Do Rabbits Need Straw or Hay?

Straw and hay are both dried grass products that look similar, but one is full of nutritional goodness for your rabbit and the other is only good for bedding. Rabbits need hay to eat, in fact, a rabbit could have just hay and water to eat and be better off than a rabbit fed on commercial pellets and water. On the other hand, a rabbit that only had straw to eat would quickly get sick. Let's look at why that is.

Hay is cut from fields containing grasses and legumes. There are many different kinds of hay, Alfalfa hay is loved by rabbits, but too much isn't good for them. Timothy hay, on the other hand is quite good as a staple diet. Mixing the two will make your bunny a very happy animal.

Straw, on the other hand is cut from hollow plants like wheat. Whilst it does have some limited nutritional value, it does not have nearly the nutritional content of hay and feeding your rabbit straw is quite a lot like feeding a kid cardboard. Straw is very useful for bedding, and even a wide range of other things like weaving baskets and making mulch, but it is not at all useful for feeding animals.

You can quite easily tell the difference between hay and straw. Hay should have long stalks of various grasses, it should be dry but with evidence of green about it. Straw on the other hand has larger, obviously hollow stalks and is usually a tell-tale yellow color.

So can straw be used with your bunny at all? Yes. Straw is perfectly fine for bedding, in fact, straw is probably a sensible choice for bedding as it is usually cheaper than hay, and if you use hay as bedding you'll be wasting quite a great deal of it because bunnies won't eat much of their bedding. They'll nibble at it, but they won't decimate it like other small animals will. Put a bag of hay in with guinea pigs for a few days and when you check, it will be gone. Put the same amount of hay in with a bunny and the bulk of it will still remain because rabbits are fussier eaters.

This is why you need to feed rabbits fresh hay on a regular basis. There's no point tossing a whole lot of hay in with a bunny and hoping that it will feed itself for a few days, the bunny may not starve under such conditions, but it also won't be very happy.

So then, use lots of straw for bedding, especially if you live in a cold area and your bunny is outside, and save the hay for feeding. Feed fresh hay every day and make sure that your rabbit always has access to clean water and your rabbit will be a very happy bunny indeed!