Opinions on a grass diets for rabbits

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peanutdabunny

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I have seen a new trend in the rabbit community, Grass diets.
Heres what a grass diet is
the bulk of their diet needs to be a variety of grass hays and fresh grass if available

Heres a video on it


 
Thats not a new trend. That is what their diet actually should be.
Hay.
Hay is grass. Grass is hay. Many different varieties of grass/hay and not all grass makes a good hay but this is what rabbits need.
Some grasses do lack nutrients depending on where/how they are grown. Like places where the dirt is just dead. So thats where supplementing with pellets/veggies come in.
 
Thats not a new trend. That is what their diet actually should be.
Hay.
Hay is grass. Grass is hay. Many different varieties of grass/hay and not all grass makes a good hay but this is what rabbits need.
Some grasses do lack nutrients depending on where/how they are grown. Like places where the dirt is just dead. So thats where supplementing with pellets/veggies come in.
Gaining popularity I mean, but its a no veggie diet
 
I think that a grass diet wouldn't be bad for a rabbit, but you would need LOTS of fresh grass because the grass would take the place of the veggies. Also, I would be nervous to feed my rabbit grass with RHDV spreading. You would also need to provide your rabbit with a salt lick to allow the rabbit to get the nutrients it needs.
I think that if you are feeding Peanut a variety of grass hays, veggies, and a high-quality timothy-based pellet there is no reason to change his diet to something that is new and still being experimented with. Stick to something that we all know to be safe, instead of playing with something where you are unsure of the outcome.
 
That's not new, that's how domestic rabbits came to be. The veggie and pellets diets are the new stuff (with great marketing), not a grass and hay diet. I mean, just one or two generation ago here rabbits were a cheap and easy to raise common staple food.

But one thing is clear: Not every pet rabbit owner has the opportunity to feed grass and forage, you need quite a lot of it. I forage wherever I can, the 1500m² I have are not enough to feed all my rabbits, not if i make hay for the winter. (Well, at least when things go wrong like last year and way too many mouths to feed)
Hay is the next best thing to fresh grass and weeds, since some stuff in it may detoriate when being dried veggies and pellets are an addition to round the diet off, but they don't really need it, not much of it anyway. Many pet rabbits are fed a pretty rich diet.
Those industrial farmed, single species hays like Timothy and so are pretty much unknown here, we just have whatever grows on the meadows.

The risk of bringing in desease was already mentioned. Those deseases are new, they were not present some decades ago, so "back to the roots"" is not the same thing as it was back then.
 
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I think that a grass diet wouldn't be bad for a rabbit, but you would need LOTS of fresh grass because the grass would take the place of the veggies. Also, I would be nervous to feed my rabbit grass with RHDV spreading. You would also need to provide your rabbit with a salt lick to allow the rabbit to get the nutrients it needs.
I think that if you are feeding Peanut a variety of grass hays, veggies, and a high-quality timothy-based pellet there is no reason to change his diet to something that is new and still being experimented with. Stick to something that we all know to be safe, instead of playing with something where you are unsure of the outcome.
I would most likely grow grass, so then I could get many different types
 
I have not run into any issues so far with my 12 week old rabbit.

He eats hay which is always available and actually enjoys spending a lot of his time in my yard and forages and munches our fresh grass (sometimes if I let him out for longer than usual he ends up eating less hay).

I also give him what I would say is 0.5-1 cup of veggies I cycle between parsley, bell pepper, celery, spinach and dark greens like a mixed lettuce (you know the dark kind with some black leaves ect), with pellets I genuinely give him like a teaspoon sprinkled with his veggies he kinda thinks the pellets are a “treat”.
 

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