Nutritional and Chemical Studies on Rabbit Diets

The main objective of this work was to evaluate the influence of partial and total substitution of yellow corn grains (YCG) and/or Egyptian clover hay (CH) by dried sugar beet pulp (SBP) in feeds for growing rabbits.One hundred forty-four unsexed New-Zealand White (NZW) growing rabbits of 5 weeks were allotted randomly into 9 equal groups (16 rabbits each, with 8 replicates for each) to study the effect of substituting YCG (Exp.1) or CH (Exp.2) by SBP at different rates on growing rabbits performance. Nine diets were fed to NZW rabbits from 5-13 weeks of age. Treatments consists of a control (without SBP) with 36% CH and 36% YCG, plus eight diets arrangement which SBP was used at four substitution levels (25, 50, 75 and 100%) either of YCG or CH Accordingly, a total of 9 formulated diets were formulated to be isocaloric and isonitrogenous.Results obtained seemed to justly the following conclusion: from the nutritional and economical point of view, using SBP up to 75 % (27 % of the growing rabbit diet) substitution for YCG/CH in growing NZW rabbit diets had no adverse effect on growth performance, viability rate, digestion coefficients, carcass characteristics and digestive tract measurements.