are you adding nutrients such as salt and minerals?
Kits will eat whatever mom is eating. If mom is used to a well rounded diet she'll pass that along in her milk and fecals. raise them how you intend to feed them. keep those that do well on the diet you intend to provide.
You said that once in a while you provide pellets. Have you thought about why you do so and what determines the frequency? You may be able to substitute the pellets for something else. Such as mixed grains/oats/etc.
Consider also.... do you intend to eat all the progeny you do not need or are you hoping to sell some as pets/breeders? If so, you will also need to consider that most people feed pellets and have green feed as an add-on. How will you raise those kits to be successful in their new homes?
@ladysown speaks from a wealth of experience. Bunnies do best eating eat what their mother thrives on, and most rabbits do best eating what they always eat. It's definitely worth heeding her advice regarding the future of the bunnies. If you'll be selling any as pets or breeders, save the bunnies (and their future owners) some pain and heartache and get the bunnies used to eating pellets!
Hello all!
I have my first pregnant does, and need some advice. Up until now, I have been feeding them each unlimited hay and around three cups of packed fresh greens from our farm a day. I also give them small amounts of treats like carrot and blueberry, and every once in a while I give them a sprinkle of pellets. I am wondering how my feeding practices should change during their pregnancy. I am also wondering how I should feed the kits once they are born and weaned. Can they start eating greens right away or do they need pellets. I'm hoping to keep them on a mostly natural diet, as we have abundant greens on our land all year. Thank you!
If your doe is eating a good diet, you should not have to add anything while she's gestating. Once she starts feeding the babies, if you see she's slipping in condition at all, I have found that adding some fat to the diet (around an ounce of BOSS, oats, or Calf manna, for example) will help her make milk without sacrificing her own condition. Most of my does do not need supplementation, although the ones that have litters of 10 or more, I go ahead and give them oats anyway. A very small addition of fatty food doesn't seem enough to cause any disruption, and it keeps the doe in good condition.
In fact, if your rabbits are getting the nutrition they need, it is best not to change your feeding practices at all. Rabbits tend to do best with a consistent diet (that can include consistently rotated items), because they are what's called hindgut fermenters. Rabbits have a cecum, a little blind pouch off the junction of the large and small intestines, where food goes on its first pass-through to be fermented. It is filled with microorganisms that do this fermentation job. (Humans actually have a cecum too, but it plays a different role in digestion.) A rabbit's cecum is critical because what a rabbit generally eats is high-fiber, low-nutrient plant material that provides little in the way of nutrition that can be absorbed by the rabbit's stomach and intestines; the fermentation breaks down the plant material to release the nutrients so that they're available for uptake by the rabbit's gut. Instead of burping up cud from a rumen, like cows, goats, and sheep, rabbits pass the fermented food out of their cecum through their back end, as unusually-shaped poops that they eat. The poops, called cecotropes, are softer and look a little like clusters of grapes. (If they're not eaten, they get stepped on and some people mistake them for diarrhea, but they're not liquid, just soft.) It's the rabbit version of chewing cud. In fact if you completely prevent a rabbit from eating its cecotropes, it will suffer from malnutrition.
All of this is to say that rabbits have a community of microorganisms in their guts that is tailored to the foods the rabbits have been eating. Different foods encourage the growth of different microorganisms. Similar to humans in this way, certain foods (a lot of sugary ones, for instance) will cause an overpopulation of less helpful microorganisms, which can give the rabbit a bellyache. An abrupt change in diet can also throw a wrench into things, as the gut flora tries to adjust to the new regimen, and a big enough change will also give the rabbit a bellyache.
This is especially important in kits at weaning time. When kits are born, their guts are sterile. As soon as they are in the nest box, though, they start encountering microorganisms. This includes what's in the mother's poops and milk, as well as what's in the hay/straw/other nesting material and feed. Starting very young, long before they leave the nest box, the kits will chew on the mother's poops. In this way, their guts are populated with the same microorganisms as the mother's, which are tailored to her diet. So, feeding them what the mother has been eating all along, rather than changing the diet, is usually the healthiest way to go.
Babies nurse ONLY for first 4 weeks ish.
Some mother rabbits wean their kits early, but many litters nurse until they're removed from the mother. I often see litters still nursing at 10 weeks - mother pretty much floats on top of them.
We've found in our rabbits that the kits left with the mother for 8-10 weeks - and ours all nurse right to the bitter end! - have the best growth rates and health. Kits pulled earlier (some have been weaned at 6 weeks to accommodate 4-H meat pen schedules - and we've since gotten those rules changed) go through a period where their growth rates plateau for a while, instead of having a steady increase like those left with the mother.
Kits do subsist mostly on milk for the first month, but they begin eating mother's poo and nibbling on hay much earlier than 4 weeks. I've seen them chewing on stuff before their eyes are open.
I would nott feed any fresh food until they are weaned and be very careful about introducing fresh foods. Younger rabbits are more prone to bloat.
If the mother has been eating fresh greens, the babies should also be able to eat fresh greens without any issues, because their guts have been populated by the same microorganisms as the mother. Younger rabbits generally only have problems with bloat if their diets are changed suddenly (which often happens at weaning), if they encounter some kind of pathogen (e.g.coccidiosis), or if their genetic line is prone to that problem. In fact, waiting until they are weaned to introduce fresh greens is
more likely to give them problems than having it available to them all the time, assuming the mother has been fed that all along (for the reasons discussed above regarding the development of the gut biome).
