Bunny Food 101

When I started my rabbitry, I took a lot of time trying to decide what pellet to feed my bunnies.  It didn't take much research before two distinct types emerged:  the pet store pellet and the breeder pellet.  Pet store pellets had lots of fun add-ins, colors, and reminded me a whole lot of Lucky Charms.  They were also expensive.  On the other hand, breeder pellets came in gigantic bags and could be purchased from feed mills directly, or at local feed stores.   They came in one color - brown, and displayed protein percentages prominently on the front of the bag.  One thing that both had in common, was not so great ingredients like:  corn, soy, cane molasses, preservatives and chemicals.   Hmmm.....  

More questionable to me were the various microorganisms in the food that were added to help your bunny digest the food.  Here, let me list some of them: enterococcus faecium, aspergillus niger, and saccaromyces cerevisiae, among others.  (that would be a bacteria, a fungus and a yeast).  I get that some people don't have an issue with this - and would agree with current opinions that these are harmless and beneficial.  That's fine.  Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.  

I was also on a rabbitry forum where the feed question was posed, and answered by many many breeders.  The conclusion?  There were many good feeds out there and choice was based on personal experience.  To complicate things, several breeders shared bad experiences of rabbits falling ill and even dying due to feed infected with molds, mycotoxins, or fungus - batches from feed mills that were tainted.  How in the world can you protect your bunny from that?  Could have happened anywhere in the production/distribution process.

What to do.  Well, I started pouring over the internet trying to find outlier options.  I found two.  One was to feed your bunny a whole foods diet.  This was not even possible for me at the time. I didn't have a pet bunny.  I had a herd - small, but still a herd.  I couldn't grow an entire garden over night, or afford to buy everything from the store.  The other option was Sherwood Naturals.  Made in small batches by a private company, this looked like a winner right off the bat.  The ingredient list was short, clear and made sense to me.  Even better, they aren't shy about sharing information about their ingredient choices.  I'm all about well-informed choices.

So the choice seemed obvious and I went with it.  Haven't regretted it for a second.  My bunnies always had shiny coats, bright eyes and stayed healthy.  The ammonia smell so prominent with rabbit urine dropped off considerably.  I was able to free feed with no worry of overweight rabbits.  I could go on, but you might want to just take a look yourself.   And by the way, I never have and still don't receive anything for my glowing opinion of their bunny food.