About treats

[Mandi]

Hi all,

Captain is 4 months and 15 days old today and I thought it’d be fun to teach him some tricks ( I saw a YouTube vid the other day on how you can teach a rabbit to stand on his hind legs or spin in a circle and it was just so cute I had to do it But I was wondering, is it okay to give him store-bought treats to help motivate him? I know a lot of rabbit owners will NEVER give rabbits store bought treats cuz it’s supposeldy really bad for them, but surely there has to be somewhere where I can get treats? I would use fruit but I’ve read you can’t give rabbits fruit till there at least 6 months.

[Bunny House]

Hi!
I usually don’t use store bought treats because of the stuff in it. You can always eat creative and wet pellets and put some safe herbs in them and bake them in the oven. There are plenty of recepies you can search online but make sure they only include a few ingredients. Hopefully someone else can chime in on good recepies to use.

[Sirius&Luna]

At nearly 5 months, he should be eating veg Do you feed him any veg? I normally use herbs as treats. I also hand feed pellets as treats, and give them the Oxbow papaya supplement, which they love as a treat.

Fruit should only be given in very small portions anyway, so it’s better to use veg or pellets as treats

[Luna's Parents]

We never use store bought treats, so I use pellets, banana, carrots or cilantro as a treat/training tools. I think the trick is finding something your bun really, really likes. For Luna, that’s cilantro. That being said, aside from always using her litter box, she isn’t very well trained

[Daisy]

If you’re going to use the treat for training I would suggest a treat that can be fed in relatively large amounts without it being bad for the bunny. This means that store bought treats and fruits make bad training treats, as those should be fed very limitedly and thus make for very short training sessions (as they WILL stop cooperating when the treats are gone :’D ). I use pellets of a different brand that have a strong odor as treats (Beaphar Care+). The buns go mad for them and because it’s pellets it can be fed in relatively large amounts without upsetting bunny tummies. I give them 1 pellet as a reward for a task so you can imagine you can train relatively long with them.

I like using them in a hide/seek intelligence game (one of those with doors/slides/knobs they have to try and open. Because of the odor I like to think it’s easy for them to sniff something is under the doors/slides/knobs.

Small pieces of veggie would work well I believe.

[kurottabun]

Does Captain go crazy for pellets usually? Something as simple as his usual pellet can often be used as a motivator for training purposes too

[Author]

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