Comparative Evaluation of Sweet Orange Waste Meals and Wheat Offal as Fibre Sources in Growing Rabbits Diets

The study was designed to evaluate the proximate composition and nutritional potential of orange waste meals in rabbits’ diet. The orange wastes (endocarp, mesocarp and whole) meals were gathered from fruit juice processing factory at Export Processing Zone (EPZ) in Calabar Municipality, sundried and milled. Based on the crude protein content, four experimental diets were formulated; Diet one contained wheat offal, serving as control, while Diets 2 to 4 had wheat offal in the control diet replaced by the orange endocarp, mesocarp and the whole orange waste meal, respectively. Forty rabbits of mixed sexes, used for the experiment were weighed and randomly distributed into four 4 groups of Ten rabbits each. Each group was randomly assigned to one of the four (4) experimental diets and fed for 10 weeks. The result showed that the inclusion of orange wastes meal in rabbits diets significantly (P < 0.05) improved the average daily weight gain with the highest (13.99 g/day) in group fed diet 4, average daily feed intake, feed conversion ratio and cost per kg weight gain. Cost of producing a kg of feed and cost of feed consumed by rabbits were significantly reduced. The orange waste meal did not significantly influenced the carcass and internal organs of the animals. It was concluded that, the orange wastes meal could replace wheat offal in growing rabbits’ diet.