If it’s available to you, you need to feed the bunnies a grass hay. Harking back to their wild animal days, grass hays were their principal diet. Our bunnies get all the oat hay to eat that they want. Hay is important for bunnies since their teeth are always growing and they need to eat something abrasive to keep their teeth worn down. Oat hay is abrasive. Fortunately we live near a feed and grain store that sells oats to horse owners.
We feed our bunnies, in addition to oat hay, leafy green vegetables. Carrot tops and fennel tops (from the farmer’s market), romaine lettuce, parsley, cilantro, dandelion leaves (farmer’s market). The carrot and fennel tops from the farmers market are free. We buy the romaine lettuce from the 99 cent store. It’s 99 cents a head. Much cheaper than from the local grocery stores. We typically buy 12 to 16 heads at a time! Also bok choy, aka Chinese lettuce. BTW, don’t feed the rabbits iceberg lettuce, it’s not good for them. For the bok choy and romaine lettuce, the rabbits only eat the green leafy part. The remainder of the stalks go into my wife’s soup!
We give them treats. Banana slices,fuji apple slices, guava slices. Tthey like the bananas to have a green with traces of yellow skin. They like the bananas to be a little bit tart.
Finally we keep their food bowls full of pellets….just in case they are hungry and want something different. I look at the ingredients of the pellets and try to make sure we are not buying pellets with molasses or corn sugar; i.e. we try to avoid the high calorie pellets since our rabbits don’t need the extra calories.
We have two 10 month old Flemish Giant rabbits. They are neutered sisters. They chomp through a lot of food, especially green leafy vegetables. Don’t know how much they weigh. 12 to 14 pounds I’d guess. They are pretty big bunnies. They are house rabbits. They have a pen in our living room and they spend a lot of their day in the pen. However, the pen door has been open continuously now for 8 months. Anytime of the day or night, they can roam anywhere in the house except our bedrooms. When not in their pen, the next favorite place is behind the dining room curtains.
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