Feeding Programme
Reptile Foods and Supplements; A User Guide
The EarthPro range of Supplements, Supplementary feeds and Wholefoods represents the very latest in nutritional scientific thought and product sourcing.
Working within our Theory of ‘Wild Re-Creation™’ we have created a ‘Wholly-Natural’ and synergistic range of essential supplement powders and foods that will work with the animal and with each other to help ensure that your animal has fantastic, ‘Wild-Like’ nutrition.
We have developed this feeding programme that is easy to follow and that will help you to keep your pet in the best of health at all times.
Remember, no one powder or food can do the job on its own! We have to incorporate variety to provide for our animals properly.
Reptiles are ectothermic or ‘cold blooded’. This means that they obtain the energy that they need to move and feed from an external source. This external source is the sun, which provides them with heat through Infra-Red and light including UV. UV, among many other critical interactions, allows animals to create and use essential Vitamin D3.
Nutrition is broken down into 4 core sections;
1. Food
2. Water
3. Exercise (physical and mental enrichment)
4. External sources of energy (solar)
All of these elements are as important as each other.
Internal ‘food and hydration’ has many forms. Reptiles and amphibians on the whole consume a vast variety of food sources. We also have to factor in the vast variety of food sources that the prey sources themselves have consumed and the differing mineral structures of the earth in which the plants have grown. This is a vast and intricate ‘nutritional web’.
It is within this constant variety and having access to wild volumes of heat and UV-rich light that an animal is properly provided for, each according to its own pathway of development. Few species have developed solely to eat only one source of food; most have access to a high number of individual species in the local ecosystem. Each of these insects will have a gut content that is as rich and diverse as the ecosystem itself.
Why do we need supplements?
So WHY do we use supplement powders in the first place? The reason is quite simple. Captive diets are reduced in variety and may even contain components that these animals do not use in the wild. By increasing the variety of core food sources and using ‘Wild-Like’ sources of powdered supplement alongside ‘well set’ heat and UVB systems and providing access to enrichment we supply for the core Biological needs of our pets. We can safely provide these items easily using the ‘EarthPro’ programme of care.
Feeding groups
Animals can be classed into a number of feeding groups. Each group will have its own needs to find nutrition from the plants and animals that surround it. However, within these loosely labeled groups, wild animals will have access to many more sorts of food. As an example, chameleons consume a large amount of insect protein in the wild. However, they also have access to and may consume plants, small rodents, birds, reptiles and amphibians if given the chance. As such this variety, even if rarely taken, becomes part of the overall nutrition of an animal through its life. Nutritional diversity aids them through their reproductive and growing cycles. Furthermore, any species will exhibit changes in dietary preference through the life stages. This means they seek out higher protein sources when young or during breeding seasons.
The core feeding groups are:
Herbivore/Folivore; an animal that mainly eats plants/leaves.
Frugivore; an animal that mainly eats fruits.
Nectivore; an animal that mainly eats nectar/pollen.
Omnivore; an animal that eats a wide variety of food items as opportunity arises.
Carnivore; an animal that mainly eats the flesh of other land-based animals
Piscivore; an animal that mainly eats a diet of fish.
These classifications depend largely on a snapshot of what the local people, collectors. When initially studied, the diets observed in the wild were assumed as the mainstay once placed into captivity. Over time, the more we learn and observe through stomach sample analysi, the greater our level of care can become.
If we can accept that our pet species are not ‘Obligate’ within the groups we can start to offer greater variety and in a safe and measured way once again start to see less incidence of avoidable nutritional metabolic ‘disease’.
The EarthPro Supplementation Programme and foods have been designed to help you offer wide dietary variety with safe, natural products. Suppose an animal in the wild obtains a percentage of the minerals that it needs to from the earth. It then makes sense that a mineral offering derived from natural source would be safest to use in captivity. Rather than use a laboratory approximation of the mineral content of the earth, we use a naturally mined ‘Full-Spectrum’ mineral clay as the base of our everyday powder ‘EarthPro-A’. Therefore, this can be used at every feed to help supply those minerals found in the wild.
EarthPro Supplementation Programme
The Feeding Programme per Dietary Group
Insectivore
Herbivore
Omnivore
Carnivores/Snakes
Supplementary Feeding
The Importance of Live/Fresh Food
EarthPro Wholefoods have not been designed to replace the entire diet of your pet. They have been designed to greatly increase nutritional variety and help to keep your pet healthy. Livefoods are essential for insect-eating species as they not only provide extra nutrients but also offer mental and physical enrichment through encouraging hunting behaviours. Because of this, further variety must be included.
Offering fresh fruits, flowers and veg is also essential for Herbivorous and Omnivorous species. This helps to further increase dietary variety and offer greater mixes of nutrients through seasonal availability.
EarthPro Reptile Supplements and supplementary feeds have been designed to help make up for the shortfall between a rather restricted captive diet and the variety that the wild would have provided them with.