Rabbit Nutrition

If you know WHAT a rabbit needs for its rabbit nutrition, you can know better where to find the ingredients for a healthy rabbit feed.

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Here are some categories of rabbit nutrition, reasons why they are important, and amounts and percentages that will result in healthy rabbits.

Not into the technical stuff?

No worries.

Skip the nutrition lesson and go straight to our What Do Rabbits Eat page, for clear guidelines on feeding your rabbits, especially your pet and house rabbits, so they will stay healthy and happy.

Fiber

That’s why fiber - roughage or insoluble fiber - is crucial for rabbit nutrition.

Fiber also has a soluble portion containing beta-glucan. Beta-glucan helps the rabbit's immune system stay strong and functioning correctly. (Beta-glucan helps your immune system too. Ask about it at your health food store.)

Water

Water is another essential ingredient in rabbit nutrition. A rabbit can go many days without feed, but only 3 or so days without water.

Ideally, your rabbit will have access to an unlimited source of fresh water every day.

Winter may pose understandable challenges, due to frozen water tubing, valves, nozzles and crocks. In wintertime when our water lines are frozen, we carry fresh water to our rabbits morning and night, and sometimes noon as well.

Another option is to pile fresh clean snow in your rabbit's crock. (Understood that a rabbit is likely to drink more if the water is not too cold.)

If winter lasts for many long months in your area, you might consider warmers for your watering system and tubing. Visit any of the rabbit supply companies on our Resources page for more information.

Nutrients

• Protein:
  A rock-bottom minimum protein requirement for rabbit survival is approximately 8% protein. Feeding rabbits at least 12- to 14% protein is ideal for adult bucks and does with no litters. Lactating does should receive at least 17- to 18% of their diet in protein. Commercial pellets meet the rabbit diet protein needs with alfalfa and soybean meal, among other forages. If you can only find pellets with 16% protein and want to provide your rabbit with less protein, simply feed a little less pellets and increase the grass hay portion of the diet.
• Carbohydrates:
  Readily digestible (starches and soluble fibers) and relatively indigestible, such as cellulose. Carbs are for energy, and some boost immune system communication and function (beta-glucans). But carbohydrate overload can cause an explosion of bacteria in the gut, and if this includes toxin-producing bacteria, the rabbit can die quickly of enterotoxemia. Carbs are important, they just need to be balanced with fiber.
• Fats:
  Fat is easily digested in the small intestine. Fat levels as high as 25% have had no ill effects on the rabbit. Normally however, you can expect a 2-5% fat level in pelleted feeds. Show rabbit breeders may add a little oil to feed top-dressings in order to enhance rabbit coat condition.
• Minerals:
  Rabbits absorb calcium very efficiently, and excrete the excess in the urine, leaving behind white deposits in and below their cages. Mixing legumes and alfalfa offers a balanced supply of calcium and phosphorus. Pelleted feeds also include mineral additives: Magnesium, sodium, potassium, chlorine, sulfur, iron, copper, cobalt, manganese, zinc, iodine and selenium. Deficiency diseases for most of these minerals is unknown.

  A note about cobalt: Cobalt's only known nutritional role is to make up a part of vitamin B12 (cobalamin). Additionally, no specific nutritional requirement has been identified. The practice of coprophagy in rabbits ensures that they consume a large excess of B12.

  Commercial pellets ensure the rabbit will receive all these minerals in correct balance. If for some reason you feed minimal to no pellets, you will need to find a way to add salt to the rabbit’s diet. We haven't used salt licks in years, however if necessary, you can hang a mineralized salt spool in the rabbit's cage.

  The mineralized salt licks sold where I live contain:

  • Salt
  • Zinc
  • Iron
  • Manganese
  • Copper
  • Iodine
  • Cobalt
  
  
• Vitamins:
  Dietary vitamin requirements are quite low in rabbits. Fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and E are usually supplemented in dry pellets, as are Thiamin (B1), Riboflavin (B2) and cobalamin (B12).

Age, moisture and light zap the vitamins in feed! Old feed can mess with your rabbit nutrition! After a few months, commercial pellets lose their nutritional zing. Pellets older than 3 months old are most likely can no longer keep your rabbits healthy. Keep feeding it, and your rabbits will lose their conditioning (overall flesh condition and vitality) due to vitamin loss. The animal may also go off its feed and get diarrhea, possibly due to some budding mold growth in old feed. (See warning below.)

Feeding rabbit vitamins doesn't seem to be a main concern for feeding rabbits. As a breeder of show rabbits, we do feed calf manna, an extra high protein supplement spiked with vitamins and minerals, to our brood does during gestation and the first 2 weeks of lactation.

Rabbits' vitamin and mineral needs are fairly low due to coprophagy. This runs their food through a second time, so they can absorb a second helping of nutrients. In fact, in tests that prevented rabbits from access to their cecotropes, the rabbits' nutritional health declined significantly.

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