This week is National Rabbit Week (www.nationalrabbitweek.co.uk) and to mark the occasion I thought I’d share my experience of how rabbits can make great green pets.

I always think that rabbits are misunderstood little creatures who aren’t given the credit they deserve as sociable and intelligent animals and the high levels of care they need is often unrecognised. I have re-homed a few rabbits over the past 10 years and each one has had their own individual personality and needs. Murphy, our houserabbit, is very bright and incredibly cheeky.

So how can a rabbit be green? Well the main reason is that from their eating habits to their entertainment they’re happy with simple, natural, low processed stuff. Here’s how…

Diet

Hay, hay and more hay
The majority of a rabbit’s diet should be hay, hay and then some more hay. Hay is vital for their dental and digestive health. Because in their natural habitat a rabbit would graze on grass all day, their continually growing teeth are ground down and kept short. Hay also keeps their delicate digestive system in check because it is high in fibre, if a bunny’s tummy stops moving you’ve got big troubles. Did I mention how important hay is?

So, straightforward hay. No preservatives, no colours, nothing and you may even be able to buy it from a local farm. Many farms shops do sell hay but you need to check with them that it is ‘clean’ and suitable as food. Luckily we have a farm just down the road which sells organic, dust-free hay and straw especially for animal food and bedding – www.dustfreehay.co.uk. It even comes in hessian sacks or cardboard boxes rather than those nasty plastic bags.

Seasonal fruit and veg
Aside from the staple hay rabbits have a wide and varied taste when it comes to fruit and veg and the great thing about this is you can give them locally grown and in season greens. At the moment Murphy is enjoying curly kale! If your garden is free from other animals like cats and dogs (who are prone to pee on unsuspecting plants) you could even give your rabbit home grown treats like parsley or spinach or grass and dandelions which take no cultivating at all. What’s more local than that?

Vegan diet
Rabbits are also strict vegans (although sometimes I wonder when Murphy tries to wrestle a chocolate bar out of my hand!) so you don’t need to buy them meat or dairy products and they will never prey on local wildlife or drop a dead bird at your feet.

To find out about rabbit diet from the experts read the Rabbit Welfare Association guide to feeding your pet rabbit.

Environment, bedding and litter

Environment
Whether your rabbit lives indoors or outdoors they will need space to move around as well as places to hide. How you might provide this for your bun may vary in lots of ways. However, one thing I would stress is if your rabbit lives in your house keep them away from electrical cables. I don’t know why but they always make a beeline for the first cable in a room and chomp straight through it. Aside from being dangerous this is costly and wasteful. Trust me, I’ve been there.

Since rabbits like to chew give them things that won’t harm them and lets you recycle at the same time. Cardboard boxes, old phone books, blocks of untreated wood and the insides of loo rolls all make good toys and boredom breakers.

Bedding and litter
Murphy is a house rabbit and is never locked in his hutch so his bedding is whichever carpet he decides to sleep on. However, if your bun lives outside or if like Murphy he uses a litter tray you’ll need something nice for him or her to sit on and to make a comfortable loo.

There are commercial rabbit litters available but I’ve never bothered with them. Since rabbits like to nibble whilst they’re on the loo better for them to munch on something that won’t harm them. I line Murphy’s litter tray with old newspaper (donated to me by my mum’s neighbour who cannot live without his daily tabloid) or shredded office waste paper and straw. When the tray needs to be cleaned the paper and straw (and poop) can go in the compost bin. I’ve also just discoverd that white vinegar is great to rinse out the tray and eliminate nasty smells. No chemical toilet here!

Companionship and care

Without sounding too cheezy your rabbit needs lots of love and companionship and those are not finite resources. Caring for another creature is sustainability at its best.

Serious bit

Ok, this is the serious bit but I think it needs saying. Although it’s easy for your your rabbit’s green lifestyle to fit alongside your own they are not easy pets to keep. Slight changes in their diet, wrong amounts of types of food and a stressful environment can (amongst other things) cause your rabbits serious health problems and lots of distress for you both. Don’t take a rabbit into your home and family unless you have read lots of information from those in the know (like the Rabbit Welfare Association) and thought about it carefully.

Finally, I would never advocate buying a rabbit from a pet shop. In all likelyhood these animals have been bred purely to make money and there are plenty of them sat in rescue centres waiting for a home. If you really have your heart set on giving a rabbit (or two) a home check out some rescue centres, ask lots of questions and have fun making a green, healthy life for him or her!

The Brits are apparently known as animal loving types. In fact there are 30 million people in Britain who own a variety of furry, scaly and feathered creatures, contributing to at least a £4 billlion pet food industry (source – The Independent Online). Additionally, according to an article on Google Answers there are between 40 – 60 million dog owners in the US alone, not to mention all of the other nations around the world.

In the grand scheme of things thinking about green pets may seem a silly and frivolous thing to discuss but when you consider those figures you can’t help but ask the question:

How big are our pets’ carbon paw prints?

I’ve always wanted a dog. Its just one of those little girl dreams that I’ve never grown out of. Sad as it sounds I was the kid who got really excited when a dog ran onto the school field and at home-time lured it back to my house with a packet of biscuits or my left over sandwiches in the vain (and highly unlikely) hope that my mum would say “no problem, of course you can keep him”. By the time I got my own home and could make my own decision about getting a dog my partner and I were working long hours and out of the house all day. Wanting to be responsible dog owners we decided that it would be too cruel to leave a dog alone for that length of time and resigned ourselves to believing the only way we could have a dog would be to win the lottery and quit work altogether. That was as likely as my mum letting me keep the stray pooch from the school field!

