I wouldnt ever give them meat (fresh as in non-dog biscuit meat) for the whole carnivore taste of blood, eating their babies thing! Not something I want to risk.
I give mine a mix of Large parrot seeds (which has the usual bird seeds & grains in it minus the gritt, and also has whole corn in it which they love - I also add more corn and 2 different kinds of sunflower seeds in it as well), Lucerne, those sticky rolled barley flake things, and dog biscuits and occasionally I mix in some chook pellets, but they like the dog biscuits better.
The seed & grain mixes, I mix myself at the local animal produce store thingo, they just charge me like $9 for 7kg bag, dont know if thats good, but I dont mind paying that, when I get home I add the dog and chook food and mix it all together and I also give them food scraps on top of that aswell and its more interesting and tasty for them lol - even though they are going to eventually be food (except for my breeding stock, which is the main reason really, that and I dont think chook pellets are a substantial enough of a food source for them to live off)...The mix I give them even looks slightly tempting to me LOL! Yes, they may be classed as spoilt, but atleast it increases their life quality before they die lol Haha the dude at the produce store always says, "Man you must really love those rats, coz you definately spoil them with the mix you give them!" even though I have both rats and mice *minor detail though really :lol:*
When I run out of my special mix, I just give them dog biscuits and food scraps. Oh and the dog biscuits are either chicken, rice & veg, or beef, rice & veg flavoured, not sure if the beef one makes them eat their babies, but yeh, coz I just grab whatever the dogs have at the time lol
Btw, for all the grammar nerds, sorry its bad, my keyboards are stuffed (on one, half the keys dont work anymore mainly the grammatical keys and really only one letter key, which im glad for! and the other, all the keys are mixed up - all due to a mate spilling a whole glass of cocktail on them by accident) and I cant always be stuffed to swap them to get the right grammatical characters etc I find it effort enough to change it for that one missing letter, let alone all the grammatical characters as well! Bahaha really dont know why I felt I had to disclose all that
, but yeh, oh well LOL!:lol: