We had Gypsy put to sleep on Friday. The tumour had grown noticeably in just five days and she had lost all her bounce. Trying to draw it out a few more weeks wasn’t worth it if she was going to spend them miserable.

Gypsy came to us from Bobtails Rabbit Rescue a month short of five years ago. She hitched a lift when we helped out on a bunny run transporting so other bunnies to their new home. Alfie had lost his partner and the timing was perfect to get him a new companion. After a few hours in a car she bounded straight out of the carrier and started exploring, she was so confident we introduced her to Alfie the same evening. I’m not sure he knew what hit him! They bonded immediately, I think it was a case of she declared she was his new girlfriend and he was too shocked to protest. They spent a very happy four years together.

You're mine!

Here are some more photos. They are mostly of her sitting still because when she was moving photos turned into a black blur.Like Scamp, she liked to explore and jump – though she was slightly better at coming back when called.

We will miss her very much.

I should think most owners worry “Is my rabbit too fat?” or “Is my rabbit to thin?” at some point. Rabbits’ weight can be quite difficult to judge as their fluffy coats hide their shape well. I thought Gypsy was looking a little thin, which is unusual as her lionhead fluff generally makes her look a little round.

The answer to weight worries is to pop your rabbit on the scales. If your rabbit hasn’t been weighed recently then I’d recommend you do so now and note it down somewhere. Weighing a rabbit is fairly easy. You can use normal kitchen or bathroom scales (bathroom scales usually go up higher – handy if you’ve got a giant, but kitchen scales are generally more accurate). If your rabbit won’t sit still then pop them in a bowl or in their carrier (subtract the weight of the carrier afterwards).

It’s important to compare your rabbits weight to their normal healthy weight not a breed estimate. Rabbits of the same breed can vary greatly in weight. For example, the UK breed standard weight for a Lionhead is between 1.37kg and 1.7kg (3lb – 3lb 12oz).  A lionhead with a healthy weight at the top end of that range could lose 20% of their body weight and still weigh in within the ‘standard’ range, but that much weight loss would make them significantly underweight.

Of course not all rabbits fit the standard to start with, even pedigree rabbits can be too big or too small and pet rabbits vary even more as they are often cross breeds. Gypsy had a vet check up a month ago and weighed in a just under 2kg, too high according to the breed standard but a healthy weight for her according to the vet.  Once you know your rabbits normal weight you can then reweigh them regularly as part of your normal health monitoring. As we all know, rabbits are good at hiding illness and weight loss can sometimes be the first clue to a problem. Likewise, rabbits are also prone to weight gain and monitoring your rabbits weight can help you adjust their diet before any gain becomes excessive.

Gypsy weighed in at 1.66kg so will be visiting the vet to find out what has caused the sudden loss.

Update: Unfortunately, it’s not good news from the vet. Gypsy has, what the vet believes is a cancerous mass in her stomach. At eight years old we’re not going to try anything dramatic and invasive so she has Metacam and we’ll monitor whilst feeding her lots of scrummy things and see how she goes.

Grass - The most natural food a rabbit can eat!

I’m just in the process of updating an old article I wrote that includes a list of rabbits foods  that offer at least 18% fibre, and around 12-14% protein – the ideal combination for rabbit nutrition. It’s great to see how much the range of high fibre pelleted rabbit foods has increased in the last few years. There are even customised options available now for young and senior rabbits with nutrition tailored to their needs. A few of the leading manufacturers like Burgess, Supreme and Oxbow are also making a big deal of promoting the importance of fibre and hay in a rabbit’s diet.

That’s a really great step forward for rabbit health and welfare, however, there are still a lot of food manufacturers that aren’t so good. These are often the foods that come in lovely bright packaging and promise to be be “gourmet”, “premium”, “fortified with vitamins”, or contain “all natural ingredients”, but read the small print on the back and they have ridiculously low fibre levels or they are full of biscuits and half dead looking chopped up bits of hay (yes technically it’s fibre but no self respecting rabbit would actually eat it). I wonder how many owners fall for the marketing without realising the consequences that these foods can have on their rabbits health.

Take ‘Betty Miller Complete Food for Rabbits‘ as an example, which claims to be “as close to natural feeding as you can get”. Sounds like a great promise until you realise it’s only 15% fibre and Betty Millers years of “observing rabbits in the wild” have lead her to the belief that wild rabbits eat “grasses, cereals vegetables and bark”. Now hold on a minute, cereals, vegetables? That sounds more like reading Peter Rabbit than observing real wild rabbits. A rabbit’s natural diet is grass, grass, ‘weeds’ (dandelion, plantain, clover etc.) and grass. I can’t honestly say I’ve ever seen a wild rabbit tucking into peas, carrots, whole grain flour or soya. Whilst these ingredients aren’t anything like “natural” they aren’t particularly unusual things to find in rabbit food. The reason why I’ve used this food as an example is because rather than just neglecting to mention the importance of also feeding hay, their literature actively advises not feeding grass or hay alongside their dry food:

“The majority of manufactured rabbit food is complementary which means you must add hay or grass to make it complete. Betty Miller’s Complete Food means you do not need to add anything. The food is all your rabbit needs to keep it in tip top condition.”

