With this article we push past the nonsense and identify which ingredients are safe for your bunny rabbit when consumed in moderation. Read on to discover delicious ingredients that you can incorporate into your own safe recipes for homemade rabbit treats!
Introduction to Safe Ingredients for Homemade Rabbit Treats
Let us be clear from the very beginning. This is not an article about your bunny’s daily diet or a nutritional recommendation. There are plenty of other great resources for this and if you have not read them you should. Excess sugar, whole grains, and seeds are not suitable as the primary food for rabbits. This article strictly pertains to what can be fed to your bunny sparingly in the form of homemade rabbit treats that compliments an established well balanced bunny diet.
Fruits & Vegetables that are Safe for Rabbits
Lets start with something easy, Fruits & Vegetables. Chewy.com has a great and brief rundown of what fruits and vegetables are safe for rabbits. We have used this as a good to establish or basic list of fruit and vegetable basics. Please be aware that when it comes to fruits with pits, also referred to as stone fruits, the pit itself should not be fed to your rabbit. We have noted this as required. The bunny safe fruits and vegetables are identified as follows:
- Fruits
- Apples (No core or Seeds)
- Apricots (No Pits)
- Bananas
- Berries
- Cherrie (No Pits)
- Kiwis
- Mangos (No Pits)
- Melons
- Nectarines (No Pits)
- Papayas
- Peaches (No Pits)
- Pears
- Pineapples
- Vegetables
- Alfalfa sprouts
- Arugula
- Basil
- Bell peppers
- Bok Choy
- Broccoli
- Brussel sprouts
- Cabbage
- Carrots
- Celery
- Cilantro
- Dill leaves
- Endive
- Fennel
- Kale
- Mint
- Mustard greens
- Parsley
- Radicchio
- Radish tops
- Romaine lettuce
- Spinach
- Spring greens
- Summer squash
- Turnip greens
- Watercress
- Wheatgrass
- Zucchini squash
Seeds & Grains that are Safe for Rabbits
Fruits and Vegetables were the easy part. When it comes to nuts and grains as they relate to bunny safety things get a little more interesting. However, we can start by identifying some brands of rabbit treat products that we choose to trust and model our list of safe ingredients from their offerings. The brands we have chosen are:
- Bunny Bran the makers of Branola!
- Bunny Branola as marketed by raising-rabbits.com
After analyzing the ingredients in these products we can add the following rabbit safe Seeds & Grains to our list:
- Seeds
- Sunflower Seeds (Ideally Black Oil Sunflower Seeds referred to as BOSS)
- Flax Seeds
- Grains
- Rolled Oats
- Rolled Barley
Flours, Oils & Syrups that are Safe for Bunnies
If we are going to make some legitimate bunny snacks or rabbit treats we need some binders to help hold things together. As with seeds and grains there is a lot of conflicting information out there regarding what is safe and what is not. What we can do is again analyze the ingredients of some popular treats/additive and learn from them. We will again be leaning on the Branola products but also adding the Oxbow Animal Health line of treats into the equation. By incorporate these ingredients we can add the following flours, oils, and syrups to our list of rabbit safe foods when used in moderation:
- Flours
- Barley Flour
- Alfalfa Meal
- Oat Grout Flour
- Oils
- Canola Oil
- Sunflower Oil
- Syrups
- Black Strap Molasses
- Organic Cane Molasses
Preparing Homemade Bunny Treats
We are going to drop a big secret here that is incredibly important to making rabbit treats. Bunnies do not bake. So in the spirit of keeping our bunny snacks as natural as possible we want to make sure that we are utilizing recipes that are prepared raw or dehydrated in a manner that preserves natural enzymes. All of our recipes here at ModernBun adhere to these preparation recommendations and we encourage you to do the same when experimenting with your own recipes!
Conclusion
We hope you can utilize this list to concoct some rad recipes for your bun! If you are looking for some inspiration check out some of our existing recipes for homemade rabbit treats!
