How To Make Rabbit Treats

Hi, my name is Marie, and I am the deputy manager of a small animal department at Wood Green animal shelters. Today I am going to show you how to make treats for your rabbits. As you can see here, we have got all sorts of garden treats.

It's really a good idea to keep your rabbit's diet as natural as possible. So, colorful treats, treats filled with all sorts of sugary and caramel sort-of-types, are really not healthy for them. Another form of treat, which is seen as a type of diet, is also the muesli-type feeds.

These are filled with all sorts of peas and cereal mix and these really are not good for your rabbit's teeth. They are really soft and they wear down your rabbit's teeth. The best type of mix you can add into your rabbit's treats would be a dry, pellet feed.

This doesn't look very exciting, but it's got everything they need in it and it keeps their teeth in great condition. So, there are all sorts of objects that you could use to make your rabbits treats fun and interesting; Keep them entertained, keep them busy, and also it's a great way for the family to keep active on a rainy day. So, firstly, we can use treats and stuff them into things like toilet rolls.

So, the best way to do this is you can use all sorts of willow sticks, apple twiglets as well. So, what you can do is pop a couple of these into your toilet rolls. Pop a bit of hay in there just to hold it out.

And then you can use something like wild germanium from your garden. We even got a bit of mint here as well. So, we can stuff them in and then the rabbits can roll that around and keep trying to pull that out.

So, what I am going to do is pop this in with the rabbits here and then they can investigate that in a little bit. Another good thing you can do is actually dry out some treats for them. So, you can use things like stinger nettles, and even rose petal leaves, and mint, and also lemon balm from your garden.

So, what you can do is pop out into your garden, collect some old roses and just pop off the leaves and just sprinkle them along on a little foam. Then what you can do is get some mint, some lemon balm and you just want small amounts. Things like strawberry leaves and blackberry leaves are brilliant for their digestive systems.

Leave them out for a couple of days and every day just turn them over until they are nice and dry and crispy. With the stinger nettles, the best idea is to hang them up and leave them for about a week to dry until they go nice and dry and crispy, that way the sting goes and the rabbits love nibbling off of them, so that you can hang them in the room. Once you have done this what you can do is get a paper bag, so any small brown paper bags are fantastic.

They love rummaging around in them and it is safe for them to chew on as well. Again, stuff that with hay and you can pop all of these little treats in there. You could even get some of their diet, so come away from the bowl and pop the food in there instead of a bowl.

Fasten that all around. Rabbits will love jumping in and out of that and chewing the bag and finding their food, and that really mimics what they would be doing in the wild. They would be rummaging, they would be rustling for their food, and foraging and grazing on all the different types of plants that are available.

Another idea would also be a garden-hanging basket. Rabbits love these. What you can do is absolutely stuff these with hay and, then again, get all sorts of different herbs that you have got collected from the garden.

So here I've got some lemon balm and we've even got a couple of blackberry thorns as well, so just pop them in there. If it falls out of there, that's fine as long as they have all the leaves sticking out, the rabbits will work it out between them. So stuff them in and pop in a few more dry treats in there and you can hang them up in the garden, or in the room, and they will love chewing on that and pulling it all down through.

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