What We Feed Our Rabbits

Introduction

Rabbits need ongoing care and maintenance to stay healthy and producing. Such as regular feeding, watering, and cleaning. How we clean our rabbits are included in: How we clean Out Our Rabbit Colony Pens in summer, and, how we clean out our rabbit hutches. So, you know where to find information on that topic. The other two, regular feeding and watering are covered in this blog

The Rabbits and Housing

Well at any one time we can have around 50 rabbits (well that is our record anyway). At our minimum we have 2 bucks (boys) and 5 does (girls) but most of the time we have kits (babies) as well but I cannot provide accurate information on that because the number of kits (babies) we have changes all of the time. And as you know if you have read my other blogs in the rabbit category such as how we clean Out Our Rabbit Colony Pens in summer and how we clean out our rabbit hutches, we have hutches and colony pens for a more accurate description of our layout.

How Much Feed We Feed

Well to our bucks we feed 1/3 of a cup to ½ of a cup, depending on the weather and whether they are skinny or not. If the scoops are colour coded that really helps! In our case they are orange for 1/3 of a cup, pink for ½ a cup and green for a whole cup. For our does we give about 1/3 of a cup each but it can be up to a whole cup if they are skinny, pregnant or nursing. As well as the pellets which I have just told you about we give our rabbits unlimited meadow hay and also they get some green food (such as lettuce, carrot tops and a small amount of other edible green food which I will be doing more on this in another blog).

What pellets do we use?

We use Allen and Page Breeder and Grower Pellets which can be used for any age of rabbit. You can buy them off amazon but we get them a bit cheaper from our local farm shop. You can only buy them in 20 kg bags, which if you do not have much storage space this may be a problem. They are completely natural and GMO free. They also have a low protein content which is why we supplement the pellets with oats and black oil sunflower seeds.

Where do we get our hay?

We get our hay mostly from our local farm shop but we can get it from other places as well. As I said before we buy meadow hay.

Why We Feed What We Feed

We feed hay because rabbits need fibre for their digestive system to work properly. A wild rabbit in the wild would not eat hay, but it would eat grass which is basically the same thing but fresh. Hay is made by drying out grass. But I warn you now you can’t make grass by making hay wet; you just get mouldy wet horrible stuff that has to be disposed of! Rabbits need lots of fibre in their diet for their digestive systems to work properly. But they also need protein and stuff like that to be healthy. We feed pellets because it is a ready-made nutrient compound. And we feed greens because the rabbits like it and also to give more vitamins and minerals.

What Green Food Do We Feed?

We feed safe green food in the evenings, by green food I mean things like carrot tops, lettuce and willow twigs and leaves. We do sometimes, but very rarely give them greens in the mornings too. Some greens such as kale, broccoli stems (not the flowers they are poisonous) and other gaseous vegetables they cannot have too much of, because it hurts their guts. And still other greens are poisonous such as potatoes and other greens which I will go more into this in another blog post.