Bunny Money Saving: How much is your lawn worth?
How many rabbit owners cut their grass, throw away the clippings, and then go out and buy hay for their rabbit?
On the left of the picture is a bowl of grass – I’ve been cutting one each day since the grass started growing this spring. It’s totally free. On the right is a bag of hay, it costs £2.25 and the rabbits usually go through one of these about every 10 days. However I’ve noticed the last bag I brought is still half full and checking back I got it a month ago. Eating more grass means they eat less hay.
With a little bit of maths that means the bunnies hay budget has dropped from 22p per day to 4p. In other words that bowl of grass is ‘worth’ about 18p. That doesn’t sound like much but it adds up, that’s £5 per month (i.e. the cost of getting pet insurance) or if you prefer £65 per year – more than enough to cover vaccinations and some new toys.
So grass is good for your bunny and good for your pocket – are you convinced? What will you spend your savings on?
Note: Don’t forget to introduce grass gradually if your bun isn’t used to it.
Tags: diet-grass, grow-your-own
You can get a bunny insured in the UK? Most people in the US say you should really just self insure because pet insurance isn’t very good for exotics here, just dogs and cats.
Interesting about the grass. Maybe a lot of people don’t grow an organic lawn, and are concerned about the pesticides/herbicides/fertilizer? I don’t have grass because I live in the city, but even when we go out to the suburbs I don’t let my buns eat ANYTHING outside. Particularly in the summer, when the local government does aerial pesticide spraying. Who knows what’s in that stuff!
Yes, here most of the big companies that insure cats and dogs also offer rabbit insurance, and it costs about the same. You have to read the small print carefully (don’t you always with insurance!) as some don’t cover teeth problems or anything relating to them.
You definitely have to be careful about chemicals and where you pick your bunny food. I wouldn’t pick anything where you don’t know what might have been used. Anything we use in our garden is bunny friendly – in fact bunny poop is excellent lawn fertilizer and totally safe. Bunnies ‘poop as you hop’ method of scattering pellets is meant to help maintain their grazing areas in the wild 🙂
Feeding a bunny grass and dandelions etc picked from the yard and neighbourhood is definitely a good idea.
I’d nver thought about ‘poop and hop’ like that but now you say that, it makes perfect asense!