Your family need to understand that a rabbit has a sensitive tummy and it’s our (your) responsibility as a rabbit owner to ensure she has a healthy diet. Feeding her whatever she fancies isn’t sensible at all. Would they feed a child all the cake it wants?! Being a parent isn’t always about giving the child or animal what it wants. It’s about doing what is best for it’s health.

If she’s underweight, she needs a vet.

As Sarah mentions, rabbits have sensitive stomachs. This sounds pretty qualitative and unconvincing to people, so a stronger way to phrase it to your family can be “A rabbit’s stomach does not function the same as a species that eats meat.” or “A rabbit’s stomach has different bacteria in it that’s not as strong as an animal that eats meat.” Our stomachs digest food because there are bacteria and enzymes in our stomach, and those attack the food and make them into energy and nutrients. For a rabbit, the bacteria and enzymes are constantly replenished by eating vegetation, and the bacteria and enzymes can only handle vegetation. Anything else causes gas, which will build up and make things painful, just like drinking milk if you are lactose intolerant. If your lactose intolerant, it means you do NOT have the enzyme to digest milk in your body, so you get gassy and feel very bad because your stomach cannot process it. With rabbits, they do not have a huge variety of enzymes to break down large quantities of non-vegetative food. A rabbit can die from too much gas build up very quickly and it is painful.

You may need to give your family a biology lesson, but you need to be firm. Your family needs to understand the proper rabbit diet, and if that means writing a guide for them, showing them websites online, etc., do all you can. She needs to see a rabbit vet if you can see she’s obviously very skinny.

You stated she was already mistreated in the classroom, so she may have already been underweight and is continuing to drop due to malnutrition. It’s very important for her to see a rabbit vet so a professional can recommend the best way to have her gain weight. Even if she goes to a normal diet, it may not help her gain weight to become a healthy weight, since healthy diets should not be ones to make an animal gain weight. A rabbit vet can tell you the best action to take, and also, a rabbit vet can inform your parents about the real information. They may be more accepting about it standing with an actual rabbit vet during an appointment, and being told they are incorrect.

In short, yes it is going to harm her. Rabbits don’t know what can be eaten and what cannot. There are plenty of bunnies who have voluntarily eaten chocolate, plastic, foam etc. and died as a result.

As Wick says, a professional rabbit vet may be able to convince your parents otherwise. It’s not uncommon that parents don’t listen to their kids because they think they know better (in everything), but of course that’s not always true.

Being underweight doesn’t always mean not getting enough food – it may be due to an underlying medical issue. My rabbit for example suddenly lost a lot of weight recently, and if I didn’t take him to the vet, I’m not sure how long he would’ve survived. It’s only after we started on meds and supplements that he got better. If you got her as a classroom pet, she definitely needs to see a vet anyway to make sure she’s all healthy as there could be many issues that stemmed from being treated poorly in the past.

I dont think she’ll be able to stand that. You gotta explain to your family that its not ok. My dad used to try and feed my bun people food but he doesnt anymore now that we talked.

Whether or not it is going to cause immediate harm depends on how resilient the individual bun is. Some bunnies are more fragile while others are more hardy. But it’s definitely going to cause harm in the long term if this continues on. Pay attention to whether she’s eating, drinking and pooping normally.

The best way to know whether she’s underweight is to weigh her. You could do this by putting a bowl on a kitchen scale and then put the bunny in the bowl (make sure to set the scale to 0 so you don’t count in the bowl’s weight as well). You could feed her some pellets or something to keep her still so the scale numbers don’t jump all over.

Ok maybe it’ll be fine once she stops eating them.Make sure you check on her often.Also make sure she is eating tons of hay.

Posted By minuit.mimi on 6/06/2018 9:43 PM

I’m a biologist myself and I told them all that but my father used to have a rabbit and he would eat almost anything and lived for up to 11 years so it’s experience vs. knowledge, I told them that it is harmful and how it would effect her stomach and so far they accepted that, but i’m worried that it will cause her immediate harm?

she was, she didn’t drop any weight, In fact she gained weight after I took her off of the dry diet and gave her vegetables. but I can still feel her bones. we only have one vet that’s familiar with rabbits so her schedule is quite packed, her appointment is not until late summer. 

As long as the weight is good, your bunny is good. You should be able to feel the ribs and spine with only a little pressure, so if you can feel those and she doesn’t look obviously bony it’s ok! Rabbits are actually pretty lean creatures, it’s just that a lot of house rabbit are overweight making them look plumpy/round so people are often used seeing plumpy bunnies and think the lean ones are too thin. This site is extremely helpful in determining if your bunny is too thin or too fat, it has very nice pictures as well to illustrate: http://www.therabbithouse.com/diet/rabbit-weight.asp

I don’t think nuts are toxic (anyone correct me if I’m wrong!) but they are very high in fat and protein, which is not good for bunnies. They are herbivores – foliovores specifically and their gut is not made to ingest nuts. In the worst case you may end up with a bunny with tummy issues, in the best case your bunny may just have a higher chance to become obese. 

Nuts are toxic because they harm the precious stomach. Make sure you dont give her too many carrots. They should only be treats

Nuts aren’t toxic I don’t think (the muesli type pellets contain seeds and nuts) They’re just inappropriate and unhealthy and can upset their sensitive gi tract.