Rabbit nutrition

General information:
 Europe tops the world in rabbit production.
 Gestation period is 31 days. Birth wt. is 60
grams.
 Meat rabbit – 2.4 kg at 10 weeks old. Adult wt.
in New Zealand white is 1-5.5 kg and in
Californian breed is 3.5-4.8 kg.
 Total lactation yield is 7 kg and peak yield is
280 g/day.
 Angora rabbit are used for fur
 production
 Attributes of rabbit for efficient
food production.
1. Rapid growth rate (40-45 g/ day).
2. High reproductive potential (within 24 hrs can
rebreed but allowed after 7 days).
3. High proliferation. (Litter size average is 7, there
are 30-50 kits/year).
4. High feed conversion (FCR: 2.5-3.0).
Hares- Unlike rabbits, hares are born fully haired with
eyes open and can run within few minutes of birth.
Rabbit- New born kits/bunnies are hairless with eye
closed. Start developing hairs by 4 days and eyes
open by 10th day.
 1. Rabbitary- It is rearing of rabbits.
 2. Fryer rabbits- raised for meat
production.
 3. Their meat is low in fats and cholesterol.
 4. Rabbits are susceptible to heat stress as
they do not have sweat glands (30-320C.
 5. Rabbit is a non ruminant herbivore.
 6. German Angora, White Angora, New
Zealand White, White Giant and and Soviet
Chinchilla are important breeds.
Nutrition and feeding of
rabbits:
 Purposes of rearing –
 Rabbits are raised in India for laboratory
purposed production of meat, wool and fur.
 Rabbit are non-ruminant herbivore, simple
stomach,
 It is hindgut fermenter (caecum and colon)
having voluminous caecum and colon for
growth and multiplication of micro flora
which help in the digestion of fibrous feeds
and NPN.
 Upper lip helps in the prehension of feed.
 FIBRE!
 In the wild, rabbits mainly eat grass
– with a few leaves, vegetable matter and occasionally bits of twig & bark
 Rabbits digest fibre poorly because of selective separation and
excretion of large particles in the hindgut
➢ Of the forage eaters like Guinea pig, sheep, goat and cattle , rabbit
has poorest ability to digest fibre as it takes only 30 hrs for majority
of foods to pass through GIT.
➢ A diet containing 15% CF shd be there in rabbit which promote
intestinal motility and minimize intestinal disease.
➢ Diet low in fibre increases incidence of intestinal problems like
enterotoxaemia
➢ High fibre diet (>20% CF) result in increased incidence of caecal
impaction and mucoid enteritis
➢ Complete feed shd contain 14-18% CF; 16-21% ADF; 27-42% NDF
 Coprophagy/ caecotrophy/
refection/ pseudo-rumination
 It is the inherent property in rabbits.
 Coprophagy is practices by the wild rabbits during the
day time while they are in burrows.
 It helps in the supply of B vitamins and essential AA’s
and VFA’s, which are produced by bacterial
fermentation in caecum.
 Two types of faeces are there.
 1. Hard pellets 50-55% DM excreted in day time.
 2. Soft faeces- 30-35% DM. they are mostly
excreted in night and these are eaten by rabbits.
 Rabbits
Let’s talk about droppings!
Left hand side:
Sticky droppings
– or ‘caecotrophs’

Right hand side:

Hard droppings
– Hard droppings from a
healthy rabbit are
perfectly spherical
– Not tear-drop shaped
 Rabbit Digestion
Fibrous material is
Food quickly passes divided into
through stomach & Digestible and
small intestine Indigestible fibre,
in the gut

Rabbit eats fibrous Digestible fibre

food like Indigestible fibre enters a large
grass or hay helps gut motion ‘appendix’ (caecum)

Sticky droppings are

Bacteria in the
re-digested and And are excreted caecum breaks
essential nutrients as normal down the digestible
extracted. hard droppings. fibre