Now, however, my situation is very different. Running Make Hay (our own business) from home we’re in the perfect situation to have our very own dog, maybe two! But wait, there’s a new dilemma. How could we keep a dog or two or ten – hang on, I’m getting carried away – and make sure it fits into our lifestyle? We’re not perfect, but we do consider very carefully where we buy our food, clothes and things for our home taking into account environmental impact, human rights and animal welfare. Would it be possible to do the same with dog food, treats, toys and bedding?

OK, so toys and bedding are easy. Just carrying out a quick search on Google this morning I see there’s no shortage of places where you can buy hemp and biodegradable puller toys and doggie beds. I could even make my own dog bed with some recycled fabric. Sorted!

Food is a very different matter though. For starters I’m vegetarian and made that decision 19 years ago because I didn’t want to support the cruel farming and slaughtering methods that were commonly used back then. Fortunately nowadays we have more choice with the kind of meat we can buy and although I don’t eat it myself I know I can get organic and free-range meat for my partner who isn’t a veggie. I’m not the sort of person who would preach my choices to other people, I personally don’t think that’s the way to effect positive change but a dog would be my responsibility and since it couldn’t debate with me on the merits of free-range versus factory farming my choices would inevitably also be his / hers. Making a wild guess (ahem) I would say that many of the known dog food brands we see in the shops probably do not include meat from ethical sources. Knowing what I know about factory farming there’s no way I could support it for as long as I own the dog, probably the best part of fifteen years. I guess you could say, “well buy organic meat and cook that for your dog then”, but I don’t think I could afford that. So what would I do?

Alicia Silverstone is one of many famous vegans and from what I understand about her lifestyle she’s pretty strict right through to her pet owning. I don’t doubt for a second that she loves her dogs but is forcing them to be vegans too healthy and fair?

OK, so now my lacking knowledge of dog biology is going to show but humans are omnvivores and dogs are carnivores, right? So humans, as long as they plan their diet carefully, can live entirely on non animal products and be super healthy. Vegan humans can eat fruit, veg, pulses, grains and soy and may sometimes take supplements to ensure a balance of necessary vitamins and minerals but can we plan an equally balanced and appropriate diet for our carnivore canine? Well, I don’t think that’s been decided yet. Some clearly believe you can, Alicia being one of them, others would argue that it’s just not natural. I haven’t made up my mind yet.

I guess my point here is that when we take an animal into our home we should be considering how their lives will affect the environment and how our own lifestyle choices relating to the environment affects them.

In case you were wondering, we’ve decided against having a dog for now. It is a huge responsibility that we don’t want to take lightly. Previously I’ve had house rabbits as pets (sadly I lost Del, my house bunny, recently) and I’ve found that giving them a green lifestyle is very easy, especially as their strict vegan diet would give even Alicia Silverstone a run for her money. Our bunny ate home grown or local, shop bought organic veg, plants from the garden (even the ones I didn’t want him to eat!), had a home-made bunny bed and even helped us to recycle by letting us put shredded office waste paper in his litter tray which would later go in the composter.

I’d love to hear about how other animal lovers have tackled these issues, not just dog owners but those with all kinds of animals – four-legged, feathery or wet.

The veggies in the patch have settled in and I’m very happy to say still alive.

We managed to ward off the snails and slugs and give the plants just enough food, water and sun. The only threat now was the pincing jaws of my house rabbit Del. Of course I couldn’t expect him to never go outside or hold back the temptation of munching his way through the entire patch so another barrier was constructed, just from chicken wire and a few wood posts.

The chicken wire is only about a metre or so high and most rabbits would scale that in one leap to get to the yummy treats, but not Del, the path of least resistance is the one for him. So, the veggies are still safe on that count.

All in all the veg in the patch are doing well, the cabbage, broccoli and onions are particularly healthy but the spinach is a bit sad. I think I’ll grow that in pots next time so I can treat them individually from other other types of veg.

In the greenhouse
The tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers have been moved to larger pots. Really I have way too many tomato and sweet pepper plants and should have got rid of the smaller, sickly ones but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. I’ve found a place for the tomatoes in the green house and out in the garden so it will be interesting to see how their growth and fruit differ.

My favourites are two little jalapeno plants, I don’t really know anything about growing these, how big they’ll be or whether they’ll produce peppers this year so they are a bit of an experiment at this point.

New arrivals in the green house are lettuce, white mustard, sweetcorn (which I’m sure will be a challenge) and curly cress. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that before but it couldn’t wait to get started so I’m sure we’ll be trying it very soon.

Cucumber crisis averted
There are about 6 cucumber plants in the greenhouse and I was worried that I might have to throw them away because they had white marks on their leaves. To an amateur like me these looked like mould or fungus. I tried to find some info about what it could be on the internet (searching under ‘cucumber diseases’) but nothing seemed to match. However, I wanted to give them a chance and re-potted them anyway and gave them wormcast food. This morning the white marks have reduced quite a lot and gone completely from some leaves so I’m assuming that it was some kind of nutrition problem. If anyone knows, I’d love for them to tell me.

Herbs
we already have a mighty mint plant and a rosemary bush which I think is intent on taking over the world, as well as sage (which seems to more or less look after itself) and a sweet little thyme plant. Other than that I’ve not been very successful growing herbs before because they always seem to get eaten or just shrivel up and die. My new batch of Basil is coming along really well though and the way they smell just gets my tummy rumbling. Imagine a completely home-grown tomato and basil pasta sauce…yum!

In fact at the weekend we had a salad with minted potatoes and our own rocket and radishes. It was very tasty indeed.

My brother-in-law bought me a whole set of various different herb seeds so they were sewn on Monday. They included marjoram, tarragon, rosemary and lots more. I can’t wait to see all the gorgeous colours, shapes and aromas they’ll produce!