Bad hay

[Vivy]

So I’ve been feeding my 4 month old netherland dwarf oxbow’s orchard grass but this new batch, unlike the previous batches I’ve purchased is pale and yellow in color and even the smell is unappetizing to say the least. He now refuses to eat it along with any other hay I’ve tried to offer him (Oxbow’s timothy & alfalfa)
What should I do? I really hate the idea of having to gamble with each bag of hay I buy… I understand that every bag of hay differs in quality but this batch is bad to the point where it’s unusable and I want my bun to be getting adequate nutrition as well as fiber as to avoid bigger issues like GI stasis. Thanks!!

[Bam]

If it has an unpleasant smell, I think you should take it back to the store or contact Oxbow and ask for a refund. Oxbow is a quality brand.

The color of hay is not as important as the smell. Yellowish hay can be sun-cured and that actually means it has higher levels of vitamin D than hay that’s been dried out of direct sunlight. But the smell is crucial. It mustn’t be moldy or foul in any way. It should have an appetizing, summer-like scent.

Don’t feed it, whatever you do. Bad hay can have toxins that really harm the bunny’s liver.

[Vivy]

It has a strange, almost sour-like tinge to it,radically different from the previous bags.. I bought the first bag off Amazon prime and then bought a second bag at the pet store with the same bad quality so I figured that it was this batch of hay that isn’t fresh. I haven’t attempted to feed him any of it since and have bought a bag of alfalfa I’m hopes that he’d eat it but with no real luck so far.

I have also emailed oxbow but haven’t received a reply yet. For now, I’m not sure what else I can do to encourage him to eat his alfalfa and timothy

[Odette]

Was the pet store local? I ask because my local pet store stocks from Amazon. Its possible that you both bought old hay. I’m not knocking Amazon by any means. I love Amazon. That’s just a possible link.

I definitely would not feed hay that smelled funny.

[flemishwhite]

The little bags of hay from the pet stores are really expensive. I live in the metropolitan Los Angeles area..the city of Torrance.  Fortunately for us there’s an expensive residential area where the residential lot sizes include barns for horses!  And so there’s a feed and grain store that sells hay for the horses.  Lomita Feed and Grain if you want to Google it.  A 100 pound bale of fresh oat hay costs $25!   $25 for 100 pounds of oat hay.  They do sell the hay in quantities of “flakes.”  I’ve got varying numbers as to how many flakes are in a bale.  For now, I think it’s 15 flakes per bale.  They sell a flake for $5.  We easily use 3 flakes a week for our two very big Flemish rabbits. It’d be so much cheaper to buy a whole bale, but I really don’t have a way of transporting a 100 pound bale of hay..it’s pretty big, and even if I got it home, I don’t have a place to store it out of the weather.  All of the bunnies we’ve had (3) just really love this stuff.  We line their litter with news paper and then cover it up with a thick covering of oat hay.   They sit in their litter boxes and chomp oat hay at one end and output pee and poop at the other end. The oat hay is abrasive.  It has natural silicates.  Rabbits teeth are continually growing and they need to wear their teeth down. Our previous rabbit, Bunny, went maybe 10 years without the need of having her teeth grown down by the vet.

[Bam]

As Flemish says, good quality hay for horses is great for bunnies and a lot cheaper. Horse-owners would be ruined in a week if they bought the small Oxbow-bags for their horses, so obviously they’d never even consider that. Milk cow hay can be really good too, because bad hay makes the milk taste funny and farmers obviously don’t want that.

Oat hay is much appreciated by my buns.

[Vivy]

Thanks for your replies! I’ve definitely considered buying hay in bulk from local farmers but the problem is that I live in Canada by the city and all the farmers that are willing to deliver only carry first-cut timothy or alfalfa, which my bun doesn’t take a liking to. I’ve been scoping around on many online retailers but they don’t ship to Canada.

He’s eating his hay, a little reluctant but he’s been gnawing at it occasionally. I’m going to continue to look at local ads for hay bales, especially before Winter comes along.

[Author]

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