Stopped Eating Pellets

[SamLM5511]

Petey is about 3 to 4 years old and is a Netherland Dwarf/Lionhead cross. He is my rabbit, but I am finishing up college. Therefore he is primarily in my parents care for the time being. I know they take good care of the basics, but are really inconsistent with things like veggies and play time. Petey has always had short phases where he may eat more or less hay or pellets, etc. But he’s never completely stopped eating something until recently. I’m not sure what is coincidence, causation, or both. So here is the sequence of events:

**Note: He has never stopped eating hay and drinking water. Through this recent incident he has still been able to eat hard objects like a sunflower seed, a piece of alfalfa cube, or small piece of carrot (as a treat) and chew on wooden/grass/cardboard toys. So I don’t think it’s his teeth. He has also had consistent bathroom habits.**

We had been feeding him Dumor rabbit pellets from Tractor Supply. They recently changed their formula. At that same time I changed around his cage by adding a larger litter box. My parents said he didn’t eat for three days (I didn’t know any of this until after the fact). My mom removed the litter box and instead of weaning him back onto his food gave it all to him. He then had terrible diarrhea. For about a week after that he sparingly ate his pellets. Then he stopped eating his pellets all together. For about a week we tried different things to encourage him to eat them, but to no avail. About 3 days ago I went to the store and picked up some Oxbow Essential Adult rabbit food. He still won’t touch his pellets. He is now in a larger cage (just got it for Christmas) and seems very happy about it. He’s still eating all of his hay and chewing on things. I’ve asked my parents to see if he’ll eat any greens. If he eats those, I’ll slowly increase and add variety then he’ll just eat veggies and hay (which is the diet I would prefer for him anyway). If not, I am definitely taking him to the vet. 

Any suggestions or ideas about what could’ve caused this or how to fix it? I have until this time next year until I graduate. During this time I will only be with him for part of the time. I know during this time, my parents will not be able to keep up with the varied veggie diet he would need to compensate a pellet free diet.

If it comes down to it, I will be working on a dehydrated system to make sure he gets the nutrients with it still being easy like pellets for my parents.

Thanks everyone!

[LittlePuffyTail]

Any change to the pellets, like smell or texture can put a bunny off their pellets. My bunnies, once in a while, will snub a new bag of pellets and I contacted Oxbow and they said that different batches of hay used to make the pellets can sometimes change the pellets a bit and some bunnies are very fussy about that.

I had to abruptly change my bunnies pellets to Oxbow pellets and it took about a week for them to start eating them. While one of the healthier brands, a lot of bunnies don’t find them to be the tastiest. I just kept offering them and they eventually accepted them.

[SamLM5511]

I guess I’ll just keep trying. We have some of the Dumor (the new formula), some oxbow essential adult, and today I just recieved a bag of the old formula for Dumor from a lady whose rabbit sadly passed away recently. So maybe he’ll still like the old formula and I can slowly mix it withe the new oxbow. The things we do for our fur-babies.

[Author]

Messages