The Rabbit House» Diet Archives – The Rabbit House

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.

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?

Seven Vegetable Dinners

Tamsin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:10:50 +0000

We don’t generally buy vegetables for the rabbits. That doesn’t mean they don’t get veg, they get what we eat, or more specifically what we don’t eat – vegetable scraps.

I’m sure some people will read this in horror… many rabbit owners buy more veg for their rabbits than themselves. I’m not suggesting that you should feed your rabbit anything that has gone bad. However, many of the parts of vegetables that people routinely throw away are perfectly fit for consumption and are often the best bits for rabbits to eat. For example carrots tops are much better for rabbits than the carrot itself.

We sort all leftovers from fruit and vegetables in to two categories, anything in good condition and safe for rabbits goes in the ‘rabbit bowl’ ready for dinner time and anything unsuitable, either because it’s unsafe or has gone bad, goes in the compost box. Once your in the habit, it’s no hassle and you’d be surprised how much there is that your rabbit can eat. Here are seven ‘vegetable scrap’ dinners (each bowl full is split between my two rabbits):

Left: celeriac, carrot peel, butternut squash, parsnip, leek leaves (not bulb).
Right: sweet pepper, strawberry leaves, apple core, carrot peel

Left: swede, parsnip, carrot peel, butternut squash.
Right:Pear peel & core (yum stewed pears!), carrot peel.

Left: carrot peel, cabbage, apple peel.
Right: carrot peel, parsnip, sweet pepper, butternut squash, sweet potato (only small amounts – some people don’t feed this), apple core

Left: broccoli stalk, kiwi peel, carrot top, mango, pear, apple, melon rind
Right: same plus Scamp.

It was interesting to record what we and they eat. I didn’t realise we ate so many carrots! We did eat other things that didn’t provide anything for the rabbits like peas, sweetcorn, runner beans, stoned fruit, etc. It also made me think a little more leafy veg would be good (I wish shops didn’t chop off all the leaves before sale). Their diet is quite seasonal; this time of year we are eating a lot of winter veg like squash and root crops. As spring comes around there will be more leafy veg plus weeds and grass. I’ll have to have a think next autumn about what we can grow over winter in the greenhouse to add to that, maybe the trays of grass could move inside.

The above is, of course, fed alongside lots of tasty hay.

Best Thing About Christmas (if you’re a rabbit)

Tamsin — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:10:51 +0000

The rabbit’s favourite thing about Christmas has to be the big pile of veg. Although even Scamp isn’t that keen on brussel sprouts!

That’s carrot, sprouts and parsnip, then there is broccoli today to add to that. The parsnips are home-grown, my first try at parsnips, so we saved them for Christmas. It dig take a bit of work to get them out of the frozen ground but they tasted great. Here’s a piccy, yummm….

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope your having a good time

Hay v. Staw

Tamsin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:08:46 +0000

I had an email about the difference between hay and straw earlier this week. It’s a topic that confuses a lot of people.

Hay

Hay is fed to rabbits as a substitute for fresh grass. It is grass that has been cut and left to dry. Good hay should be green and smell sweet, not be dusty or smell musty (excuse the pun). The greener hay is the closer it is nutritionally to grass. Old brown hay will have plenty of fibre but is not so good for providing all the other nutrients a rabbits needs. It’s also less tasty… not that I’ve personally tried it.

There are different types of grass such as Timothy, Meadow and Orchard. Sometimes grass is also grown with legumes like Alfalfa. This increases the protein level which makes it too fattening to feed as the main diet for the average adult rabbit, although it can be good for growing youngsters or putting weight on an older rabbit. Alfalfa is also higher in calcium, again good for growing youngsters but too much can be bad for adults.

Straw

Straw is the stalks from grain crops after the grain heads have been taken off. It’s yellow and the stalks are hollow like a drinking straw. Straw is great for insulating so it is used for bedding to keep rabbits warm on cold winter nights. Straw has a lower nutritional value than hay so it’s not suitable to feed as a replacement for grass. If you use it for bedding, add some hay on top for your rabbit to snack on. It’s perfectly safe if your rabbit does nibble the straw a bit too though.

