Rabbit meat % of diet for dogs and cats?

Shop deals on ebay
shop deals on amazon
Advertise with us
Rabbit Talk Forum

Help Support Rabbit Talk Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
B

bunnybunny

Member
Joined
Jul 2, 2011
Messages
10
Reaction score
0
Location
Australia
I know that rabbit meat is not a complete diet for dogs but I would like to know how much of their diet can be rabbit meat without causing health problems? Two of my four border collie dogs have allergies to wheat/pasta/rice and the junk in most dog kibble, so I plan to move them to a raw food diet (I've fed this in the past). Other than rabbit meat, their diet will consist of RMB's (lamb, beef, rare pork and occasional kangaroo, beef/lamb hearts, chicken necks/frames, some liver, eggs and a small amount of raw vegetables for for the ones that love them.

I would like to feed them as much rabbit meat as possible, so would like to know how much is too much? I've also got two cats and have the same question regarding the amount of rabbit meat in their diet.
 
I don't know about feeding dogs, but I can help you with a couple good resources for cat raw feeding if you would like. Just p.m. me, and I can share links.

I grind the rabbit for my kitties, and I stick to using chicken and rabbit, along with one dedicated recipe. One of my divas....er....kitties :lol: is extremely finicky, and it's the only way I can feed.
 
I was told by an exotic cat breeder that as long as you have 25% of the meat as chicken, beef or something other than rabbit, it is good. You don't want the rabbit to be more than 75% of the mixture.
 
Just for the sake of getting in enough variety I'm not sure I'd go over half with any one meat source and make up the other half with at least 2 preferably 3 or more other types.

A cat typically would not eat anything bigger than a rabbit and would only occasionally eat rabbit. Many prefer a raw diet heavy in rodents for cats with some chicken or quail and a little larger game for variety. Chicken still has the high chance of causing allergies in cats like it does in dogs and for most raw feeders chicken necks are considered a very inferior poorly balanced food choice that is only used as a treat.
 
You'll want to make sure your dogs are getting the proper amount of vitamins and minerals in their diet. Since dogs are mostly carnivores, yours will be fine if meat is a large part of their diet. I would recommend adding raw eggs, plain yogurt, and even some fruits to their diet. There are guides online on how to figure out what percentage of meat, veggies, etc your dog needs, and will calculate it out for you. A lot of RAW feeders just buy a vitamin and mineral suppliment to add to their dogs' and cats' diet, since figuring out precisely what you need and how much can be difficult. Just search for BARF Diets and you'll get a wealth of information.
 
Adding vitamins and minerals can actually be a bad thing. Unless you are following a tested diet plan with recipes you don't know how much supplement to add and you can overdose on some things or throw off the balance of the diet. This is why most vets and many pet owners say a raw diet is unhealthy. People add random things in random amounts and end up with an unbalanced diet that causes health issues.

I prefer prey model diets. A prey model diet does not use any supplements, fruits, vegetables, or dairy. It works entirely off the idea that a carnivore would eat one whole prey item before hunting another and that is all they would eat. So you feed exactly what would be found in the same ratios it's found in a prey animal.
http://rawfed.com/myths/preymodel.html
It's a very uncomplicated diet especially if you can get whole animals like rabbits and just feed the whole animal out over however many days is required for your size of dog. That's one reason rodents are popular for cats. You can feed them the whole thing as they would eat it naturally.
The rest of that site is good as well
http://rawfed.com/

If we do feel the need for supplements we feed the satin ball recipe which uses total cereal along with wheat germ and molasses for the vitamins/minerals
http://www.heartlandgdr.org/satin_balls.htm
Satin balls have been confirmed by vets and nutritionists to be a complete diet by themselves if necessary but most just use them as a fully balanced supplement to all types of other diets including both raw and kibble based. We just use whatever ground meats we have sitting around or has gotten freezer burnt to make it more cost effective than what 10lbs of store bought hamburger would be. Leaner meat than the recipe calls for can be useful since it's original purpose was for dogs that needed weight put on fast so high fat hamburger was used. Ground venison or rabbit satin balls don't make fat dogs like hamburger ones.
 
there are so many different ways to do a raw food diet. Do what works for you.

As to the percentage of rabbit... from what I've been given to understand about 50-75% is fine. For those who use a lot of rabbit they will often do either rabbit with a slab of fatty meat to go with it OR they will feed two days rabbit and one day a fattier meat. And thusly vary the diet.

