When I read the title of the thread... my mind was elsewhere. I immediately thought, "who the heck in their right mind would buy meat-flavored pellets for their rabbits?!?!"
Yeah... I must be tired.
Without really considering flavor, I also kind of put my growouts on a diet recently. I had 12 meat kits. The first 6 we butchered at 10 weeks old. They were all between 4.5-5 lbs. They had a lot of fat in them. I had been giving grains during the winter and since winter here is so long, those kits got to about 8 weeks before I started tapering off the grain rations. And there was no greens in their diet until they were probably 4 weeks old and it was minimum at best because it was just so early in the spring that collecting greens was time-consuming.
There were 2 rabbits that went at 12 weeks and they'd had no grains for 4 weeks and more greens, but still were getting about a half cup of pellets each day. They had less fat.
The final 4 we kept around until 16 weeks so that their pelts would be good for tanning. They were getting no more than 2 Tbsp of pellets per day, plus 2 Tbsp quick oats and 2 heaping handfuls of grasses and weeds. They had very little fat. These guys weighed only 5.1 lbs average live. So a whole 6 weeks after the first ones (same litters, so same birthdates) their weights were not much different... but they were lean. Now, these were also the chinchilla colored rabbits, which did grow the slowest of all the colors on average, so that partly accounts for their low overall weight. But... they had very lovely muscle tone, despite not getting very much exercise and very meaty backs and thighs.
Taste test? They pretty much taste the same. Just less fat. And... it saved us money on pellets. That's my 2 cents.