Rabbit eats sticky Then excreted

droppings direct as sticky
from their bottom droppings
Nutrient requirement-
 Energy- for maintenance – 120 Kcal
DE/kg body wt with an increment of 40 Kcal
for each additional 0.5 kg body wt (440 Kcal
for 5 kg body wt).
 It is 125-130 Kcal/kg W0.75. A ration having
2200 Kcal ME/kg is optimum for adults.
 In case of pregnant and lactating does
requirement increases to twice and thrice,
respectively.
Nutrient requirement of rabbit fed ad
libitum (% or amount per kg of diet)
Nutrient Maintenan Gestation growth lactation
ce

DE (Kcal) 2100 2500 2500 2500

CP% 12 15 16 17

DCP% 9 11 12 13

TDN% 55 58 65 70

CF% 14 10-12 10-12 10-12

Fat% 2 2 2 2

NRC, 1977
 Protein:
 It is 15% CP in the diet.
 For creep ration it is 30%.
 About 10-20% of total protein requirement
is obtained through caecotrophy.
 Glycine is dietary essential for rabbits.
 After 8 weeks of age quality of protein is of
little importance because of corprophagy.
 In rabbits raised for fur, S amino acids are
highly required.
Feed ingredients PERCENT

Ground cereals 30
(maize/sorghum)
Groundnut cake 16
(decorticated)
Wheat bran 52

Mineral Mixture 01

Salt 01
 CF- a diet having 13% CF (complete pelleted) is
satisfactory for all classes of rabbits. In creep
ration it is 2%.
 Fat - It is 1-8% in the diet.
 Minerals - daily 2 g calcium in growing and 2.5 g
in lactating fulfills the requirement.
 Fe store (initially at birth) in the liver of bunny
(young one) is very high.
 As the milk contains less iron, so at the end of
suckling young ones may be anaemic.
 Cu deficiency also leads to anaemia.
 Salt requirement is 1%.
Composition of a pelleted diet mixture
for rabbit.
Feed ingredients PERCENT
Barseem meal 40
Barley grain ground 18
Maize grain ground 5
Wheat bran 14
Soybean oil meal 17
Linseed oil meal 5
Salt 1
 Vitamins – normally they get good
amount of carotene and other vitamins
from green hays and feeds.
 Water – in adults 200-300 ml water
daily, lactating doe may consume water
up to equal to their body wt.
 It depends up on water content of feed
also.
 Feeds of rabbits - cereals, legumes, cereal
and legume by-products, green fodders
(Berseem, cowpea, lucerne), root crops like
turnip, carrot ; some fodder tree leaves and
some animal by products may be used.
 Feeding of rabbits – depending upon the
physiological status of rabbits normally 50-
70% of their DMI is from roughages and rest
from concentrates.
 Concentrate mixture should have 15% DCP
and 70% TDN.
 As maintenance ration –
 2.4-2.5% of body weight as conc. and 10% of
body weight as green or 2.5% as hay.
 As growing & breeding ration-
 3% of body weight as concentrate and
12-15% of body weight as green or 3.4%
as hay
 As lactating ration –
 6-7% of body weight as conc. and 14-
16% of body weight as green or 3-4% as
hay
 In complete diets – lucerne meal is
preferred over berseem meal, maize is
preferred over sorghum and ground nut
cake is preferred over linseed oil.
Adult Doe:
 It is usually- fed restricted quantity of
food to prevent overfatness.
 If fertility is.poor in maiden does which
have been on a restricted regime,
"flusliing ration" for 4 days before and
one day after mating has been shown to
improve fertility considerably.
 A restricted (140 g/day-Californian does)
level during pregnancy followed by
unrestricted feeding during lactation
resulted in a higher milk yield and better
growth rate in their young in the first week
of life.
 Food and water intakes usually decrease
sharply on the last day before parturition.
 Soaked Bengal gram (50 &/day) can be
given to lactating does for better
performance.
 As lactation begins food intake increases to
a maximum after 20-30 days.
 Lactation:
 The rabbit is unusual among domestic
mammals because the young are suckled
only once per day usually in the early
morning and is completed in 2-5 minutes.
 Occasionally some does will permit their
young to suckle more than once in the first
2-3 days of life.
