Features of feeding young rabbits

Abstract. Domestic industrial rabbit breeding after 30 years of stagnation is beginning to gain momentum. Rabbit breeding is a well-developed branch of animal husbandry all over the world. An essential condition for the success of animal husbandry is the correctness of the organization of feeding, since in the cost of production, the cost of feeding reaches 60–70 %.The basis of the organization of feeding of all types of farm animals, including rabbits, is to determine their nutritional and energy needs. The feeding of young rabbits attracts special attention of scientists, since its energy demand is 3.4 times higher than that of adult animals during reproduction. Scientific research of domestic and foreign scientists on feeding young rabbits is very fragmented. The scheme of three-breed rabbit crossing has been developed at the Afanas`ev Research Institute of Fur – Bearing Animal Breeding and Rabbit Breeding on the basis of which the first domestic precocious and highly productive cross “Rodnik” was created. The relevance of the study lies in the need to create optimal diets for highly productive rabbit crosses. The purpose of the study is to study and analyze the achievements of domestic and foreign rabbit scientists contributing to the development of optimal diets for highly productive rabbit crosses. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the analysis of new knowledge obtained by different scientific schools makes it possible to choose the direction of creating optimal diets for young rabbits. The results of the study. It has been established that the physiological features of rabbit digestion indicate the direction to the creation of diets optimized in terms of the ratio of nutrients, allowing to reduce the cost of feeding by 34 %. Probably, the need for nutrients and energy of new highly productive and precocious rabbit crosses will differ from the needs of meat-skinned breeds, as a result of which there will be a need to create individual diets.