What Is the Best Diet for a Rabbit? | Pet Rabbits
Like 4 Dislike 0 Published on 25 Nov 2013
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Speaker 1: So, we're talking about rabbit diet today. A rabbit diet is actually really, really simple, because the main part of a rabbit's diet should be fiber, preferably grass. Now, having rabbits eat grass in most rural or suburban areas can be a little dangerous because of possible parasites. One that we worry about a lot is raccoon roundworm, if you're in an area, as we are, the New York area, we have raccoons all over the place. And as they go through your yard, or look through your garbage, they are defecating, and they have a roundworm called Baylisascaris procyonis, and if the rabbit picks that up from the ground, and grooms it off his feet, it's lethal. There's no cure and there's no treatment. So we encourage people to keep their rabbits indoors, and to feed them grass hay that is clean and this is an example. There are many companies who will ship you grass hay, and this is an example of a really lovely, nice fresh green hay.
Speaker 2: Like timothy hay? Or mountain grass?
Speaker 1: This is timothy hay.
Speaker 2: And you want to make sure that it can breathe, right? You never want to keep it in a closed...
Speaker 1: That's right, and this should be the main part of a rabbit's diet. If you use hay, as you see it here, if you use hay in the rabbit's litter box it's great, because the rabbit will sit there, as a wild rabbit does in your back yard, and he'll eat and poop in the litter box, and he'll increase his intake of hay just by being there. We actually have a hay pyramid here, a rabbit food pyramid, you can see that the whole bottom of the food pyramid is hay, and then on top of hay we have a section for leafy greens, and on top of that a section for rabbit pellets. And rabbit pellets, nowadays you can usually get a high fiber pellet pretty easily from different companies. You should measure the rabbit pellets, this is a set of scoops that you can buy in just about any home goods store, and we feed about a quarter of a cup of rabbit pellets per five pounds of body weight, per day. So this rabbit is not yet five pounds, so I'm going to scoop out a quarter of a cup, there's your quarter of a cup, and then I shake out a little bit, just because he's not a five pound rabbit, and I put that in his dish.
Speaker 2: Once a day?
Speaker 1: Once a day. That will be his pellet serving for the day. And he never needs to go hungry, because when he finishes his pellets he has hay, he has hay available all the time. So, the real juicy question is the one about treats.
Speaker 2: Treats, and also how much leafy greens? And can they eat any kind of leafy green? When you say, leafy greens, like sometimes if your iceberg lettuce isn't good, kale you don't keep your eye on...
Speaker 1: Yeah, most people don't feed iceberg lettuce, mainly because it doesn't have any nutritional value. So the dark green leafy vegetables that we use most often are things like romaine lettuce, any of the green leaf lettuces, dandelion greens, parsley, cilantro, oregano, dill, basil.
Speaker 2: And you should check, there's probably online a list of things that you can't have.
Speaker 1: There are. Actually you can do an online search for safe rabbit vegetables. Some people avoid the cruciferous vegetable family, and those are the vegetables that smell strong when you cook them, like broccoli, cauliflower, those vegetables. Actually a lot of people feel that the cruciferous vegetable will predispose a rabbit to gas, so I've been doing an experiment over the past few years, giving small quantities of broccoli, because my rabbits love broccoli, and nobody has gas. So, sometimes you don't know how much of this received wisdom is from somebody's thoughts, or if it's from actual experience, so you might want to just try small quantities of any food you're giving your rabbit. And then watch your rabbit's reaction, like if you want to test out broccoli, kale, whatever, give a smal