Sugar gliders are exotic animals, and with any exotic animal, it can often be confusing to know what they can and can’t eat and what is considered healthy and nutritious for their daily diet.
Depending on where you live, bread can be a diet staple or an occasional treat. While bread can be sour for some animals (due mainly to digestive issues), you might wonder whether or not your sugar glider can eat bread.
Sugar gliders are omnivores; this means they can eat a wide variety of food, including bread. It’s essential, however, to ensure that your sugar glider has a well-balanced diet; therefore, bread should make up no more than 10% – 20% of their daily diet and should be used as an occasional treat rather than a diet staple.
Certain parts of your sugar glider diet are essential, including a healthy balance of protein, fruits, and vegetables. When it comes to carbohydrate sources like bread, you need to be more selective about the types and quantities you feed your sugar glider.
In this article, we’ll tell you why it is ok to feed your sugar gliders bread and how you should look to manipulate their diet so that bread is an occasional treat rather than a diet staple.
Can Sugar Gliders Eat Bread?
A sugar glider diet is not that complex. However, it’s always best to be cautious when experimenting with food and diet choices, and bread often causes many animals discomfort and even illness.
As an omnivore, however, sugar gliders can eat a wide variety of food, including protein sources (naturally insects), fruit, vegetables, grains, and cereals, which means that sugar gliders can eat bread.
If you don’t want to take our word for it, a quick video below shows a sugar glider that seems happy enough to tuck into a rather large slice of bread.
An ideal diet has yet to be devised for sugar gliders in captivity as they are a relatively new ‘pet,’ so moderation needs to be taken when providing food they wouldn’t otherwise consume in the wild.
In the wild, you’ll find they consume nectar, insects, sap, eggs, lizards, and even small birds; therefore, we advise taking a cautious and minimal approach when feeding them bread.
Why Bread Should Be an Occasional Treat
Sugar gliders have tiny stomachs, and you should limit the amount of bread they consume because it can quickly fill up their stomach (for humans, this is more commonly described as bloating).
Filling their stomachs is not significant because bread isn’t very nutritious. Therefore, the more bread you feed a sugar glider (especially if they eat it first), the less nutrient-rich foods they are likely to consume afterward.
That makes bread sound quite bad; however, that isn’t the case, carbohydrates are not only good for sugar gliders but essential, and bread is a very carbohydrate-rich food source.
Instead, we want to emphasize that your sugar gliders should only have bread in moderation alongside a well-balanced and nutritious diet.
We (and others in this forum) feel that bread is best used as an occasional treat to break up your sugar gliders’ diet and give them something new to eat and enjoy.
You can experiment with coating the bread or using different types (banana, wheat, etc..) and make sure you don’t give them too much to avoid bloating and discomfort.
Round-Up
A sugar glider can eat bread doesn’t necessarily mean it should. Bread isn’t something that a sugar glider would eat in the wild, and therefore when kept in captivity as pets; it’s always best to try and recreate their natural diet as closely as possible to keep them healthy and happy.
It doesn’t mean we can’t give them an occasional treat; bread is delicious food to provide them in moderation.
Just make sure they’ve consumed some nutritious diet staples first. If they fill up on bread, they’ll likely ignore the more nutritious foods they should be eating.
Before you go, we thought we’d leave you with one last video showing that sugar gliders can eat bread and that they do enjoy it (have you ever seen a more content-looking pet?).
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