Rabbits Eat Grass

Tamsin — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:50:26 +0000

With all the different dry foods, fancy types of hays and treats available for discerning rabbit owner to chose from sometimes the simplest diet options get overlooked. Grass is the most natural of foods for a rabbit to eat and is often readily available at very low (if any) cost.

It is tasty, if you are a rabbit, and will often tempt rabbits who turn their noses up in disgust at hay. It is also high in fibre, great for wearing down teeth and the rabbit digestion system has been perfected to digest it.

So why do many rabbits never get to eat it?

There is often a worry among rabbit owners that fresh foods can upset the gut and cause diarrhoea. It’s true, if you suddenly gave your rabbit a large pile of grass it probably would upset their gut, but a large pile of a different brand of dry food or treats would have the same effect. New foods need to be introduced to rabbits gradually. Start by feeding small quantities of grass daily and build up the quantity gradually over10 days of more.

If you are picking grass, rather than letting your rabbit graze, then use scissors or pull it up. Do not feed lawn mower clippings. The heat and crushing action causes the grass to start fermenting which will upset the gut if eaten.

Don’t have a lawn? No problem. Grass is easy to grow and can be grown in trays, window boxes or pots on your window sill.Â Put some general purpose compost (available at garden centres/DIY shops) in a tray or pot and sprinkle grass seed on top. Water if it gets dry and wait.

You can either cut the grass or put the whole tray/pot in your rabbits pen.Â If you put the tray in your rabbits pen take it out again after they’ve eating it and allow it regrow. In a few weeks it will be ready for them to eat again. As well as being tasty it is an excellent form of enrichment to prevent your rabbit getting bored.

Normal lawn grass seed is fine to use but you you can also buy Timothy grass seed or seed/weed mixes that contain other plants such clover, dandelion and thistle (as shown below).

The different plants help provide different vitamins & minerals, mimicking a wild rabbit’s diet which contains a varied assortment of plants in addition to grass.

Rabbit Toys: Treat Balls

Tamsin — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:00:44 +0000

Over the last few years the range of toys available for rabbits has grown enormously. Of all the products available, I think the absolute best is: the treat ball. A treat ball is a hollow ball you fill with dry food/treats that has a small hole. As the rabbit pushes the ball around the food gradually falls out the hole. What’s so amazing about this? Rabbit’s are grazing animals and would usually spend hours every day eating. The treat ball helps mimic this by stretching a bowl of food, that would usually be eaten in ten minutes, out in to an hour long activity. It’s great for getting your rabbit more active and preventing boredom, both of which will help your rabbits over all health. There are various treat balls available. The most basic (and smallest) are designed for cats and are about 2″ diametre. They split in two to fill/clean.

The other type of treat ball is sold in various sizes for rabbits, cats and dogs. They have an opening at the top which can often be adjusted to control the amount of food that falls out. If your rabbit is a chewer avoid brands with raised patterns around the ball that could be chewed off.

What to Put in Your Treat Ball

The name treat ball is a bit misleading. You should not fill your rabbits ball with extra treats, otherwise your rabbit may get fat! Instead put your rabbits normal dry food in to the ball. This should be a portion of its normal amount, not extra. Once your rabbit has the hang of it, you can put all your rabbits dry food in the ball – and throw out your food bowl.

Teaching Your Rabbit to Use It

Some rabbits are quicker at others to pick up how to get get the food out of a the ball. Start by placing the ball with the hole down and a few pieces of food next to it. As your rabbit tries to get the food the ball will move knocking more food out. You may have to help your rabbit a few times until they understand what they need to do. If the opening is adjustable start with it on the widest setting. Once your rabbit has the hang of it they’ll soon be chasing it around super-fast!