The Rabbit House» Diet Archives – The Rabbit House

Last minute Christmas Baking – for Rabbits

Tamsin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:09:47 +0000

There seems to be bright lights and sparkly things everywhere, anyone would think it was almost Christmas or something! If it’s snuck up on you and the idea of braving the shops for last minute presents sends you into a panic, this is for you…

Christmas Bunny Treats!

They are easy and inexpensive to make, healthier than most shop bought treats and make wonderfully tasty Christmas presents for your rabbit.

Just take these instructions for making homemade rabbit treats and adjust the flavour to your rabbits taste. This time Scamp tried out Carrot & Banana…

Take two handfuls of pellets (crushed), two handfuls of rolled oats, 1 banana, 2 medium carrots

Finely grate the carrot, chop up the banana, crush the pellets and mix it all together.

Roll out the mix with a rolling pin and then use your favourite cookie cutters, we had squares, stars and Christmas Trees. Then poke a hole in them – don’t forget this step if you want to hang them up!

Bake on a low heat for a couple of hours until they are completely dry. And tada, Christmas bunny treats:

Please remember to remove the ribbon, or swap it for something more bunny safe like sisal before letting your bun lose on them!

A Time for Giving

Our bunnies are a luckily lot, I’m sure they are treated and cuddled all year around. Sadly, there are many bunnies that don’t have a slave to spoil them this Christmas, so if you have spare treats, have time to make some bunny toys, or have odds and ends like bottles, bowls, bin bags, brushes, towels, unwanted toys, even a bag of spare bunny food then please pop them along to your local rescue and make their day with something for the not so luckily bunnies. There is a surprise parcel already winging its way to a rescue from me and my family.

Have a merry Christmas everyone!

Homemade Rabbit Treats – Fenugreek & Banana

Tamsin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 02:15:00 +0000

My mum and I did some baking yesterday, but not cakes… we made bunny treats! My mum was tidying up her herbs & spices draw awhile back and found a packet of fenugreek, and I said ‘rabbits like that’ (everyone’s heard of fenugreek crunchies, right?), so she said lets make him some. After thoroughly researching online recipes we decided to go for the make it up as you go along approach.

Quite a few recipes called for honey, to stick it together, but we weren’t really convinced that’s a great option for bunnies. Instead we went for banana, and crossed our fingers it wouldn’t turn into crumble.

Ingredients

2 small bananas

1 tbl spoon fenugreek

2 handfuls rolled porridge oats

1 handful dry rabbit food (pellets)

a splash of water

Instructions

1. Add fenugreek, porridge oats and banana to a mixing bowl.

2. Collect dust from bottom of rabbit food bag/tub, decide there isn’t quite enough and smush some pellets up to make more.

3. Mix together, adding a splash of water if necessary until it binds together.

4. Put some grease proof paper on a baking tray (the dabs of oil at the corners are underneath to stop the paper rolling up).

(You don’t need a pic of that do you?)

5. Break off sections of the mix and roll it between your palms to make a ball.

6. Place the balls on the baking tray and flatten.

7. Place the baking tray in the oven, we tried using the left over heat after cooking a meal but it needed a little longer to dry out completely, so a low heat e.g. 150 oC for 30-60 minutes and just keep an eye should do it.

8. Artfully arrange them on a plate with a sprig of basil.

Testing

Of course, no baking is complete without testing. These smelt so good I was almost tempted myself, but I thought it best to let Scamp have that honour.

Scamp gave them a resounding paws up – very tasty!

Obviously, these are treats, so will be portioned out gradually to avoid porkyness. Easy and cheap to make though and much less of the processed odds and ends that you get in many store brought treats.

I’m already wondering about flavour variations… I wonder how well apple n grass would stick together…

Why Grass/Hay is good for Rabbit’s Teeth

Tamsin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:35:57 +0000

Today I’m going to let loose my inner geek, want to see something cool?

Look at those pointy bits! What do you think, a cactus, saw blade, sharks teeth… ?

Nope, that’s a blade of grass magnified a few hundred times and those pointy bits are the reason grass (or hay) is an essential part of a rabbit’s diet.

Rabbit’s teeth grow continually throughout their life. To stop the teeth growing too long and causing problems they need to be worn down at the same rate they grow. That sounds fairly logical. But what seems to puzzle a lot of owners is: why does it have to be hay? Surely pellets are harder so would create more wear or even some nice crunchy carrots – wouldn’t they work?

