5d • Rabbit Nutrition
Bad advice kills
This is why I push back so hard against the “80% loose hay” diet myth.
It’s not a difference of opinion — it’s a welfare issue. I’ve seen rabbits seriously harmed and killed by owners following that advice exactly as it’s been promoted.
If people want the FACTS , DEEP DIVE in the Rabbit nutrition course.
Rabbits are not biologically designed to live on hay.
They are selective browsers. In the wild they target high-protein new shoots, leaf tips, bark, buds, and woody browse, plus specific grasses at early growth stages. Mature, lignin-heavy hay is fallback food—what they eat when nothing better is available. Calling it “80–90% of the diet” is simply not supported by the literature.
The modern “hay-based diet” idea traces back to non-experimental essays from the early 1990s, not controlled nutrition trials. That framework stuck because it was simple, marketable, and profitable for hay producers—not because it reflected rabbit physiology.
When you actually read the research (Gidenne, De Blas, Lebas, Maertens, COST 848, etc.), a different picture emerges:
• Rabbits require adequate digestible protein and energy to maintain gut motility, muscle mass, immune function, and reproduction
• Excessively lignified fiber dilutes energy and amino acid intake
• Chronic hay-heavy feeding leads to subclinical malnutrition, poor growth, reproductive failure, and increased GI pathology
Hay doesn’t “prevent starvation.”
Hay-heavy diets cause it—slowly.
If someone wants to approximate a natural diet without pellets, the closest approach would be: – Fresh woody browse (blackberry, raspberry, mulberry)
– Early growth cuttings(28%protien, 32%fiber), not mature stems
– High-quality protein sources (legumes like alfalfa, or Clover properly processed14-18% protien)
-- Yucca leaves to control urea order and bind to amonia
-- ground soy bean, measured, hulls for fiber, center meal for protien(28%DM) to balance legumes
--Steam rolled Oats and Barley also boost and balance protien
– Balanced minerals and micronutrients
– Correct particle size and fermentability
That is not the same thing as throwing timothy hay or an abundance of hay at a rabbit and calling it species-appropriate.
Pellets exist because they solve real nutritional problems—controlled energy density, amino acid balance, mineral consistency, and predictable intake. You can debate how to use them, but pretending rabbits are designed to thrive on hay is ignoring decades of digestive physiology research.
This isn’t about comfort or tradition.
It’s about biology.
And biology doesn’t care how popular a pyramid graphic is.
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Bad advice kills
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