Do you agree that seeing our pets having a healthy and well-shaped body is a happiness? Rabbits are small animals, but it is a big no for them to be underweight.
Rabbits have digestive systems that are effective to squeeze every last bit of nutrition out of their body. As a result, generally, a rabbit becomes underweight if only it has underlying medical condition.
You can enrich your knowledge about basic first aid to treat sick rabbits in case your rabbit is suddenly sick.
If you are trying to find the best ways to gain weight for your rabbit, you have to make sure it is checked by a vet first. It is done to make sure that your rabbit doesn’t have any medical problems.
There are some types of food you can feed to your rabbit in order to gain its weight, specifically food that is rich in fiber. Food that is rich in fiber will be beneficial for your rabbit to have good gut function.
You can also choose the food that has higher calories than the usual food your rabbit normally eats. Also, beware of these types of food your rabbit shouldn’t eat. They might be dangerous.
Let’s see the types of food that are beneficial for gaining your rabbit’s weight.
- Hay
Green and leafy hay will provide the highest protein or fat values to your rabbit’s diet. Moreover, the second higher cut hay is higher in protein and fat than the first one.
If you plan to purchase hay, make sure you read the nutritional information on the packaging. You might consider to think which one is better: giving hat or grass for rabbit.
Alfalfa is another good way of increasing the protein levels and also providing lots of fiber. Young rabbits are commonly fed by this. Young adults also can be fed by this to put more weight.
If your rabbit refuses to eat hay, then you can introduce fresh grass to encourage it to eat. It is also rich in fiber and make sure you provide grass from new growth. It gives more nutritional value than the older leaves.
- Dry Food
Dry food is a good choice for increasing a rabbit’s weight as it is also a way to increase calories intake. If you have fed a low protein pellet for your rabbit, then you can try to mix some pellets at young or breeding rabbits to increase the calories without increasing much volume.
The mixture of the pellets is quite handy for your rabbit, especially if it tends to stop eating hays once it has too many pellets available.
- Fresh Food
You should consider introducing small portion of fresh food to your rabbit, such as fruits and vegetables (apples, carrots, parsnip and sweet pepper). Other than carrots, you can also consider these fruits you can feed for your rabbit.
These roots vegetables and fruits will provide more calories than the leafy green ones. It is not the most efficient way, but it will be good enough to tempt your rabbit once it is reluctant to eat.
Fruits also provide more energy and calories than leafy greens, make it perfect to increase calories intake in rabbits.
Rolled oat or porridge oats might be good for your rabbit to gain weight. You can easily find this from supermarket or a feed supplier. As the beginning, you can feed small quantity first, such as a teaspoon.
Rolled oats or porridge oats are considered safe and tolerant for rabbits. So, it is worth trying. You can also mix some other ingredients, such as finely chopped hay or vitamin supplement into the porridge to make it tasty.
If you want to make natural vitamins for your rabbit, you might need to know how to make rabbit vitamins naturally. They are natural and beneficial.
Cautions
Changing a rabbit’s diet should be done gradually as your rabbit’s gut needs to adjust processing new types of food. One important thing is you just need to watch and make sure that your rabbit is eating without adding too much new food at once into its diet.
Slow weight gain is healthier than the sudden and fast one. Take your time and never expect to have instant weight gain for your rabbit. Slow and steady weight gain is better as it is not just the matter of fattening your rabbit, but also supporting the new muscles to develop.
Drastic weight loss on rabbits might also be dangerous. Understand more about it in causes of loose weight drastically on rabbit.