The problem with dry food is that it is a very concentrated form of nutrition (it packs a lot of nutrients into a small volume of food), the exact opposite of a rabbit’s natural diet (a high volume of low nutrient food) i.e. grass.  Which is why the majority of manufactured rabbit food is complementary (not complete) and manufacturers recommend it should be fed along side grass and hay. It’s not a fault in the food design, it’s a sign that manufacturers recognise that grass and hay are the most natural foods for a rabbit to eat not carrots and peas. Dry food should be feed as a compliment to hay/grass not a substitute. A balanced rabbit diet should look something like this (note the teeny portion of dry food):

On the left a wild rabbit’s diet: a large amount of grass plus a range of other plants. On the right a pet rabbits: a large amount of hay or grass, a moderate amount of other fresh plants or veg and only a small amount of commercial dry food.

I expect as most people read this their bunnies are tucking into giant piles of hay, but there are lots of new and less experienced owners that will believe the marketing of pet food manufacturers and not realise the serious consequences that it can have to their rabbits teeth, digestion and behaviour.

So please, don’t listen to the marketing of companies like this. Check the nutritional analysis, get advice from people not trying to sell you their product and above all feed your rabbit lots of hay or grass (or both)!

I know I said Monday but the link is live a day early and I can’t wait to share. The RSPCA are launching a big survey of UK rabbit owners to learn more about rabbit ownership and welfare issues.

Here’s the link: www.greatbigrabbitsurvey.org

Please take the survey and pass it around. It’s no good just surveying us rabbit crazy owners with bunny palaces and gourmet bunny diets, they want the average rabbit owner too, so if you can plug it places that are not necessarily rabbit related that would be great. Perhaps drop an email to your work colleagues, add the link to your signature, or pop a note up in your local vet/pet shops.

So what does the survey ask?

The survey asks all sorts of interesting questions, I can’t wait to see the results. They ask about the rabbits you currently own including their sex, age, breed, where they live and what they like to eat. Some of the questions are obviously targeted at finding out the scale of welfare issues such as how many children are the primary careers for rabbits, what owners think the most important food for rabbits is and how they rate the importance of social companions. They also address the number of rabbits ending up in rescues, asking why you choose a rabbit, where you got it from, how easy you think they are to care for, how long you think a rabbit lives and what you think are the main problem areas that need to be addressed to improve rabbit welfare.

Why are you excited about a Survey?

Having read the survey questions, the responses should provide some valuable insight into what education is needed and the best ways of getting it to the people and rabbits that will really benefit from it.

The RSPCA believes (and I agree) that:

by increasing awareness and understanding of rabbits’ welfare needs, it will see a long-term reduction in the number of rabbits coming through its doors at rescue centres

Around 33,000 rabbits are given up to rescues every year in the UK, about a third of those to the RSPCA. Many, perhaps an overwhelming majority, of rabbits end up in rescue because their owners didn’t realise what rabbit care involved or their rabbit has displayed behaviour that they don’t know how to address or cope with. Finding out exactly where the gaps in peoples understanding of rabbits is will help us target education better so peoples misconceptions about rabbits are addressed and they can make more informed choices about whether a rabbit is a suitable pet, and, if they do go ahead, how to care for one successfully.

It’s not just about stopping rabbits ending up in rescues though. There are around a million rabbits kept as pets in the UK. Many of these do not get all their needs met and this survey will hopefully help identify what the problem areas are so that we can start addressing them. We don’t just want to keep rabbits out of rescues we want them to be happy and healthy too.

So, go take the survey: www.greatbigrabbitsurvey.org as well as helping future rabbit welfare you also get a free bunny screen saver and the chance to win bunny goodies.

Note: In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you Scamp got a parcel Saturday morning… addressed to him (finally post of his very own to eat). It was a pack of willow sticks and a copy of the press release. I was planning to share this news with you anyway, but Scamp very much appreciated the sticks, which he demonstrated by decimating one under the table. If anyone would like to send him his own hoover next it would be very much appreciated. Wireless preferably as he has a thing for cords.

Boxes make brilliant rabbit toys, Scamp always has a cardboard box or two or three but they aren’t so good for outside as they tend to melt when it rains. So, Gypsy has a wooden box, the sort you get veggies in (another freebie from a farm shop). It was looking a bit grotty though…

Then I remembered there was a spare rabbit box sitting around with no rabbit in it! I brought it originally for when Scamp was exercising on the balcony. Unfortunately we had to stop that (short version of the story – 4′ barrier… ladder to remove rabbit from roof… 5′ barrier… ladder to remove rabbit from roof… 6′ barrier… ladder to remove rabbit from roof… 7′ barrier… rabbit from roof & banned from balcony). The cat that adopted it for awhile but it has been unused for months now after she passed away. Despite being outside for a couple of years it’s in great condition, the little legs and felted roof meant the blanket inside was totally dry. So after a clean out I moved it to Gypsy’s run.

She was totally unimpressed in the way of a rabbit woken from a mid-morning nap for a reason that did not involve food i.e, she took one look and went back to bed. I’m sure she’ll get more excited later.

The great thing about boxes is they are multi-purpose, not only is it an extra snug hideaway but that top is just right for sitting on and fits next to her shelf perfectly.

Ps. Tune in Monday for some rabbit welfare news from the RSPCA.

Pps. That reminds me, I’ve added email/rss subscribe links to the left there. I’m not sure what the most popular methods are for keeping track of blogs so if you have any other suggestions for widgety things can you let me know.