Foods for weight gain

Hi All
Am clutching at straws a bit here but I'll go on......
Scarlet is struggling to maintain her weight, there's nothing underlying from a medical perspective, she had a full set of x-rays and bloods with FHB a month ago, but at her last weigh in she'd dropped to 1.8kg and both FHB and our vet prefer her to be at about 2kg.
She will maintain her weight IF she has a sachet of recovery every other day (she's currently on it daily to get her weight back up) but that is rather expensive.
We've tried oats, the problem being that Nokey likes those too (wet or dry, I was hoping he'd turn his nose up at them wet) and he can't afford to gain weight (we don't want to swap an underweight bun for an overweight one) the same goes for upping their pellets.
So what I'm asking is is there anything else we can try?
Clearly if we have to keep up the recovery we will but if anyone has any bright ideas please shout!
We are trying to avoid feeding them separately and the recovery would win out over that as an option.
Thanks

I would only be able to think of the ideas you are already doing. I don't know if feeding a junior variety of food would work, I feed my quad on junior/dwarf Excel, as they are all manic live wires and that seems to work for them, but it must be very difficult if one of a pair is underweight and the other one is overweight.

Anyway, bumping up for you, hope someone has some ideas :thumb:

Having had a similar problem with Bella and searching on here we have been giving her about 3 mini shreddies broken in half on an afternoon plus a tsp of oats made up (porridge). She adores both. I know some people frown on it but as she has ongoing probs with teeth and vet had said it was becoming harder to recover given her weight and we had to consider the fairness of it we thought it was the lesser of 2 evils. I keep Buttons occupied with some of his favourite greens so he doesn't gobble them all up. A bonus has been that she's upped/maintained her weight well plus seems to eat more hay. Hope this helps.

Nokey loves wheaties too unfortunately and he gets overexcited by food and will huff and chase. He isn't overweight, but we don't want him to be which is why we're trying to find something she likes that he doesn't. Looks like we'll be sticking with recovery which she loves and he hates. Scarlet is also a dental bun, she eats loads but has always been a skinny rabbit.

I'm also interested in this, we're feeding separately at the moment. Mack needs a lot more food than my two girls, we shut him in the carrier for a few minutes twice a day so he can chow down while they get to run about the garden. Not sure how long it will take for them to realise he's getting food that they're not getting!

Someone donated some barley rings for the buns recently, and said to only give a quarter at a time as they're very fattening. I've never seen them before, but they may be worth a try? (Like these: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/like/2213...f11=ICEP3.0.0&ff12=67&ff13=80&ff14=108&ff19=0 ) I've got lots left, I can give you some tomorrow to try out x

Hope you find a solution. Nokey sounds like Spenser with food ... unless it's something he doesn't like.

Would pro-fibre pellets be feasible? They are not cheap at around £13, but that is for an 800g tub. Spenser has them for his digestion, but I have also heard of them being used to help keep weight up (something Spenser needs no assistance in doing! )

When Santa needed extra to gain weight, I used to feed her some warm mashed oats with a slice of banana squished in. You'd need to separate to feed some recovery food anyway so I don't really see what the difference is to separate to feed a little extra oats etc? Obviously with something like this you need to introduce slowly and keep a careful eye on poos etc, but having a little extra portion which she would eat in just a couple of minutes was enough to keep Santa's weight up.

That's the thing Santa, Nokey hates recovery and won't touch it so we can just put it in and we know she gets it , she practically has the dish out of your hand(a godsend when her teeth are playing up). We're adding oats to the recovery food which means we can give half a sachet, that's halved the cost and keeps the Noakster at bay!

very interested in the suggestion that crop up on here..... currently trying to put weight on my two (benson post dental and phoebe old age muscle wastage)

is it ok to feed wheat products?

I've was warned off barley rings when I was giving one or two a day to Mack. Apparently they can cause stasis?

Anything good for weight gain is going to be very tasty to rabbits, so if you've got two the only way to do it is to hand feed or split them for 10 minutes at dinner time Porridge oats are good for weight gain or get some pellets aimed at baby or breeding rabbits - they are higher calorie. You can handfeed two different types and they wont know one bun is getting different

Tamsin said:

Anything good for weight gain is going to be very tasty to rabbits, so if you've got two the only way to do it is to hand feed or split them for 10 minutes at dinner time Porridge oats are good for weight gain or get some pellets aimed at baby or breeding rabbits - they are higher calorie. You can handfeed two different types and they wont know one bun is getting different

Click to expand...

I'm currently having this issue with Skye, although there are medical reasons for her weight loss which (hopefully) are now being treated, I'm desperately trying to get her weight steady.

Currently she gets her medication in a pellet mash and I've been putting oats in there too, but I might see about getting some breeder pellets and adding those in too (obviously slowly and monitoring poo's).

What I do is give her the bowl of pellet mush and at the same time scatter some SS for Noah, when she's finished her mush she then helps him finish the SS. He has a couple of times gone for her pellet mush as I also mix dried herbs in so it must smell nicer than SS :lol: so I supervise them and move him away if necessary

BattleKat said:

I've was warned off barley rings when I was giving one or two a day to Mack. Apparently they can cause stasis?

Click to expand...

I'm also unsure about barley rings so have not tried them yet - trying more pellets and oats for now