Natural Feed Additives and Novel Approaches for Healthy Rabbit Breeding

Dear Colleagues,

Rabbit meat offers excellent nutritive and dietetic properties, but digestive disturbances mainly during the post-weaning period create important economic losses for rabbit farmers. Recently, many studies have focused on feed additives which are able to improve the intestinal health and productivity of broiler rabbits. The main objectives of animal agriculture production are to produce safe food products, eliminating antibiotics with a low impact on environmental pollution. A great deal of interest has been expressed for safe and natural rabbit food with increased nutritional value without inducing bacterial resistance and potential side effect to animals. Natural feed additives such as prebiotics, beneficial microorganisms, organic acids, bacteriocins, and phytogenic compounds are able to match these requirements and can satisfy the increasing consumer demand for natural substances, but since they are represented as novel valuable substances, their research is an ongoing discipline.

 

Highly advanced research on these fields is welcomed in this Special Issue:

• Herbal feed additives for functional food, modes of action;
• Phytoadditives—current and future;
• Effect of natural substances on rabbit production, performance, gastrointestinal microbiota, intestinal immunity and morphology, and health parameters;
• Bacteriocins/enterocins—novel feed additives in rabbit nutrition;
• Bioactive compounds—novel approaches to prevent gastrointestinal diseases and microbial disbalance (maintaining the intestinal health, microbial balance, stable intestinal immunity, and morphology);
• Improvement of nutritional quality of rabbit meat.

Dr. Iveta Plachá
Dr. Monika Pogány Simonová
Dr. Andrea Lauková
Guest Editors

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