A summertime snack staple for a lot of people, celery is quite a healthy vegetable option. It’s loaded with a ton of different vitamins and minerals, with the most prolific ones being vitamin B6, vitamin C, vitamin K, folate, and potassium. Not only is celery very nutritious, but it also tastes great! With all of the health benefits that come from celery, you may be wondering: Can rabbits eat celery?
Can I Give My Rabbit Celery?
In short, yes, rabbits can eat celery. Celery is a fantastic snack for rabbits as they love the taste and texture and it aligns well with their natural diet. Feeding your rabbit celery a couple times a week is a great way to keep their diet diverse and tasty!
What Do Rabbits Eat In The Wild?
In order to better understand why celery is such a great bunny snack, it helps to know what rabbits naturally eat in the wild. Rabbits have been kept as pets for a few thousand years, but they’ve been around for about four thousand years. During their time roaming freely throughout North and South America, Southeast Asia, Japan, Africa, Europe, and Sumatra, they’ve eaten roughly the same foods. Therefore, their digestive systems have become optimized for digesting and processing these specific foods.
This is why it’s so important to match your rabbit’s diet to their natural diet — their bodies are optimized for digestion of certain foods!
Rabbits are defined as herbivores, meaning that they only eat plants and plant matter. Their bodies are able to get all of the essential vitamins and minerals that they need to live from a small variety of different foods. This is fortunate for rabbit owners since herbivores are able to eat a wide array of foods, but rabbits don’t require too much variation. A wild rabbit has a diet that’s primarily made up of wild grass, leafy weeds, and forbs.
Rabbits spend a large portion of their day simply grazing, meaning that they stand around and eat grass. In fact, they graze so much that about 80-90% of their entire diet is made up of grass. The remaining 10-20% of a rabbit’s diet depends on their geographical location and the time of year, but they all eat roughly the same foods. The staples of a wild rabbit’s diet are vegetable plants, wildflowers, clovers, and weeds.
Health Benefits & Dangers Of Celery
Looking at the natural diet of a rabbit, it seems clear why rabbits are able to eat and benefit from celery. They may not have direct access to celery in the wild, but they do eat other foods that are very similar in nature. Therefore, their bodies are able to digest and process celery to extract the great nutrients that it has.
There are not many dangers associated with feeding your rabbit celery. They are easily able to digest the fiber-rich vegetable without any problems. However, if you’re just starting to feed your rabbit celery for the first time, there is a chance that they could experience some negative health effects. Fortunately, these can be avoided by simply following the feeding guide given in the section following this one.
A rabbit that’s new to celery could potentially experience an upset stomach, as they simply aren’t used to the new food yet. Too much celery can also cause digestive problems. Being cautious with your feeding, though, is generally enough to avoid these problems. If your rabbit does experience an upset stomach, you can simply stop feeding them celery or hold off and try again another day in smaller amounts.
While there are a couple issues that could arise, celery is still one of the best snacks that you can give your rabbit. It’s a vegetable that doesn’t contain much sugar or calcium, which are both things that can cause serious problems in excess. The nutrients that it does contain are very beneficial for rabbits, especially the fiber. Additionally, it’s very tasty for them, and the texture is great for dental health.
When fed properly, celery should have virtually no negative health effects and keep your rabbit’s diet tasty and interesting.
How To Properly Feed Your Rabbit Celery
Celery makes for an excellent rabbit snack when fed properly, which isn’t a very hard thing to do. Rabbits are used to eating foods such as celery, so you shouldn’t have a difficult time getting them used to the vegetable. You still should follow basic feeding guidelines to ensure the well-being of your bunny, though.
In terms of serving sizes, a piece of celery a couple inches long (including the leaves) given a few times per week is generally a healthy amount. Of course, your rabbit can eat more or less celery than this, but that depends on the amount of other food that they eat. Therefore, it’s up to you as the owner to determine the amount of celery that your rabbit should be eating.
When you’re first feeding your rabbit celery, make sure that you ease into it and start with very small amounts. This allows you to see if your rabbit reacts positively or poorly to the new food. Additionally, don’t only feed your rabbit celery as a snack. You should diversify the snack foods that you give your rabbit to keep their diets interesting and full of different nutrients. Below this section we’ve listed out some of the other great rabbit snacks.
If you do want to feed your rabbit celery, you first need to make sure that their nutritional needs are being met. Even though celery is extremely healthy and tasty, it can’t be a staple food of your rabbit’s diet. Therefore, once you have determined that your rabbit is getting enough nutritional value elsewhere, you can then supplement their diet with greens such as celery.
Any healthy rabbit has 80-90% of their diet made up of a high-quality hay. This hay needs to be prominent in their diet because their bodies are used to grazing and constantly eating grass. While it may seem like a basic food, hay provides rabbits with most of the nutrients that they need to live a happy and healthy life. It also tastes great to them and works to keep their teeth healthy.
Other Healthy Snacks For Your Rabbit
As stated above, rabbits can certainly eat celery as a snack, but that shouldn’t be the only vegetable that they eat. The key to a strong rabbit diet is a diverse selection of different foods. This makes sure that your rabbit is getting an array of different nutrients while also keeping their diet interesting. Below are some of the most frequently eaten and enjoyed vegetables by rabbits.
- Peas
- Romaine lettuce
- Cauliflower
- Squash
- Peppers
- Spring greens
- Pumpkins
- Artichoke leaves