The Feed Delima
Wether you just have a pet, a couple of show rabbits or a whole rabbitry deciding what kind of food to feed your rabbits is a big deal.
Let’s talk about what should motivate your decisions:
1) Quality
2) Contents
3) Pricing
4) Avalibilty
Quality - you want your rabbits to have fresh food that hasn’t sat in the store for months already. Getting food directly from a feed store can solve this problem easily. Quality also goes along with #2 – Contents. Make sure the contents have quality in them.
Contents – Depending on if you have show, brood, pregnant, or nursing rabbits you want a certain amount of protein in the rabbit food.
No more than 16% protein is great for most rabbits.
For pregnant or nursing rabbits you can push it up to %17.
You should also compare old feed bags with new ones (save feed bags!) and see if the content in it is changing. (This would happen because pricings for different things rise or drop.) If this happens a lot you should probably switch food. Rabbits like a consistent diet.
Pricing - over-expensive rabbit feed will burn a hole in your pocket fast. Nutriphase (what I currently feed my rabbits) is $12 for a 25 lbs pack of rabbit food. Is that a good deal?
Let’s see.
1) I’m getting this from Petsmart - it’s probably old
2) They do change the contents of the food depending on pricing.
So I went to a food store (Booth’s Feed) and saw a 50 lb pack of Purina (not normally avaliable around here) from $16.
I’m definetly switching.
Your last consideration with food is avaliablity. If you have to drive 2 hours to see if food is avaliable in the store getting the food for $4 less isn’t going to help. Booth’s Feed is only 15 minutes away from me, compared to 20 minutes for Nutriphase.
I can’t wait to switch my feed!