Safe Alternative Additives to Antibiotics in Rabbit Nutrition: Probiotics and Prebiotics

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 subtherapeutic 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 EU 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, AND prebiotics as alternatives to antibiotics in growth performance and health status of the rabbit.