Quote:
Originally Posted by etspam
I may be missing something? The Oxbow food I was using was Oxbow Garden Select Fortified Food for Hamsters and Gerbils. Nowhere in the ingredients (at least that's listed) did I find hay:
Oat Groats, Whole Barley, Sunflower Meal, Linseed Meal, Oat Grass, Orchard Grass, Cane Molasses, Canola Oil, Whole Yellow Pea, Sodium Bentonite, Calcium Carbonate, Flaxseed, Lignin Sulfonate, Salt, Yeast Culture (dehydrated), Banana Powder, Carrot Powder, Hydrolyzed Yeast, Inulin, Mixed Tocopherols (preservative), Spinach Powder, Tomato Powder.
There's a bunch of vitamins and other stuff. I do see some other Oxbow feeds (not the Garden Select Fortified version) having hay or timothy grass for rabbits & guinea pigs, but I never used those.
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It's important to note that there's a lot of types of hay, so the ingredients may not specifically list "hay". Additionally, the issue with hay-based diets is the high amount of fibre, so even if every ingredient isn't hay, but is a fibrous food regardless, it's just as bad. You even listed some hays which haven't been produced into something else. These include Oat grass and Orchard grass - this is considered hay, and is even sold separately by Oxbow:
Oat grass &
Orchard hay. Whole barley and oat groats are byproducts of hay, sunflower, linseed, whole yellow pea, flaxseed, carrot, banana, spinach and tomato are all decently high in fibre. It's also important to note that hamsters are omnivores and need some sort of meat or insect daily.