Basic Diet

    Proper feeding of mice is relatively simple. As a basic diet you can give hamster seed mixes or special mouse (usually rat and mouse) lab blocks (lab blocks are compressed whole diet kibbles like dry dog food is for dogs). If you are feeding with a seed mix, you should remove excess sunflower seeds and nuts in order to prevent your mouse gaining too much weight. Always try and choose the healthiest and most versatile mix available. Mice do not need green alfalfa pellets in their diet at all (they won't eat them) and colorful little cakes of corn are not needed nor healthy. You should also make sure that the mix is still fresh. Otherwise the mix may have lost its vitamins and the fatty seeds may have gone rancid. One option is to feed your mice muesli (human breakfast stuff). .

    You can check the freshness of the mix from information given in the packet, or by testing how well the seeds will sprout - fresh seeds sprout easily within a few days after being put in moist dirt, old ones do not. With lab blocks you should check their best before date (which the pet shop keepers have to know - if not take your business elsewhere). Also, find out where the blocks (as well as seed mixes) have been stored. They should be kept in low temperature and dry. If you find insects or maggots in the seeds or lab blocks, do complain to the shop and demand your money back! For some strange reason many pet shop keepers think that the common rules of good business (not selling inferior goods and giving refund if they do, for example) do not apply to them. This is possible because too many people let the pet shops to get away with selling spoiled food (and sick and / or pregnant animals!). You are their customer and without customers they don't have a business at all. Little pet shop rant here: do not buy anything from a shop where animals are not treated well. It is highly arguable if responsible breeders of rodents would ever sell their babies to pet shops either - of course the quality of the pet shop matters here.

    The lab blocks are a good alternative, as they contain everything the mouse needs. Furthermore, a picky mouse is not able to pick and choose only those parts of the diet it happens to like. There are usually two different kinds of blocks available, one for growing mice, another one for grown ups.

    The basic diet should be given twice a day, especially with larger groups of mice and there should always be some left by the time of feeding

    I feed my mice on the parrot mixes found in Coles, Franklins or any pet shop. My mice seem to like eating this.