Great Ideas for a Healthy Rabbit Diet

For first time rabbit raisers knowing what and how much to feed is often the hardest thing to decide. Traditionally rabbits are fed pellets and for most people that seems to be the only option, but are pellets really the best diet for rabbits? And are pellets as complete of a diet as the companies make it sound?

A healthy diet for rabbits must include fresh greens, ideally the whole diet would be pasture or hay and supplements such as oats, sunflower seeds, and other foods and minerals. On Long Creek Farm they are either on pasture or given free choice hay, and for bucks and non-pregnant or nursing does we feed a cup of pellets each day, when the does are pregnant or nursing (and for bunnies) we feed free choice pellets.

You will also want to feed about four cups of greens each day. We raise New Zealand rabbits which average 10-12 pounds, so you may need to adjust the amounts if you raise a smaller or larger breed. You can give kale, lettuce, spinach, cucumber leaves, basil and almost any leafy green a horse or human can eat can also be fed to a rabbit. If you introduce new foods gradually you should not have any issues.

You may wonder, can you make your own rabbit food? Yes! That would really be the best option. We buy organic pellets from Natures best, which can be found at Tractor Supply. Pellet companies tend to add unnecessary ingredients such as soybean hulls, stems etc., to reduce the cost of producing it. When the ingredients are 100% purposeful, the rabbits eat less and are healthier, and because they eat less feed bills will be lower.

Recently we ran out of organic pellets, so we got some non-organic pellets to hold us over until the organic ones were available. Our rabbits at first would not eat them at all and then they started to eat them like crazy but did not seem to actually like them. They would just mess with them and seemed to never be full even though they sat there and ate all day. We are assuming it was because it was hardly food, so they were either getting addicted to them or that there was very little protein in those pellets.

Normally our rabbits are very happy to be fed but when we were feeding those pellets they would often just flip the bowel over or seem to be looking for something, like nosing around in the pellets. We did not feed those GMO pellets long enough to find out whether or not they had any health problems with them but after seeing how they reacted I would strongly recommend that you consider whether the cost of feeding non-organic pellets will really be cheaper.

Rabbits will be happier and healthier when being fed correctly, but most importantly rabbits need lots of fresh greens, clean water and a safe comfortable stress free environment. Overall, rabbits will be very healthy and hardy given the right feed and attention.