# homemade mouse diet safe?



## tmosler (Jan 8, 2016)

Hi I'm new here and just wanted to know if my diet plan is going to work for 2 female mice. The reason I decided to make my own diet is that most commercial rodent diets today are full of terrible potentially harmful ingredients leading me to try to create an all natural diet that is based on what they'd eat in the wild.feed 2-3 tablespoons of grain mix daily during evenings but don't leave out more then 2 hours (cooked rice and oats spoil quickly)
daily grain mix:
1 part cooked brown rice
2 parts cooked rolled oats 
1/2 part millet
1/2 part cooked pearled barley
1/8 part or less unshelled sunflower seeds (can be left in tank 24 hours)

Treats: small mealworms(all insects from pet store not wild) once every 2 weeks. small crickets 1-2 per mouse daily or every other day(don't want too much protein).vegies/fruit- feed once daily bite sized portion or 1 tablespoon of cooked peas, berries, cooked broccoli, ripe banana, carrots, apples, or kale, maybe occasional cooked chicken. So what do you think?


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## Laigaie (Mar 7, 2011)

There's no need to cook your barley or oats. I'm not sure about brown rice, but I'd be surprised if that needs it, either. If you think about it, mice don't have little microwaves or stoves to cook their food. Mealies are great, but don't worry so much about all the fruits and veggies. Mice are big into grains and seeds (so your main diet looks great), and mealies are an excellent protein source. One issue I ran into back when I fed a whole grains diet--salt. While mice can't handle a big salt block (they can really overdo it, because they like salt just like we do), there does need to be some small source of sodium in their diet, or made accessible to them. I handled that by switching to a commercial dog chow for the protein and fat portion of their diet.


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