A rescue rabbit arriving on a muesli-style mix is arriving on a habit as much as a food. Those colorful mixes let a rabbit eat selectively, picking out the sweet, starchy flakes and peas and leaving the plainer pieces that carry much of the fiber and balance, so the bowl looks eaten while the diet quietly is not. The goal is a diet built on hay with a small measured portion of plain pellets, and the route there is gradual: the mix shrinks across roughly a fortnight while pellets take its place, and the rabbit's gut, which is tuned to consistency, gets time to adjust at every step.
Hay is down before anything changes
The first move happens before the mix is touched: hay becomes unlimited and always available, in a rack and in a loose pile, refreshed daily so it smells fresh. Hay is the foundation of the diet, the food a rabbit's teeth and gut are built around, and during a transition it is the safety net. A rabbit suspicious of pellets is never facing an empty bowl, because the hay is always there to eat.
The two-week shrink, step by step
Reduce the mix by a small step every few days rather than on a strict daily count, and introduce pellets in the opposite direction at the same time. Early on, the bowl is mostly mix with pellets mixed through; by the middle of the transition the shares are roughly even; by the end, pellets stand alone in the small portion the rabbit will keep. Hold each step for at least a couple of days, and let the rabbit's response set the tempo within the roughly two-week shape. Keep everything else steady during the switch: the same greens at the same times, the same water setup, no new treats introduced as bribes.
Never starve a rabbit into new food. Leaving an untouched bowl of pellets in front of a rabbit that is refusing them and waiting for hunger to win is dangerous with this species, because a rabbit that stops eating entirely is a same-day veterinarian matter. If pellets are refused outright at a step, restore the previous mix share, hold there longer, and shrink again in a smaller step.
Droppings are the dashboard
Watch droppings daily, because they report on the transition before appetite does. Healthy output is plentiful, round, and uniform. Droppings that become fewer or smaller, or that string together, mean the current step went too fast: return to the previous share, hold it until output recovers, and then proceed in smaller steps. Soft droppings or uneaten cecotropes smeared in the bedding call for the same slowing, since a gut adjusting to richer or poorer feeding often shows there first. Weigh the rabbit weekly during the switch if you can handle it calmly, because steady weight alongside good droppings confirms the rabbit is eating the new diet rather than quietly eating less overall.
After the switch, and keeping every feeder aligned
Once pellets stand alone, the lasting pattern is simple: hay always down without limit, pellets as a small measured portion once or twice a day, greens as before, and the muesli mix retired rather than kept as a treat, since returning to selective feeding undoes the point of the two weeks. A transition this gradual usually fails only at the human end, when one person follows the stages and another, faced with a rabbit sitting by the bowl, tops up the mix out of kindness and resets the clock. Write the current stage, the day's mix and pellet shares, and the droppings check on a chart by the food scoop, so anyone feeding can see the stage and record what was actually eaten and produced. KinsLe Family Sharing is the route by which relatives you invite can reach the profile, at whatever stage the pellets have reached.