What are good foods to give an emu?

My favorite emu and I hung out again today, and we’re kind of short on emu food…So I brought him a piece of melon and handfuls of cat food. He HATED the melon. Actually spit it out and shook his head, like he was really disgusted. It was so cute. But he ate the cat food without much thought, but I’m wondering if it’s good for them or not?

So what do you recommend feeding an emu that’s not yours but lives next door to you?

Okay, my tumblr friends. What do I do about this?

The guy who lives next door, aka our landlord, pretty much has a small menagerie of barnyard animals that essentially lives in squalor/a junkyard. Chickens, goats, turkeys, miniature horses, emus, you name it. The birds, with the exception of a few roosters/geese/ducks, are all locked up in small wire cages, usually 2-3 in a cage. Hardly any room to move around. If you’ve ever seen a PETA video, this would look like a small-time operation they video tape.

Anyway, I came across a small chicken just now that I thought was dead, resting on its side on top of a cage (like someone put it there, because right next to it was another chicken that was also dead). Turns out — the first one is NOT dead. In fact, when I went over to it, it tried to get up and bite me, and it was clucking away at how close I was getting.

I picked it up and found out that the only reason it couldn’t get up was because its left leg had a deformity that made it walk with a limp, and left it unable to balance for too long standing up. I also noticed it had a lot of mites, and its left…err…drumstick was plucked clean of feathers — you could see the skin, clear as day.

My question to you is: should I try and help it? It’s obvious that our landlord just left it there to die. It’s trying to get up and leave, but it can’t. So what should I do? I told it I’d be back out there for it, that I would try and help it, but I just don’t see what I could do. It’s still pretty strong and healthy looking, despite its leg and mites, and I don’t want it to die of dehydration.

Any ideas as to what I should do? Comments sooner rather than later would be appreciated.

(tagging as ‘animal cruelty’ because…it seems like that to me.)