The goal is always... balance over time. :)
 
Thanks for all the great information! We've followed a prey model raw diet before so I am familiar with that, the only supplement I added was fish oil, unless I fed them tuna or other sardines. Whole eggs are part of their staple diet and the other things (raw vegies/fruit/yogurt/table scraps made up less than 2%, so just as treats).

Hard to believe it was easier for us to get the variety to feed raw food when we were living in the city, since we moved to the country it has been a lot harder and alot more expensive - most meat we feed is human grade meat, the only readily available pet meat is ground. We are raising our own sheep, chickens and cattle so when we eventually process them for our own meat, all of the left over parts will be for the dogs and cats (we don't eat any organ meat or offal ourselves). But rabbit meat will still make up the basis of their diet. Lucky the 'balance over time' works well, because not everything will be available all of the time! I now have enough chickens to be providing the dogs with 4+ eggs per day if necessary - at least when the chooks are laying.

Luckily we have just over 40 acres and we do have mice and probably rats (shudder) in the hay shed that both cats love to catch. That's good because no way am I going to be raising rodents - BLECH!!! My kids would happily raise mice or rats, but they wouldn't let me feed them to the cats, so we are not going down that road!

akane thanks for the link to the satin balls, that looks like a good thing to make and freeze for the times that we don't have a ready supply of beef or lamb to supplement the rabbit meat.<br /><br />__________ Wed Jul 06, 2011 9:04 pm __________<br /><br />One more question - approximately how much does a skinned NZW rabbit weigh (8-12 weeks) processed for pet food so head, feet, offal/organs except intestines? I'm just trying to estimate the numbers I need to breed per year (and there for the number of breeding stock and cage space that I will need).

I'm leaning towards feeding skinned (except feet/tail/head rather than with fur on to hopefully avoid the dogs seeing the living bunnies as food and also because I presume the dogs will not eat all the fur scraps which might entice scavengers to come onto the property.

On rough calculations, for my four dogs I would need 5 rabbits per week/260 per year...plus if we ate 2 rabbits per week thats 310 minimum per year. Wow that is an awful lot of rabbits!
 
They butcher at about 60% of their live weight but I don't know average pure NZ weights.

Fur on or off usually doesn't make dogs think of something as food or not. It does seem to have an impact on cats but for dogs it mostly comes down to the kill or not. If they get to chase something they start seeing it as prey and if they get to kill it then even if you take it away and don't let them eat it they will still be very difficult to break from trying to get at the animals again. If you feed them whole freshly killed prey though while telling them not to touch the moving ones it does not have an impact on how much they go after the live ones. I have spitz breeds with insane prey drives and have thoroughly tested this and most of the people on the dog forums agree. The only problem with leaving fur and feathers on is some animals won't realize it's food or how to eat it and they can make a huge mess out of it. My akita has plucked captured guinea fowl out of curiosity, they were new and she didn't recognize them as accepted residents of the farm, and plucked wild rabbits she's caught before eating them leaving feather or fur in a 5' radius of her laying spot. She does the same with stuffed toys and removes all the stuffing through a tiny hole to scatter it everywhere. She loves to take things apart. My shiba got an entire buff orpington once while we had her tied out on her 150' rope in the yard and you should have seen the mess. Feathers covered half that area of the yard. That's why I skin everything even though people say the fur and feathers is healthy fiber for them. Mine usually get fed in the house and I don't want to clean that up.
 
what weight of food do you need to feed your dogs?

Depending on what your needs are will define when you butcher.

If you need 2.5 lbs of rabbit meat for each dog...then you'll want to butcher 4-5 lb rabbits. some people only need 1 lb rabbits...so butchering early works.

Dressout is ranges from 45-65% depending on the rabbits involved
 
LOL akane, experience with de-stuffed toys is a good lesson that my dogs have taught me as well! I know they can eat fur/feathers without health problems, its the mess and scavengers it will bring that I want to avoid!

In theory I need to feed my dogs about 600gms per day, they are very active though so in reality they need more than that. So that is about 2.5kg/5.5lb per day minimum. Thats over 2000lbs (912kg) of food per year! If I allow 60% of that to be rabbit thats 1200lb or 540kg per year. Ok now I'm off to find some information on age and slaughter weights.

Thanks!
 

Latest posts

Back
Top