Caring for Senior Rabbits
As our rabbits age, they require a little extra care to keep them happy and healthy. Once they reach five years of age, they may start facing age-related changes like a slower metabolism, arthritis, or even a decline in cognitive function.
The good news? With the right nutrition tailored to their needs, we can support them through their golden years. By providing targeted nutritional care, we can help them stay active, comfortable and content, giving them the best chance to thrive well into their senior years.
About Senior Rabbits – The Senior Life Stage
Senior rabbits may need a little extra support as they age, especially when it comes to their gut health, brain function, mobility, immunity, and living environment.
- Gut Health and Immunity: A senior rabbit’s metabolism will begin to slow and their gastrointestinal system can have issues supporting their immune system. Providing pre and postbiotics can help protect the gut and improve the immune system to keep our senior rabbits protected from pathogens and illness.
- Brain Function: Ageing rabbits' brains may become confused and forgetful, having trouble processing information and sending signals throughout the body. Omega long-chain fatty acids DHA + EPA can support good brain function nutritionally.
- Mobility and Joint Health: Senior rabbits may experience arthritis and stiffness. While they may be unwilling to exercise or move around much, supporting and encouraging them to move is important to keep them healthy and prevent obesity.
- Environment : Making some adjustments to our older rabbit’s environment is vital to their longevity. We need to keep them protected from extreme temperatures, as they are more likely to suffer from heat stress and ensure they can reach their food and water bowls easily.
Housing
There are plenty of things we can change or add in our rabbit’s home environment to support them during their senior years. It can be as simple as:
- Providing soft areas for them to lay on that support their joints.
- Using gentle gradient ramps or shallow steps to help them get around easily. This is important if your rabbit is having trouble jumping up or down, as it can provide relief for stressed or sore joints.
- Ensure your rabbits’ food and water are placed in easily accessible spots.
- Adding extra water bowls may be beneficial if your rabbit is given a large area to roam as they may forget where their bowl is or be too tired to get to it.
Enrichment
Even though our senior rabbits might not want to hop around as much as they used to, it’s still important for them to have enrichment to keep their brains active and prevent them from becoming bored. Here are a few things we can do to provide enrichment:
Healthy treats like one of our Herbivore Harvest DeliStix are used to keep them active. These can be placed in their hutch or area as a fun snack. For even more enrichment, place it in a box with some scrunched-up paper and let them search for it! This keeps their minds active and also encourages them to stay active without tiring them out completely. You can also reuse DeliStix hangers or paper towel rolls and stuff them with hay and treats!
Snuffle mats are also a fun way to get your rabbit moving and staying engaged, hide some of their favourite treats and watch them have a blast finding them.
Just remember to give treats in moderation, too many treats can lead to obesity!
Nutrition For Senior Rabbits
Rabbit Origins Senior is vet-formulated for rabbits 5 years and older as a scientifically balanced premium diet. These senior pellets are naturally flavoured and irresistibly tasty, perfectly complementing their daily hay intake.
Our pellets are extrusion-cooked to ensure optimum digestibility, palatability and food safety. The extrusion process involves cooking the ingredients at high temperatures, which improves the digestibility and absorption of nutrients, ensuring that your senior rabbit is getting the maximum nutritional value from their food, in a form they’ll enjoy eating.
Rabbit Origins Senior pellets contain:
- Glucosamine: to support joint health and mobility. Glucosamine is a key ingredient in our senior diet as it can help promote joint mobility and may help repair damaged cartilage. This is important as keeping our senior rabbit’s active is a great way to prevent obesity and other health problems.
- Pre and postbiotics: (100,000,000 c/kg of food) to help promote gut health and wellbeing. We include 9 strains as greater postbiotic diversity is more beneficial to gastrointestinal health than only providing a few variants.
- Omega long-chain fatty acids DHA and EPA: which can help assist brain function keeping our pets’ minds sharp, retinal (eye) health which supports good vision and immune function like helping inflammation. We know ageing brains and immune systems need all the support they can get which is why we’ve included DHA and EPA as the perfect ingredients to assist these crucial functions in our pet’s body.
- High fibre: for healthy digestion. As rabbits age their metabolism begins to slow, meaning that it takes longer for them to get nutrients out of their food. By providing high fibre in our pellets, it ensures that our rabbit’s digestive system stays regular and allows for optimum digestion of nutrients.
Common Health Issues
Arthritis and Inflammation
Senior rabbits over the age of four are more commonly seen with mobility issues like arthritis. Supporting their joint health is key to keeping them happy and active. Inflammation can also cause problems for joints and other body tissues, with the help of glucosamine, DHA and EPA we can help these health problems.
Cognitive Function
Our ageing rabbits may begin to have a decline in cognitive function. By providing our Rabbit Origins Senior we can support their cognitive function with the help of Omega long-chain fatty acids DHA and EPA.
Vaccinations
Rabbits are susceptible to calicivirus and require yearly vaccinations against the virus to protect them from getting sick and spreading it to others.
Obesity
Is a common health concern for ageing rabbits. As rabbits age their metabolism changes and overfeeding or providing an unbalanced diet can lead to obesity. By being feeding-conscious we can make sure our rabbits are getting the proper nutrition they need. Encouraging our senior rabbits to stay active is also a great way to prevent obesity and linked health conditions like arthritis.
Teeth
Senior rabbit’s teeth grow at a rate of 2-3mm per week and they don’t always want to eat what’s good for them so ensuring that they are chewing and grinding down their teeth with long strand hay is an important part to keeping them at a healthy length and avoids the need for a vet trip!
Worming and Insect Control
Worming is not generally required for rabbits unless it is suspected that they have been infected. For insects and mites, regular prevention should be used, such as our Origins Insect and Mite Spray. This helps control insects on our rabbits and also in their environment, keeping them protected for longer.