Whilst other foods may contribute some degree of wear, as you can see from the picture, there is something very special about grass and this makes the number one thing for maintaining rabbit’s dental health.

Most people think of grass as soft, like me, you have probably enjoyed sitting on it at some point. But grass is actually very similar to sand paper. Sandpaper isn’t hard, it’s flexible and you can tear it easily, but if you rub it against something it will wear away the surface. Like the sandpaper, the reason grass is good for wearing teeth is how rough the surface is, not how hard it is. Here is another close up of your rabbit’s dinner:

Hay (Dried Grass) Magnified 200x

The reason that grass is rough is it doesn’t really want to get eaten. So to protect itself, it sucks up silica from the soil and uses it to build rough spiky structures called phytoliths.

If you don’t have a microscope to hand, you can feel them with your fingers. Run your fingers down a piece of grass they will catch on the surface – you can see why from the picture above. This is the same reason hay is so great at catching on your clothing and spreading itself around the house. And why it is so good at wearing down rabbit’s teeth!

Pellets are hard and carrots are crunchy, but neither are rough enough to act like sandpaper on rabbits teeth. For the same reason, grass is just as good as hay for wear, even though hay seems harder because it’s dry and crunchy.

Hands up all those about to go fondle their hay to see how rough it is…

Making Winter Forage

Tamsin — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:01:23 +0000

This time last year I was writing about all the rabbit safe plants that I found in my garden for Scamp to enjoy. I’ve been picking leaves again and Scamp’s been enjoying them, but I know shortly autumn will turn them all pretty colours and that will be it for tasty leaves until next spring. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was some way to store them up so Scamp could eat them all year around? Well, maybe there is. My experiment with making my own hay proved that it was possible to store tasty summer grass for eating later (I’ve made several more batches since), so why not do the same with other plants.

I started by collected a pile of tasty looking leaves. Look for green healthy looking ones without blemishes (or bugs) and collect them on a dry day.

Dandelion, thistle, strawberry, hazel, ginko, raspberry & basil leaves

Don’t forget to get your bunnies approval, there is not point going to the trouble of drying and storing leaves your bunny won’t eat. Scamp gives all these a pass on the taste test. I divided my pile in two, half for his supper and half to dry out.

Just checking the flavour!

The leaves for drying, the ones Scamp hadn’t eaten, I spread out on a tea tray on top of a couple of sheets of kitchen roll:

Then I popped them in the airing cupboard where it is warm and dry. I wasn’t sure how long it would take, but it was surprisingly fast! In just 4 days they looked like this:

It’s surprising how much they shrink! The Ginko leaves (which are thicker) needed a couple more days but everything else was dry and crispy. But the big question is, do they still pass the bunny taste test?

The answer is yes, Scamp seems just about as excited about dry leaves and the fresh ones. So I’m going to be drying a lot more leaves to provide tasty, home grown, rabbit food full of vitamins and completely free!

Other was to Dry Plants for Your Rabbit

There are several ways to dry out leaves for storage:

Leave them somewhere warm and dry like I did … I put mine in the airing cupboard! It takes 4-5 days to dry them out.
Lay them out outside and let the sunshine do the work. The drawback is you need sunshine! You may want to stretch a bit of clear plastic above them to keep the rain off.
Use your oven. You can dry leaves in an oven on the lowest heat setting, or better yet, save energy and just use the leftover heat after you’ve cooked something. The downside is you can’t fit much in at once and something can be a little stinky. I doesn’t take long though (about 15minutes), we did this with Scamp’s first greens when he was a tiny baby.

Making Your Own Hay

Tamsin — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:35:43 +0000

I wonder how many thousands of bunny owners wake up on a Saturday morning, mow their lawn, throw away or compost the clippings, and then pop into the pet shop and tut over the price of hay, that in some cases has been shipped half way around the world. Now the obvious thing would be just to cut a section of grass (with scissors not a mower) and feed that direct to your bunnies, but that isn’t always practical. Some people don’t like to feed fresh grass to buns with sensitive tums, and it’s handy to have a good pile of hay in the litter tray even if you’re topping up with grass at dinner time too. So the next option is to take the lovely fresh grass and dry it so it turns into hay! So, that’s what I did….

Making Hay Step 1: Find Grass

The first step is to find some grass. If you lovingly mow your lawn weekly, you might want to skip a week to let it grow out a bit. We may have taken that to the extreme as our lawn looked something like this:

Which was the inspiration for making hay in the first place. If you don’t have a lawn, you could try asking your neighbours – offer to ‘cut’ their grass in exchange for keeping the clippings. Just make sure they don’t use any weedkiller/pesticides.