 The doe's milk production follows a typical
mammalian lactation curve, reaching a
peak at 18-21 days and then decreasing
rapidly until weaning takes place at 3 to 5
weeks
 Digestive disorders-
Enteritis / Enterotoxaemia –
 Major cause of mortality (10-20% mortality)
 Inflammation of mucosa of digestive tract /
intestinal and caecal lining – diarrhea,
mortality,
 Major type of enteritis is enterotoxaemia
Caused by pathogenic bacteria Clostridium
spiroforme and toxigenic strains of
Escherichia coli,
 Occur due to carbohydrate overload in the
hindgut, leading to upset of normal gut flora
referred as Dysbiosis
 Cause: Diets high in fermentable starch
and low in fiber responsible, hyper
fermentation, drop in caecal pH.
 Prevention: feed highly lignified poorly
digestible fibre like straw (15% fibre).
 Fibre absorb toxins which are then
excreted, stimulate gut motility, low in
fermentable carbohydrate.
 Copper sulphate @ 250ppm
 Ascorbic acid inhibits toxins
 Addition of probiotics (microencapsulated
lactic acid bacteria and yeast culture
 Fur chewing (Angora rabbits). Low fiber
diet is the reason. Pull fur from cage mates
and consume it. Gut blockage/Wool
block/large hair ball in stomach, off feed,
starve to death.
 Prevention: Increase fibre and protein
level or particle size of fibre (hay/straw)
 Treatment: 200g of magnesium oxide per
quintal of feed
 Early weaners are more sensitive to change
in diet so avoid carbohydrate overload
 Ingestive Behaviour
 During the first 3 weeks of life the young
are fed only once in every 24 hours by
their mother.
 Five to 15 ml of milk are sucked by the
newborn within 2 to 3 min. Rabbit milk
contains 20-24% fat.
 Adult domestic rabbits, on the contrary,
are more continuous eaters and they take
one or two meals every hour throughout
the 24-hours period.
 From 16 to 18 days, young rabbits begin to eat
small quantities of solid feed in addition to their
mother’s milk.
 The water intake of the young rabbit is closely
related to intake of solid feed.
 The feeding behavior thus changes quickly as
the young rabbit moves from a single meal of
milk per day (from birth to 15 days old) to a
large number of solid and liquid meals
 Caecotrophy begins in the young rabbit at
about 3 weeks of age, i.e when the animals
begin to eat solid food in addition to their
mother’s milk.
Feeding of Angora Rabbits
 The quantity of feed ,required by Angora
rabbit depends upon the age, body
weight, season and physiological status
of the animal.
 Adult, non-breeding, non-lactating does,
and non-breeding male rabbits can be
fed concentrate at 120-150 g per day,
preferably in the morning.
 This feed should contain about' 14-16%
DCP.
 Does in advanced pregnancy and
lactating stages will need about 200 g of
quality balanced concentrate feed
containing 18-20% DCP and 12-16% of
crude fibre.
 The growing young Angora should be
given 80-100 g of good-quality feed.
 The nutrition of Angora rabbit must be
very good as the animal has to produce
wool protein throughout the year.
 There is a higher requirement of sulphur-
containing amino acids, e.g, methionine.
 Roughage supplement in the feed is
highly desirable to avoid wool eating and
formation of hair-balls in the stomach.
 Improper and inadequate nutrition of
rabbits will lead to rough coats, poor
wool production, lack of body growth,
deformed skeleton, poor reproductive
efficiency and higher rate of mortality.
 Feeding the good bacteria
in the rabbit
Rabbits cannot digest their food without the help of
beneficial bacteria and other microbes
Maintaining the balance of bacteria in their digestive
system keeps rabbits alive
Feeding rabbits the right sort of food is therefore one of
THE most important aspects of rabbit care to ensure
healthy, happy bunnies!
– Choice of food is therefore critical
Commercial feed additives containing microencapsulated lactic
acid bacteria and yeast culture; organic acids and enzymes are
helpful in preventing enterotoxaemia.
THANK
YOU