weird eating

Question
sometimes i come home seeing my bunny chewing something hard. it sounds crunchy. the only thing that is hard in his cage is his poo. i feed him regular alfafa. is it possible for a bunny to eat its own poo?

Answer
Hi Nicole,

I wanted to also mention that he may not be eating something at all, but he may just be grinding his teeth (teeth purring) because he is relaxed and happy.  Sometimes it gets intense enough to sound like crunching.  He may just be expressing happiness that his favorite person is home and soon will come and pet him and maybe he gets a small treat!

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Hi Nicole,

rabbits make two types of pellets - fecal pellets, and cecal pellets.  Cecal pellets look like little clusters of grapes.  Fecal pellets are the round waste pellets they drop and are almost all hay fiber.

Rabbits re-ingest the cecal pellets.  The crunching you hear is just his own teeth.  Either that or he is eating something else.  There is nothing crunchy in cecal pellets.

If your rabbit is older than 1 year old, stop feeding him alfalfa and switch him over to timothy hay/orchard grass hay products.  Alfalfa is too high in calcium for adult rabbits and he'll wind up with bladder sludge or kidney stones.

Lee