Making Hay Step 2: Cut the Grass

Once you have located your patch of grass, next you need to cut it. It’s important not to use a lawn mower for this. Mowers chop up the grass and crush it which encourages it to begin fermenting. This is great if you want to compost it but no good for feeding to rabbits. If you’re cutting a big patch you could use scythe (don’t chop off any body parts) but I went for scissors; big hedge scissors would be quicker than kitchen ones if you’re cutting a lot. I filling up this A4 paper box in about a minute… it doesn’t take long.

Making Hay Step 3: Drying the Grass

Next is the difficult part, the grass needs to dry out (and turn into hay). There are a few options for this. You could leave the grass where you cut it and turn it a few times to help it dry. The trouble with that is you are at the mercy of the weather. If your grass keeps getting soaked it will turn into a soggy mess instead of hay. It also means your lawn is covered in grass cuttings.

It was raining almost every day when I started so I decided to pop it in my mini greenhouse now the seedlings are mostly outside. It’s important the air gets to it so I made a shelf out of some plastic mesh and left the doors open (a closed greenhouse would get too humid). Note: The foil isn’t part of hay making, it just helps my seedlings grow straight as the greenhouse sits against a wall.

You could also use a covered deck, greenhouse, shed with windows etc. or you could lay it out on a sheet and just pick it up in the sheet when rain is forecast and pop it out afterwards. The top of a wire rabbit run would be great if the weather is a bit drier.

Here is my grass all laid out ready to dry.

Making Hay Step 4: Wait

That’s it for the hard work, now you just need to wait for it to dry. It didn’t take long like this. In two weeks it smelt and looked like tasty hay.

Once it has dried out you can store it like you would normal hay. Something that breaths (like a Hessian bag or pillow case would be best) just in case there is any moisture left. If you leave it out in the sun it will loose the hint of green and go golden brown (still edible but less nutrients).

Making Hay Step 4: Taste Test

The whole point of making hay is producing something tasty for a bunny to eat, so the process wouldn’t be complete without a taste test.

I think it passed!

Conclusion

Okay, so I’m probably not going to make enough hay from our little patch of lawn to supply hay all your around, but it’s a fun experiment and certainly worth the effort if you want to cut down on your expenses, be more environmentally friendly, or just provide an extra treat.

Apple Branches

Tamsin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:52:07 +0000

It’s probably the wrong time of year for pruning, but we missed at the end of last year so the apple tree is rather overgrown. I’ve whipped off a few branches and used them to decorate Scamp’s corner.

Before:

After:

Doesn’t it look nicer with a bit of greenery! Of course it won’t stay that way for long. The question is, which leaf to eat first. Scamp gave quite a few a good sniff before selecting which to eat.

This leaf first?

Or this leaf?

And the out take, what a dopey face. Possibly it’s rabbit for this is very tasty (what do you mean don’t talk with my mouth full).

Sorry for the gap in posts. Scamp had his VHD jab at the beginning of May but there was a muddle up and he got the Cylap version of the vaccine and had a bad reaction to it. Poor chap had big sores running down his side and under his chest, which resulted in several vet trips some antibiotics and metacam. He sulked for a week but is back to his usual self now.

Rabbit Diet & Nutrition

Tamsin — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:47:24 +0000

We’re having a brief break in toilet tubes toys whilst we restock! Instead I’ve been writing about feeding bunnies. I originally intended to use this website to write about rabbit housing but it’s hard to write about one thing without relating to another. So I’ve added a section on diet & nutrition. I’ve got the basics added, just need to add a little more detail and some more pictures. Here are some of the new pages if you’d like to take a look:

Rabbit Food – Don’t Believe the Marketing

Tamsin — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 05:17:31 +0000

Grass - The most natural food a rabbit can eat!

I’m just in the process of updating an old article I wrote that includes a list of rabbits foods that offer at least 18% fibre, and around 12-14% protein – the ideal combination for rabbit nutrition. It’s great to see how much the range of high fibre pelleted rabbit foods has increased in the last few years. There are even customised options available now for young and senior rabbits with nutrition tailored to their needs. A few of the leading manufacturers like Burgess, Supreme and Oxbow are also making a big deal of promoting the importance of fibre and hay in a rabbit’s diet.

