Lisa's Reasons for Avoiding Parakeet Pellet Diets
First, this is of course my personal opinion. Many people are pellet diet fanatics and just like someone can be an Atkins Diet Fanatic or a Red Sox Baseball Fanatic, a lot of this simply comes down to how you feel. If you are a pellet diet fanatic, that is fine. It's your pet, you feed your pet the way you want to.
But here is my point of view on it. First off, we have studied human medicine FAR longer than we have studied keet medicine. Much of the research on keet vitamin needs is done by the pellet manufacturers, whose sole interest of course is to get people to get 'hooked' on buying pellets for **the entire lifetime of the keet** - i.e. 15 years straight. There aren't many products out there where you can force someone to keep buying your product for 15 years in a row, using it every single day. The profit these pellet makers get on extruded colored goo is phenomonal.
We know SO much more about human diet - but even so, we are constantly learning, every year, about new vitamins, new vitamin interactions, new vitamin high and low amounts. We haven't even *dared* to put humans on a pellet diet, because we know so little about the total nutritional needs of human beings. And that is with millions of research hours being poured into human beings. There is only a tiny percentage of that time being put into parakeet nutrition - and we think we know enough about parakeets to base their entire diet on extruded chemical goo? That seems very presumptuous.
It was only a few years ago that vets were telling all parakeet owners to feed their keets gravel as a necessary part of their diet. That has since been proven to be WRONG - that gravel is only necessary for birds that do NOT hull their seeds. The gravel helps those types of birds (pigeons, etc) break down the outer hull in their stomach. Since parakeets DO hull their seeds (i.e. remove the outer hard layer) before eating it, they don't need gravel. In fact gravel can damage their stomachs. But again vets were completely wrong about this for many years. Vets are not infallable. They simply go with what they currently know.
Parakeet bodies, systems and muscles have evolved over millions of years in order to perform the tasks they need to survive. That means they have complex jaw muscles, for example, to help them open up seeds, nibble on leaves, rip bits of meat off of animals, burrow into a nook after a tasty morsel. In the wild, parakeets spend 70% or more of their time in their quest for food. It keeps their muscles in good shape, their mind engaged, and their interests aroused as they go trying different foods, pulling to get it, playing with it in their mouth. They don't have great eyesight, but their eyes have a special ability to see how "fresh" a food is. The fresher it looks, the tastier it appears to the keet.
Now if you simply give your keet a bowl of bland, artificially colored pellets, you have taken away most of what a keet does naturally! They LOOK at that food and it doesn't look fresh. It in fact looks dead. That isn't appealing. They eat the food, and there's nothing at all to do! Every single piece is exactly the same as the previous one. They all taste the same. They all have the same texture. The same flavor. The same smell. There's no figuring out how to open this one, nibbling on it. Nothing. Their entire normal "life" is reduced to sitting at a bowl and taking in small pellets. Think of your own life. What if there were no mashed potatoes and gravy, no corn on the cob with butter, no crunchy potato chips, all the various textures and flavors you love. What if the only thing you could ever eat was crunchy pellets with the exact same flavor. Unless you suffer from poor taste buds (or live with a bad cook!) that would really make a big change in your daily life.
Which brings up the next point. In the wild, parakeets would not naturally eat "crunchy things" all the time. Sure, their beaks are made for gnawing. But most of their food was fresh. They ate a ton of fresh, moist greens. They ate soft little insect meats, the inner seeds of grains, and so on. If they got to a crunchy bit, they'd probably avoid it. They didn't gnaw on bones! But now with pellets you are making them ONLY eat crunchy things.
And to go with that is the water issue. In the wild, parakeets didn't guzzle down water. Just look at their beak layout - they aren't able to hold up a glass of water and glugg it down like us humans do. They can barely lap up water in little amounts. That's because most of a keet's water supply was supposed to come *in their food*. When they ate moist greens and moist meats, the water was right in there. So they stayed naturally hydrated by eating healthy food. They would only really drink water as a supplement to that, which is why it's so hard for them to drink water on its own. It's just not what they did to "get their 8 glasses of water a day" (or the parakeet equivalent of course). But if you change them over to pellets, now they get NO water at all in their food. They have to get ALL of their water from their water dish. And that's a royal pain for a parakeet! Not only that but because the food is 100% dry, now when they eat it it actually absorbs liquid from the parakeet. Sort of like dropping a sponge into a moist bathtub. So now the food is actively drying out the keet from the inside. That isn't good.
I of course agree that feeding your keet only seeds is ALSO not good. You're just substituting one bad thing for another. Now the keet is just getting a ton of starches - which granted they have to at least use some muscle to get to - but with only a portion of the nutrients necessary. You have to feed your keet a COMPLETE diet with a variety of foods, textures and nutrients. But that is really best for the overall health of your keet. Your keet will SEE that it is fresh which makes a happy keet. The keet will have a variety of ways to eat it, which keeps the muscles and brain in tune. The keet will get all those nutrients it needs - including the ones the pellet makers haven't learned about yet. And it is MUCH cheaper than handing your wallet to a pellet maker for 15 years straight.
So why do people buy pellets? Let's look at the marketing brochure from a pellet comany. It's because:
* No foods to clean and chop
* No kitchen mess
* No time to prepare - just pour and go
* Less volume of food needed
* No hulls or cage mess
* No fuss, no worry
Let's see, it's because the owner is too LAZY to give their keets healthy, fresh food that the keets crave??
Just my opinion.
Index of Healthy Food and Water for Parakeets
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