Feeding & Nutrition

I used to spend a fiver a week on a bag of rabbit pellets and call that feeding. The bag said complete, the rabbit looked round, and I went about my business assuming the job was done. Then a friend who keeps angoras looked at my rabbit's droppings and said, mildly, that they were a bit small, and that maybe she'd like a salad.

So I started learning weeds. Not the stuff in the lawn, which gets mown and dog-pee'd on, but the long grass and broadleaf growth at the edge of the lane where the council doesn't spray. Dandelion, plantain, cleavers, sow thistle, the occasional hawkbit. I took a bucket and a pair of gloves and pulled what I could identify with certainty, leaving anything I couldn't name exactly where it grew.

The first bucket I brought home, my rabbit, Plum, approached it the way she approaches everything, which is to say with suspicion followed by violence. She tore through the dandelion leaves in about ninety seconds and then sat by the bucket looking affronted that it was empty. The pellets, which had been the height of cuisine a week earlier, sat untouched in her bowl like a slight.

I checked, obviously, that I wasn't poisoning her. The lane is on a quiet road with no farms nearby, no crop spray, no treated verges, and I only ever took plants I could name. The vet, when I described my foraging, nodded like this was the most normal thing in the world and said the fibre and variety were better than any pellet for gut health, as long as I kept the lawn-mower and the roadside grit out of it.

What changed wasn't just her diet, it was the rhythm of the evening. Instead of scooping from a bag, I'd walk the lane at dusk with the bucket, Plum hopping beside me in her harness, and we'd both graze, her on the weeds, me on the quiet. She got the fresh stuff, the dog got the walk, and I got a reason to slow down that wasn't a screen.

The pellets didn't vanish entirely. They're a useful fallback in deep winter when the lane is bare and frozen, and a handful settles her if she's hungry between forages. But the bulk of her week is now green, gathered by hand, and her droppings are the size of the vet said they'd be, which is either a triumph of husbandry or a triumph of weeds, and I'm not sure it matters which.

One caution that took me a while to learn: not every pretty leaf is a friend. Buttercups in quantity, foxglove, anything from a garden that's been treated, all stay well clear. I pulled a bucket of weeds from the roadside and the rabbit ate better than we did that week, but the rule I keep is simple. If I can't name it, it stays in the ground.

In winter the lane gives up its generosity and I fall back on the pellets, but I've changed how I use them. A small measure now, not the heap I used to tip, with the green stuff layered on top when I can find it, so Plum gets the roughage she needs without the sugar spike the fancy muesli mixes sneak in. The bag lasts twice as long, which rather spoils my earlier point about cost, but the rabbit is rounder and calmer, and that's the ledger I care about.

Plum's harness was a battle at first, a flailing, thumping argument with a strip of nylon that ended with both of us sweating. Now she hops to it at the door, because the harness means the lane, and the lane means the best salad of her week. We walk slow. She grazes, I pull, the dog ranges ahead, and the evening, which used to be a scoop and a bowl, became something I look forward to.

The cost, which I'd expected to be the selling point, turned out to be almost nothing, a bucket and a pair of gloves I already owned. What it cost was attention, the willingness to learn ten plants by name and to walk the same verge in all weather. A rabbit, it turns out, is a better excuse than most for paying attention to the ground, and the ground, it turns out, was feeding us both.

My partner, who rolled their eyes at the foraging at first, now points out a good patch from the passenger seat and calls it Plum's restaurant. The neighbours have stopped asking if I've taken up gardening. The rabbit, oblivious to all of it, has simply become the healthiest she's been since the day we brought her home in a cardboard box that smelled of sawdust.

The odd thing about feeding a rabbit from a bucket of weeds is what it did to me. I walk the lane now the way Plum walks it, head down, scanning the verge for something good, and I've started noticing the season in the leaves, which ones are up, which ones are going over, which corner the dandelions favour this year. The rabbit didn't just eat better that week. She taught me to look, and looking, it turns out, was the part I'd been missing all along, the part no bag of pellets ever asked of me.