That’s a really great step forward for rabbit health and welfare, however, there are still a lot of food manufacturers that aren’t so good. These are often the foods that come in lovely bright packaging and promise to be be “gourmet”, “premium”, “fortified with vitamins”, or contain “all natural ingredients”, but read the small print on the back and they have ridiculously low fibre levels or they are full of biscuits and half dead looking chopped up bits of hay (yes technically it’s fibre but no self respecting rabbit would actually eat it). I wonder how many owners fall for the marketing without realising the consequences that these foods can have on their rabbits health.

Take ‘Betty Miller Complete Food for Rabbits‘ as an example, which claims to be “as close to natural feeding as you can get”. Sounds like a great promise until you realise it’s only 15% fibre and Betty Millers years of “observing rabbits in the wild” have lead her to the belief that wild rabbits eat “grasses, cereals vegetables and bark”. Now hold on a minute, cereals, vegetables? That sounds more like reading Peter Rabbit than observing real wild rabbits. A rabbit’s natural diet is grass, grass, ‘weeds’ (dandelion, plantain, clover etc.) and grass. I can’t honestly say I’ve ever seen a wild rabbit tucking into peas, carrots, whole grain flour or soya. Whilst these ingredients aren’t anything like “natural” they aren’t particularly unusual things to find in rabbit food. The reason why I’ve used this food as an example is because rather than just neglecting to mention the importance of also feeding hay, their literature actively advises not feeding grass or hay alongside their dry food:

“The majority of manufactured rabbit food is complementary which means you must add hay or grass to make it complete. Betty Miller’s Complete Food means you do not need to add anything. The food is all your rabbit needs to keep it in tip top condition.”

The problem with dry food is that it is a very concentrated form of nutrition (it packs a lot of nutrients into a small volume of food), the exact opposite of a rabbit’s natural diet (a high volume of low nutrient food) i.e. grass. Which is why the majority of manufactured rabbit food is complementary (not complete) and manufacturers recommend it should be fed along side grass and hay. It’s not a fault in the food design, it’s a sign that manufacturers recognise that grass and hay are the most natural foods for a rabbit to eat not carrots and peas. Dry food should be feed as a compliment to hay/grass not a substitute. A balanced rabbit diet should look something like this (note the teeny portion of dry food):

On the left a wild rabbit’s diet: a large amount of grass plus a range of other plants. On the right a pet rabbits: a large amount of hay or grass, a moderate amount of other fresh plants or veg and only a small amount of commercial dry food.

I expect as most people read this their bunnies are tucking into giant piles of hay, but there are lots of new and less experienced owners that will believe the marketing of pet food manufacturers and not realise the serious consequences that it can have to their rabbits teeth, digestion and behaviour.

So please, don’t listen to the marketing of companies like this. Check the nutritional analysis, get advice from people not trying to sell you their product and above all feed your rabbit lots of hay or grass (or both)!

Carrot Tops – Free Rabbit Food

Tamsin — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:10:12 +0000

This lovely pile of carrot tops are from our local pick-your-own farm. My mum got them for free when she went to pick some tasty fruit. Our garden fruit supply is good for eat as you pick but not plentiful full enough to turn in to crumble and pie and all the other tasty things you can make with baskets full of fruit .

Many places discard parts of vegetables that rabbits like to eat. Things like carrot top, cauliflower leaves and sprout stalks. If you ask politely they are often kind enough to let you take a bag full, particularly if you are buying some of their produce too. Otherwise it’s just composted or worse thrown in to the general waste.

It made me think of all the other sources of free rabbit food. We’ve had free vegetable parts from both the local farm shop and market. Anyone got any other ideas?

Plants for Bunnies

Tamsin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:53:21 +0000

By this time of year we’re on top of the weeding so there is a bit of a shortage of dandelions, thistles etc. to add to the bunnies diet. So I was thinking about what other plants we had they can eat and once I started adding it up there were quite a few (and our garden isn’t that big!).

I found:

Apple
Hazel
Ginko
Rose
Raspberry
Blackberry
Strawberry
Grape
Nasturtium
Sage
Rosemary
Basil

I did find a little bit of clover and a baby dandelion.

Then I wondered, which would they actually want to eat? Non toxic doesn’t necessarily mean tasty. So I gave Scamp a little bit of each to see which he’d go for first. Can you guess?

See if you got it right…

That’s a yumm to strawberry leaves, ginko, apple, clover and rose, then he decided the pile of grass from earlier was a better option and skipped off.

What’s your bunnies favourite and do you have any other plant ideas?