I have lost track of the number of times someone says this to me in a joke, "You start with 2 and next thing you know you have 30!" My response is usually, "if only that were true."
You see the comment "breeding like rabbits" makes it sound like expanding your herd is an easy thing to do. But in reality, when you think about nature, animals that have large litters quickly usually have a high mortality rate. Same is true for rabbits. The stories about our does becoming moms could fill many posts, just when we think we've seen it all (and we're relatively new to the rabbit world), something shocking happens.
For now, we'll look at just one example...
This past week, we waited and waited for our second cinnamon doe to show signs of a pending litter. Seeing nothing happening all week, I decided it was probably another failure and we'd plan to re-breed this weekend. Well the night of this decision, I headed down to the "barn" for my bed time check to hear a weird squeaking sound. I opened the door and looked down to see baby cinnamons on the floor of Viola's cage. Well, she had babies after all, but had them all on the wire. They were cleaned up and fed, but starting to get cold. She had pulled no fur for them in the nest box and because I thought there were no babies on the way I hadn't brought in more straw! So, I called for my husband and had him grab a towel and we sat down in the bunny barn, putting the chilled babies on their momma to warm up and then fill in the nest box as best as we could.
Now the other part of this story is that while discovering these babies, Momma rabbit Viola became protective and didn't want me touching her babies. However she ended up stepping on them while they lay on the wire. It was a bad, bad night. Shockingly they all made it through the night, but throughout the next day we continued to loose the kits and by Friday afternoon, all had died. Whether the conditions of their arrival were too much to recover from, or they had more injuries than I knew, or Viola simply sat on them we'll never know. But these events no longer surprise me. Now it completely bums me out that we couldn't keep the litter going, but now all I can hope is that momma learned something and will know better next time.
Not all rabbits are good mothers...
So the next time you hear someone make it sound like breeding and raising rabbits is a piece of cake, just think "if only they knew..."
You see the comment "breeding like rabbits" makes it sound like expanding your herd is an easy thing to do. But in reality, when you think about nature, animals that have large litters quickly usually have a high mortality rate. Same is true for rabbits. The stories about our does becoming moms could fill many posts, just when we think we've seen it all (and we're relatively new to the rabbit world), something shocking happens.
For now, we'll look at just one example...
This past week, we waited and waited for our second cinnamon doe to show signs of a pending litter. Seeing nothing happening all week, I decided it was probably another failure and we'd plan to re-breed this weekend. Well the night of this decision, I headed down to the "barn" for my bed time check to hear a weird squeaking sound. I opened the door and looked down to see baby cinnamons on the floor of Viola's cage. Well, she had babies after all, but had them all on the wire. They were cleaned up and fed, but starting to get cold. She had pulled no fur for them in the nest box and because I thought there were no babies on the way I hadn't brought in more straw! So, I called for my husband and had him grab a towel and we sat down in the bunny barn, putting the chilled babies on their momma to warm up and then fill in the nest box as best as we could.
Now the other part of this story is that while discovering these babies, Momma rabbit Viola became protective and didn't want me touching her babies. However she ended up stepping on them while they lay on the wire. It was a bad, bad night. Shockingly they all made it through the night, but throughout the next day we continued to loose the kits and by Friday afternoon, all had died. Whether the conditions of their arrival were too much to recover from, or they had more injuries than I knew, or Viola simply sat on them we'll never know. But these events no longer surprise me. Now it completely bums me out that we couldn't keep the litter going, but now all I can hope is that momma learned something and will know better next time.
Not all rabbits are good mothers...
So the next time you hear someone make it sound like breeding and raising rabbits is a piece of cake, just think "if only they knew..."
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