Short version: I feed rats for ease of breeding and procurement. Occassionally mice when needed for mousers or fussy runty babies. lol.
the TL:DR version…
Summary
So… here’s the dirty downside to knowing everything about nutrition and such.
Animals need to be tested on.
For example, knowing how a prescription diet for dogs will work before being able to sell it as such requires invasive testing like multiple blood tests, biopsy samples or bone marrow testing or in the past at least sometimes require euthanizing the animal to fully examine possible effects on organs. I don’t know how far that testing goes nowadays with everything that’s been built up as veterinary knowledge.
We all know the general diet of BPs in the wild consists of rodents and birds. Because of testing done previously, RodentPro has an amazing table of information here: Nutrient Composition
We know from keeping them in captivity for so long that they will easily tolerate a rodent only diet. We also know they can be picky… =_=;
Without having a whole study done with routine medical inspections and testing over a very large group… we’ll never know the perfect diet standard. The best we can do is mimic the wild diet. Which outside of africa, most of us tend to lean towards the general mouse and rats. Sometimes gerbils or ASFs. Some include chicks.
But the other thing to keep in mind is also, observation of the animal. If the animal is too thin or overweight? Things need to be addressed. Is there a parasite? Are they eating too much?