Can you feed dried spent grains to house rabbits?

We just got a couple rabbits yesterday, and I'm wondering if anyone knows if it's safe to feed spent grains that have been dried in the oven to rabbits. There's probably not much nutritional value in it, but it looks like it might make good roughage.

 

I'm no expert but I think you can. Commercial brewers sell their spent grains to feed cattle. I've seen photos of deer eating spent grain on HBT so I would say yes you can.

 

I usually leave a little less than pound or so of my grain out for my dogs. They love it, nice treat, and keeps them regular...very regular.

 

It's probably fine but it's not a good place to hide spent grains as they'll come back out of the rabbit later.

 

I made dog treats out of spent grains, and the dog loved 'em. They had little to no effect on his normal "routine," so I wouldn't hesitate to feed them to an animal even more acclimated to eating grain products.

 

Our chickens get mine.

 

Never tried to feed spent grains to ours, but you could always look on the Houserabbit society's website for answers.

http://www.rabbit.org/

 

If you were talking about any other animal, I would say sure, but rabbits are kinda funny critters. They are hindgut fermenter, so they will probably get alot more nutritional value than you think out of your hulls, but at the same time their kidneys are kind of funny, and some weird things can easily cause them problems (like lettuce, who would have guessed, we used to feed it all the time till they started peeing blood) Thats a interesting question and I will see if I can dig up more on rabbit nutrition from some of my text books....... (yay! study time!) My guess is going to be the cellulose present in the hulls is going to increase the fermentable sugars in your rabits colon, risking an overgroth of clostridium sp. and risk enterotoximea....

just an educated guess...

 

Yuri - what was your recipe for your dog treats? I have lots of spent grains and 2 huge hungry dogs. Thanks.

 

http://www.wrs.upv.es/files/journals/vol 5_4_maertens.pdf

According to the conclusion it's mostly junkfood. High in protein, but lacks carbs and other nutrients. Probably good to feed them as a treat, or with supplements, but probably not going to save you a ton of money on feed.

 

Rabbits generally need things like Green veggies (Lettuce, not iceberg, the good stuff, Broccoli, cilantro, etc...) and pellets made out of alfalfa and hay in addition to timothy hay.

I wouldn't give our rabbit spent grains to eat for any number of reasons (mostly the fact that there are no nutritional benefits to them)

I do plan on making dog biscuits...

 

The thing with rabbits is anything that's sweet. Like cabage leaves,any kind of cabbage or other foods that are higher in natural sugars. The can quite litterally shizz themselves to death. My old neighbor used to breed them & told me that after I'd given them some leaves off my brussel sprout plants. So the sugars left in the grains wouldn't be a good thing. Maybe in moderation...