Rabbits!

[User395221]

about how 90% of their diet should be hay and only 10% pellets. Is that right? We've been doing it backwards.

Should be mostly hay, some green veges, just a few pellets, probably not even 10%.

 

[appps]

Should be mostly hay, some green veges, just a few pellets, probably not even 10%. 

Well crap hey. He's been on pretty much all pellets and hay once in a blue moon. Well bought a bag of hay today and will just give him a hand full of pellets a day from now on.

So what does too much pellets or not enough hay mean health wise?

 

[User395221]

Well bought a bag of hay today and will just give him a hand full of pellets a day from now on.

Not even a handful, like about a tablespoon (for my 2 mini-lops).

Quote:
Basically, they get the calories easily with the pellets. With the hay, they have to sit there all day chomping on it. Helps stop their teeth overgrowing. Not sure of all the reasons, I just know they get mostly hay.

 

[Bunnylady]

The general rule of thumb is one ounce of pelleted feed per pound of body weight per day, and free choice hay. That's what breeders have done for decades. Some rabbits barely nibble the hay, let alone scarf down 9 times as much as their allotted pellets. What're you supposed to do, starve them into eating it? And how do you measure - by weight, or volume?

Pelleted feeds are intended to meet all of the animal's nutritional needs, but feeding them free choice can make a lot of animals fat. Rabbits aren't designed to be fat; it goes very hard on their bones and messes them up metabolically. Chewing hay does help keep the rabbit's teeth ground down, but it also keeps a lot of fiber in the rabbit's digestive tract, which helps keep rabbit fanciers' nemesis, GI stasis, at bay. The wild rabbit eats a lot of high-fiber, calorie-poor things like twigs and leaves, and that's what we try to imitate with the hay (grass hay, not alfalfa).

You can monkey with the rabbit's diet any way it suits you. Pelleted feeds only became widely available less than a century ago; obviously, people have been keeping rabbits a lot longer than that; pellets are mostly a matter of convenience. Some people feed hay almost exclusively, others spend a lot of effort trying to balance the diet out with this much of this veg and that much of another. Some people are convinced that alfalfa is bad for rabbits, and spend a lot more for a feed that doesn't contain alfalfa, some scream the house down about corn in the feed, or GMO's, or something else - the more you hear and read, the more you begin to wonder how the poor things manage to survive all the awful things we do to them and the more confused you will get.

 

[appps]

Thanks, well he doesn't seem to be overweight to me so we didn't do too much damage it seems. I think I bought alfalfa hay though duh

 

[User395221]

The wild rabbit eats a lot of high-fiber, calorie-poor things like twigs and leaves, and that's what we try to imitate with the hay (grass hay, not alfalfa).

with their veges, they/I like the stems and the "veiny bits", the harder fibrous stuff. It takes them ages to chomp through it, whereas if they get the leafier parts they just inhale it.

 

[Bunnylady]

Quote: The problem may be the vaccine itself. I don't know about this one in particular, but some vaccines are made up of weakened, live versions of a pathogen. Deliberately exposing the subject to a version that "annoys, but does not kill" (to borrow a phrase), gives the subject's immune system a chance to develop antibodies that will also defend it against the nasty version that everyone is worried about. I suppose the concern might be that rabbits that are inoculated with a weakened virus vaccine might wind up shedding that version of the virus, thereby potentially exposing feral animals to the weakened version and "inoculating" them as well. You could wind up with two versions of Myxo running around in the feral population, one lethal, one not, with a lot of animals that get exposed to the benign version first being effectively immunized against the nasty one. There is already a certain amount of natural resistance to Myxo developing in the feral rabbits, though it can still be plenty lethal to a rabbit without that resistance (we had a poster on here a year or so ago who lost a pet rabbit that way).

 

[rabbitguy242]

My rabbit has milk coming from her nipples how soon will she give birth?

 

[tracyjg]

I don't think there's a measurement of time to give birth based on milk supply. In human there's not a time frame on milk supply and birth. Every body and animals or different.

 

[Bunnylady]

My rabbit has milk coming from her nipples how soon will she give birth?

I have never heard of this in rabbits. For some animals (like horses) it is normal for milk to be present and even dripping for days or weeks before giving birth, but since you normally can't even see a doe's nipples, how would you know? I'd think she'd have to be pulling fur for you to even be able to see this, and since does don't usually do that until right before kindling, are you sure she hasn't given birth already?