bone meal?

[herpboi]

i have been hearing monitor keepers on other forums saying that they add bone meal to their ground turkey along with crushed centrum tablets and use this as a staple for their lizards! i was wondering if any one else use bone meal as a source of calcium?while i plan to keep giving my tegus a variety diet, i was wondering if this is ok to give to tegus, or if i could just replace the calcium supplement with the bone meal or give them both!

[HernandosMom]

If bone meal comes from a big, old, grazing animal, there is a danger of high lead and other heavy metal content. Bone meal in the US used to come from old horses. The horses would work or race all their life, then when they got too old for economic value they were processed for other uses. Their hooves were used to make glue, their carcases ground up for dog food, and their bones were ground up for bone meal. That's fine if you are using it to fertilize your irises or other flower bulbs as you plant them, but once scientists became aware of the lead problem, vitamin companies were discouraged from using animal bone as calcium supplement for humans.

Because few horses are ground up nowadays, I'm assuming bone meal comes from cows. Cows may not have as long as a productive life as horses did, and their lifestyle is not as urban or highway-related as horses were (are, in the case of racehorses). So possibly there is not as much accumulation of heavy metals in the bones. I'm just guess, though. I would research it before giving bone meal to my lizards.

[GraphiK]

Sorry for digging up a dead topic but I was browsing the boards and stumbled upon this thread.

This is called the 'SDZ Diet' it was created by Jeff Lemm of the San Diego Zoo to be as nutritionally complete as mice, without the fur. This was to accommodate for the large amount of monitors and short supply of whole prey. There are plenty of Dog owners that make their own dog food and when doing so, make use of steamed bone meal within the food. You'll notice that on most steamed bone meal sold in pet stores, there will be something saying "certified free of heavy metal contaminants" which is what HernandosMom is referring to. The bone meal you'd purchase at your local farm or hardware store is intended for plants, which the heavy metal contaminants wouldn't bother. If you can't find it at a pet store, I would recommend purchasing it online. Below is a link to some:

http://www.nationalpetpharmacy.com/p...ement-for-Dogs

If you're going to be going this route, be sure to take the route Jeff Lemm (San Diego Zoo, Animal Nutritionalist) had intended, below is the exact recipe:

10 lbs. lean ground turkey
90 grams steamed bone meal
2 ground Centrum tablets

to quote SavannahMonitor.org:

Feeding – The SDZ Diet

While we discussed in the section above that processed grocery store meat is frowned upon and is not a nutritionally complete package, we should also discuss the “SDZ Diet” here just to cover all bases. This diet was created by Jeff Lemm and nicknamed the “San Diego Zoo” diet by the pet trade. It was created to be a healthy monitor diet that could not only supplement a diet consisting of whole prey items, but also aid in feeding monitors in areas where the supply of feeders has not caught up with the exploding pet trade. The diet consists of:

10 lbs. lean ground turkey
90 grams steamed bone meal
2 ground Centrum tablets

This diet has been proven to be nutritionally complete and used to feed everything from Ackies to Komodo Dragons, with great results. A few things should be noted, however.

First, success has been found with this particular formula, in the format in which it is written above. Too often someone creates their own variation of the diet, has bad results, and then blames the diet or Jeff Lemm, when ingredients were substituted at random and the recipe not followed. Make sure to use exactly what is listed above. For example, when the diet says “Centrum tablets”, it means “Centrum tablets”. It does not mean eggs, calcium powder, Reptivite, or anything else.

Second, bone meal is a staple in the nutrition field, and can be found in health food stores or ordered from the Internet.

Lastly, I would strongly suggest using ground turkey that is lean, as the recipe calls for. Anything more fatty than lean, and you will be sorry when you have to clean it up coming out the other end of the animal.

Source:
http://savannahmonitor.org/feeding/sdz/

Be sure to refer to this thread before trying anything though:

http://thetegu.com/showthread.php?63...t-A-Discussion

In the above thread you'll see that Rick Sisco took the time to request proof and/or verification of the diet from the San Diego Zoo. In their reply they stated:

Thank you for your e-mail. Unfortunately we do not know where this reference may have occurred as this is not our recommended diet for this species.

Though, at the end of the thread you'll notice the member meatbeagle claims to have gotten in touch with Jeff Lemm, below is Jeff's response:

Hi Rick,

You have found me, lol. Yes, I did the research on the ground turkey-based diet and the peer-reviewed journal article did come out in Zoo Biology. I believe the pdf is online and there was a link in the discussion. Anyways, the diet was simply to find another staple in the diet of monitor lizards. The study compared rodents to a ground turkey-based diet in juvenile Komodo monitors and basically found little difference between the two diets. The “SDZ diet” name was something the private sector came up with after I wrote a couple of articles on monitors in Reptiles mag. That is probably why our PR dept. knew nothing about it. There has been a lot of debate about it simply because people heard about it through the grapevine and did not make it properly or use the proper ingredients. Plus, monitor forums are not the nicest places and I pretty much gave up on them; plus I’m very busy with research. Lean ground turkey is a must to keep it from coming out soft on the other end. We used:



10 lbs. ground turkey

90 grams steamed bonemeal

2 crushed Centrum tablets



I also used the diet extensively at home and when I worked at zoos in Australia – it worked great. In fact I raised, kept, and bred ackies on nothing but turkey just to prove it. I had glauerti breed on it with no problems either. It has also been used on many different skinks and Tegus, as well as Dracaena. My prasinus like it better than anything and just produced eggs (which the male promptly ate!). Anyways, I hope this helps you out. Don’t worry too much about forums. People believe what they want and that’s why I rarely respond to posts about it. Good luck,

Jeff

Take it as you will. At the end of the day though, it'd probably just be easier to feed whole prey and insects.

[the enigma]

Don't be sorry for "digging up a dead post" I was wondering the pros and cons of bone meal myself.

Thanks

[txrepgirl]

Thank you for the great info. It's good to bring up some old posts. I found a lot of good infos in them before. I'm glad you did .