Safe alternative additives to antibiotics in rabbit nutrition [electronic resource]: a review.

Includes references.

Rabbit meat is interesting for its dietetic and nutritional characteristics and bio-security for the consumer, in addition, the consumer as a product of high quality already accepts it. With intensification of production systems and concurrent exposure to different stressors, antibiotics at sub-therapeutic levels, have been widely introduced to rabbits as growth promoters for long time. Recently, evidences on the increased health risk to people who consumed the products they contain urged the European Unity and other countries to ban the usage of sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics as antimicrobial growth promoters, which in turn, forced the scientists and rabbit producers to seek for other natural, safe, reliable, and economic additives serve the same goals achieved by antibiotics. This paper reviews in short the rabbit gut ecosystem, and in more details the effects of probiotics, prebiotics, organic acids, essential oils, copper compounds as alternatives to antibiotics in growth performance and health status of the rabbit.

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