Oat Hay or Meadow Hay

[Cassi&Charlie]

Jerseygirl raised an interesting point in another topic, we can’t reallly get Timothy Hay in Australia and I’d like to know which one is better for the bunnies, Oat or Meadow?

I don’t know the difference but the oat always looks nicer than the meadow.

[jerseygirl]

Funny you bring this up, I was at fodder store yesterday weighing this up too. You can get Tim hay but it’s pretty rare.  I read somewhere that Oat has close properties to Timothy hay – that is, it has desirables that we want for buns.  Meadow hay is grass hay as is timothy so I would have thought they more closely aligned.  More questions!  I free bunny book I have that is in a lot of vets offices promotes meadow hay.  It’s called Bunny Business and also has web addy.

http://www.bunnybusiness.org

Do you like the hyperlink Cassi?

[MooBunnay]

I’m not sure myself, but I do know that recently I have always read that bunnies should definitely have a “grass hay”, so that would lead me to believe that meadow hay would be better. On the other hand, I fed my bunnies oat hay for a year, and they all did quite well on it, the oats are a bit fattening for them, so if you have a bunny that is prone to weight gain you will probably want to get some of those oats out. Could you possibly feed them a mix of the two types?

[bunnytowne]

Mixing them sounds like a good idea.  No harm in that.

[Sarita]

Well oat hay is a grass hay and it’s high in fiber so either one of those would be just fine for bunny.

[Author]

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