**
Tuesday:
- AM: edible-bone in meat
- PM: muscle meat
Wednesday:
- AM: edible-bone in meat
- PM: heart (OR 50/25/25 MIX)***
Thursday:
- AM: edible-bone in meat
- PM: edible-bone in meat (or muscle)**
Friday:
- AM: edible-bone in meat
- PM: ½ heart + ¼ liver + ¼ other organ (OR 50/25/25 MIX)***
Saturday:
- AM: edible-bone in meat
- PM: muscle meat
Sunday:
- AM: edible-bone in meat
- PM: ½ liver + ½ other organ (OR 50/25/25 MIX)***
NOTES:
**These two meals can be either bone-in or muscle meat depending on the consistency of your ferret’s poop. Dry, chalky and firm you should reduce the bone-in meals and feed muscle meat instead. Loose, unformed and overly liquid, increase the bone-in meals. Do not change the menu beyond these two optional meals or you could affect the nutritional balance of the diet.
***50/25/25 MIX: Many find the 1.5 meals of heart and 1.5 meals of organ (1/2 liver, 1/2 other organs) confusing. To simplify things, you can instead make a single heart and organ mix. To do this, blend 2lb heart, 1lb liver, and 1lb other organs. Then feed this MIX in place of the listed heart and organ meals.
For the Visual Learners:
OR alternatively, using the above-mentioned 50/25/25 MIX:
For the VERY visual learners:
Edible bone-in meat (7-9 meals per week):
Meat with bone included. It is NOT bones with just a bit of meat on them (ie: most of the meat removed) – if you fed bones like this you will throw the balance of the menu off. See below for some acceptable bone-in meats:
- Bone Sources:
- Chicken: any / all
- Quail: any / all
- Rabbit: any / all
- Turkey: necks, ribs, and wing tips
- Duck: neck, ribs, spine, and wing tips.
- Frog: any / all
- Any small, adult bird: pheasant, partridge, ptarmigan, etc: any/all
- Cornish game hen (CGH): any / all. NOTE: CGH is a young chicken with potentially immature bones and thus NOT acceptable as a primary source of bone in the menu. It should only be used as a bone-in meal for a few (1-3) meals per week maximum.
- Any commercial frozen raw with 10-15% ground bone.
- Any freeze dried raw with 10-15% ground bone.
- A note on Pork: Please note that pork ribs are NOT edible for most ferrets. If your ferret does not eat the bone, it does NOT count towards their bone content. However, some larger ferrets can handle pork button bones or rib ends.
Muscle meat (2-4 meals per week):
Any boneless meat that has not been processed (smoked, pickled, cured, preserved, injected with saline). Examples include chicken (including gizzard), turkey, duck, lamb, goat, beef, Cornish Game Hen (counts as chicken), venison, elk, etc.
Note that gizzards are considered a muscle meat, NOT an organ.
Some meats you can feed include (but not limited to):
- chicken
- turkey
- pork
- beef (also veal)
- bison (buffalo)
- rabbit
- duck
- lamb
- goat
- fish (mackerel, salmon, halibut, goldfish, etc – also, fish oil is very good for them)
- pheasant
- quail
- squab
- venison and other game meats
- rodents (mice, rats, african soft furred rats, guinea pigs, etc)
- cornish game hen
- moose
- caribou
- kangaroo
- goose
- emu
Heart meat (1.5 meals per week):
While heart is a muscle, we include it in its own separate category because it is ABSOLUTELY necessary for adequate taurine. Lack of taurine in their diet can lead to neurological diseases, eyesight problems and other very serious health problems. Heart from any animal may be used, though we do not recommend rabbit as a main source of their heart content due to the generally low content of rabbit.
Beef tongue may be used in a pinch as a replacement for heart if you are having difficulty locating heart meat. Other sources of heart include online raw food providers.
IF you must supplement to replace heart, we recommend 500mg Taurine Powder per ferret per day, divided across meals (250mg per ferret every morning, and 250mg per ferret every evening). Supplementation is not ideal for long-term, as supplements are thought to be less well absorbed than dietary sources of taurine. However, if you cannot find heart or beef tongue, then you MUST supplement with taurine or you risk your ferret developing very serious medical problems due to taurine deficiency. We recommend always having some powdered taurine on hand when raw feeding in case you are ever faced with a local shortage of heart meat.
Organ meat (1.5 meals per week):
Note: At LEAST 1/2 of the total organ content should consist of liver.
Read more HERE.
Nutritional Organs are Major Metabolic and Hormone-Secreting Tissues:
- Liver
- Kidney
- Spleen
- Pancreas
- Gallbladder
- Brain
- Major glands (thymus, thyroid, parathyroid)
- Uterus
- Testicles
Organ Replacement Supplement
In a pinch, you can use Pet G.O. Powder as a TEMPORARY replacement for organ content if you are unable to find organs in your area. However, you should continue to search for a supplier of raw organ meat for an optimally balanced raw diet. Check out our page on Raw and Whole Prey Providers.