Mazuri Insectivore

What does everyone think about feeding the Mazuri Insectivore diet? We currently feed both hedgies blue buffalo but lately Sugar doesn't seem to eat much of it. When we first got them, the place gave us some of the mazuri. We still had a little and gave her some and she went to town eating it. Does it make a good food?

Most commercial hedgehog foods are not in fact beneficial to hedgehogs. I looked up this particular brand online and it does not meet the requirements for a healthy hedgehog diet:

https://www.mazuri.com/PDF/5MK8-5MM3.pdf

While it has a protein and fat content that is suitable for a hedgehog, the actual contents are not very good for them.

The first ingredient is "poultry-by-product meal." This is not a quality protein source and should be avoided in hedgehog food. The next five ingredients are all filler- brown rice, soybean hulls, dried beet pulp, etc. are not ingredients that hedgehogs can digest and don't contribute to their nutrition.

The worst ingredient though is that the animal fats used in this food are preserved with ethoxyquin and and BHA, which are two ingredients that are notably toxic to hedgehogs (see Nancy's post here: http://chins-n-hedgies.com/forums/showthread.php?t=117)

I would check out the post about what others feed... but avoid this one and other commercial hedgehog foods found in pet stores.

For some reason, vets love to push that product! Mine did for me, and swore it was the best out there. They just don't know some of the care aspects of exotic animals. There is a list out there with the names of all the good cat foods with meat as the main 3, 2 and 1 ingredients? Does anyone have a copy of that? You want to pick foods from the top of that list, if possible. Or at least one from the top and then another from lower down.

http://hedgehogcentral.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15
You can download a copy of the list from that link. I just put a link to the HHC board because Reaper updates the list occasionally, and that should always have the most recent.