Can you weigh animals on a scale made for weighing people?

Answer 1

An ideal weighing scale for animals will have a function to reduce errors caused by movement. Standard scales for people don't have the same facility so may have small errors in the reading. It can be difficult to place an animal on the scales and they may need to be adapted to provide a sufficient platform for the animal to be supported. The final weight may need to be calculated to take into account the additional weight of the new platform.

For smaller animals such as rabbits, the guide below offers useful ideas on using domestic scales instead of investing in expensive veterinary scales.

You can't weigh rabbits or other small animals on human scales because the scales don't register tiny differences in weight, although tiny differences are significant when it comes to how much to feed the rabbit (or animal), and knowing if the rabbit is losing weight (or "wasting" -- due to illness or ageing).

To weigh small animals, you can use a good quality kitchen scale. Cheap kitchen scales are no different from human scales: they won't register small differences in weight, so they're no good for this purpose. You need a scale with a tare function, because you need to put the animal in a container on the scale, not directly on the scale -- the reason is that the animal will move around too much and try to jump off the scale, but you need the animal to sit still for a few seconds or else the weight shown on the scale won't be correct. A tare function means you can weigh the container, and then that weight will be automatically subtracted from the weight of the animal and the container, so the results shown are just the weight of the animal.

If the scales don't have a tare function, take a reading of the empty container, weigh the animal and then subtract the weight of the container from the final reading. A little more complicated but will also provide a reasonable accurate result.