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The comments on Ultrakibble led me to go look the product up. I am curious like that, and some of what I read was making me wonder if I should try it. Then I finally found the info that included the ingredients list.
INGREDIENTS: Corn gluten meal, corn, soybean meal, linseed meal, catfish meal, dicalcium phosphate, crab meal, yeast culture, dried vegetables (dehydrated beet pulp, dehydrated celery pulp, dehydrated water cress pulp, dehydrated spinach pulp, dehydrated carrot pulp, dehydrated lettuce pulp), HMS vitamin pre-mix, salt (NaCI), choline chloride, fresh ground cinnamon and assorted spices, diatomaceous earth, primalac, lysine, selenium.
I noticed that the soybean meal comes before the catfish meal and crab meal. I have to ask if perhaps the corn and soybean meal are primary sources of protein here? And the site also specified farmed catfish. Everything that I have heard about fish indicates that wild caught is better for you than farmed. This leaves me scratching my head... and if peafowl are 'obligatory predators of invertebrates and small animals'... cats are obligatory carnivores and a good food for them shouldn't have corn, corn and soybean as the first ingredients. Some beautiful pictures on the other posts, and a lot of info, but I think perhaps instead of using this feed I would be better off feeding grasshoppers and small frogs (wish I had seen that info earlier, we had an abundance of tree frogs last summer. Cute as they are, I should have given some to the peafowl!) I did some reading and saw that flax is a good source of selenium. I live in ND and they grow a lot of flax around here, and this area is known for having plenty of selenium in the soil. Considering that, I wonder if grasshoppers would be a good source too, since they eat plants? A lot to think about... Just wish I could free range my birds, too many predators (furred, feathered, and 'furless'). I need a place out in the middle of nowhere with no neighbors (sigh).
UltraKibble is baked like dry pet food. One of the reasons, aside from the issues of reducing waste, mold and spoilage, these kibbles have been designed the way that they are has to do with digestibility. As I mentioned earlier, the more traditional pellets, mashes and crumbles are not heated to the temperature that kibbles are. Dog and cats are also obligatory predators but cannot utilise the vegetable proteins that peafowl and poultry are capable of. All the same, the kibble is heated to a degree that makes the grain and vegetable proteins more digestible for these carnivores. If dry pet food was only processed to the degree that our typical poultry feeds are, they would not have enough digestible protein in their diet and would lead to nutritional deficiencies. The food would also disintegrate in ambient moisture. It would create a dusty residue which could, like the feed itself, readily mold or spoil if left out. There are large percentages of corn and soybean meal in the UltraKibble as there are in any typical pellet. The major difference is the temperature that the kibble has been heated to.
Additionally, UltraKibble is 40% protein. It's a supplement. The amount of catfish in the product is substantial and this is a readily digestible material. It is ingested into the digestive system and utilised almost at once. While the corn, soybean and linseed proteins are still working through the digestive system, before they have been digested thoroughly and put to work, that fish meal has already been absorbed. Farmed fish is ecologically sustainable unlike ocean caught fish.
Farmed fish used in this application can be fed in such a way that they are more highly nutritious, higher in certain fatty acids and vitamins, trace minerals and so on.
Regardless, farmed catfish, farmed salmon, farmed carp, these are all fantastic sources of complete amino acids. At the end of the day, Ultra Kibble is simply the best product on the market. It's the only product formulated for birds that are not maintained in high intensity farming situations. Most feeds are designed for commercial applications and small flocks do just fine on them but those birds are not reaching particularly high life spans. Their moults are heavy and the birds eventually will succumb to one infection or another.
When Peafowl are maintained on substandard feeds the birds end up with chronic infections and will often drop dead unexpectedly, especially birds growing in trains.
The reason this food was created in the first place is the all the guessing that people put into their bird nutrition. Peafowl and other gallinaceous birds have been maintained on traditional pellets and mashes for close to fifty years. There weren't many issues with that until feed manufactures pulled animal protein from their formulations. This was about twenty or so years ago and this when populations of subtropical pheasants started to take a nose dive. People didn't notice much of an issue with peafowl because most that kept the birds had them free range on ranches and farms. There was nothing resembling the enthusiast hobbyist crowd until the 90's. People kept their birds on turkey and gamebird crumbles but mortality and the cycle of disease and infection was and is an issue of some concern. People also complained about the fact that captive born birds were not as attractive and colourful as wild caught birds. This naturally came down to diet and housing.
There had never been a diet formulated exclusively for peafowl but UltraKibble is as close as it gets as the diet was originally designed for Congo Peafowl, Great Argus, Green Junglefowl etc. I spent decades experimenting with different feeds and wasting time on guess work. The product line made by Farmers' Helper put an end to all that and as the kibble is a supplement that is mixed into maintenance diets- I can add or subtract it accordingly. An old male peafowl heading into his moult gets quite a lot more than a flock of a laying hens but once they begin to cut back on egg production and feathers start showing up- I increase the kibble to assist the birds through the moult. Proper animal nutrition comes down to consistency-you've got provide an optimal diet consistently its about affordability- as well.
Now my birds are super healthy and appear as if they're wild caught. I can't really keep going on about ultra kibble -Id suck at infomercials. It should suffice to say that everything I've heard about the product from people that use it makes me confident they can't afford not to use it.
