Dry Pasta?

[squeaky]

Any reason for gerbils not to eat dry pasta?
(I use it in my homemade rat mix but have been picking the pasta out before giving it to the gerbils. It just looked kind of big and scary but in retrospect that seems mad, since the gerbils chew through everything in record breaking time).

[queenofthenile]

You are not supposed to feed dry pasta, rice or beans. These will soak up water in your gerbil's stomach and may may them very sick.

I got that information from this site:
www.wagerbils.com/habitat.html

[squeaky]

Raw beans and legumes like peanuts I don't feed anyone cos of the antinutrients and toxic proteins.
I can see that pasta and rice would soak up a lot of water and could cause problems in such a tiny stomach, but then surely all their dried food will soak up water in the gerbils stomach?
Especially things like oats, bran and dried veggies mentioned on that site?

(I'm not trying to be awkward).

The more research I do on gerbil nutrition the more conflicting advice I find.
However I will obviously always err on the side of caution.

[RW]

I thought the "birds + raw rice = exploding birds" thing had been disproved? I know gerbils aren't birds, but same principle, right? I always wondered about the birds and rice myth, anyway. If it were true that rice swells in their stomachs, wouldn't just their stomachs rupture? I mean, the whole bird wouldn't explode, would it?

www.birdwatchersdigest.com/myths.html


Many birds feed on rice as part of their natural diet and don't come to any harm. It's well-documented that one of the major pests of rice crops is rodents. If rodents gorge on rice, either in the paddies or in storage at warehouses, and it killed them, wouldn't the local rodent population experience a significant drop?

I feed my gerbils Kashi Pilaf, a type of dry cereal, and one of the ingredients is long grain brown rice. No exploding gerbils here...um, not yet anyway.

RW

[queenofthenile]

I'm just going by that website. The girl who wrote it is pretty knowledgeable. You may be right about it not being harmful. I think for now I will stick to no pasta/beans. There is a lot of conflicting info available, so I'm going to err on the safe side .

[RW]

No, I'm not saying that Rachel doesn't know her stuff, I just think the rice info is a little outdated, plus my own experience feeding Kashi.

I've not tried feeding beans or pasta (like my gerbils need any more treats anyway!), but I agree, until I'd know for sure, better safe than sorry.

RW

[RyanF]

Sorry about off-topic here. RW: Check your Private Messages.