How To Choose Rabbit Food

Hi, my name's Marie and I'm the deputy manager of the Small Animal Department of Wood Green Animal Shelters. I'm going to show you how to choose rabbit food. When choosing rabbit food, you need to remember that it's a good idea to keep their diet as natural as possible.

Diets that contain colorful and sticky and sugary ingredients really are not healthy for them and you're more likely to have to deal with various health issues at later stages in their life. A rabbit's diet should contain at least 80% hay and it should also be mixed with different types of grasses forages amongst things like a wild geranium, mallow and plankton as well. Here you can see a type of mix that's really common to be fed to rabbits, unfortunately, this is actually really bad for your rabbit's teeth.

What this has is squashed peas, cereal mixes, and these are all really way to soft for a rabbits teeth. They basically do not wear down the back teeth of the rabbit, so the front teeth can often look fine but it's the back teeth that can do the damage and cause the rabbit a lot of discomfort and in some cases even shorten their life. This type of mix is also really fattening for your rabbit so please avoid it.

The best mix you can offer them is a dry plain pellet feed. This offers all the nutrients it needs in there and the fiber that it needs but it also is really hard and coarse for their teeth so it really makes their teeth wear down. All you need to provide is a small handful of this once a day.

You can have two options, you can either provide it in a bowl, or you can provide it in a treat ball. That keeps your rabbit active and it assures they are not eating too much of it. Another common one that most people often tend to try to feed their rabbits is straw.

This offers absolutely no nutritional value to your rabbits. It is also quite coarse and sharp and can cause damage to the rabbit's eyes and even to the coat. So try to stick to hay.

When you're choosing hay, it should be a really nice green to light brown color. It should be really nice and fresh and it should be quite soft and anyway, it should smell quite sweet as well. Hay that has gone really yellow and is really coarse and smells in a way a little bit moldy is probably really old stock and is likely to not be as high in nutrients and also may even contain parasites if it has been stored for a long time.

Another thing that your rabbits would be doing in the wild is feeding on all sorts of different plants in the garden. They'd also be grazing on different types of trees in the garden so willow, fruit tree, apple wood is fantastic for them and this will help for their teeth to gnaw down on that and really keep their teeth trim. They can have all sorts of herbs and in the wild, they would be feeding on a really big variety of types of grasses, mallow, plankton, blackberry leaves and even a few stinging nettles so keep your diet as natural as possible for your rabbits to keep them healthy. .