NH Meat Rabbits

How many babies can fit in the tunnel- at least one more!

Rich was not impressed that I was using him to keep track of the babies I had weighed. What a cure fluff pile.

I say this with every litter. The best part about raising rabbits is playing with the babies. Never gets old.

Baby rabbit pecking order- The one that sleeps in the food bowl is top of the list.

Bug has started stashing hay! It is early but hopefully that is not a bad sign. She is taking a page out of Blues book and building her nest free style. Definitely too early to give her a box but she was fine using the nest box with her first litter.

Jade - your baby was trying to eat.

Jade what a pretty girl you are. That is her favorite place to lay- behind the trash can.

The babies do not like scary movies! I was watching Halloween while playing with the babies and everytime the scary music came on they ran and hid behind me.

Around day ten eyes open. Around day 12-18 they start getting out of the nest box and eating solid food and drinking water. This stage can involve babies jumping in the food and water bowls. The other night one of the little babies jumped into the water bowl and was up to his chest in water. I reached in to grab him out and dry him off and his mom squeezed out the door. I already had our buck G in the exercise pen. Jade ran right by him to the other side. G suddenly realized that was a girl and ran after her. I stood there with my foot blocking G from Jade while yelling for Rich to come help. Definitely make sure your water dishes are not too deep if your babies decide to jump in and can't get out.

Cut some maple branches for the rabbits the other day. Cheetah happened to be in the exercise pen when Rich was handing them out. She followed him to every cage and tried to steal leaves from everyon else. Such a greedy girl.

Bootsie- you are the bane of my existance right now! He insists on jumping up into the food and hay buckets and sits there waiting for you to get him out. He has literally been jumping straight up and over a 40 inch fence to get to the girls. I've had to pull him away from a doe a few times now. This last time I got freddy kruegered for my trouble. He is lucky we are keeping him for his good looks. We just need to get him past this teenage attitude.

I've gotten so behind in posting. Here is an update on Blue's litter. They are a little over 5 weeks and weigh between 36 and 45 ounces(2.25-2.81 lbs). Two look male and two look female. Two have already been spoken for- one of each s*x.

Milk- turned into a big issue for Jade. We don't know exactly what happened. Her milk seemed to take a long time to come in and it seems like she does not have a lot of milk. This is why it is so important to inspect the babies everyday so you can intervene if needed. The first thing we tried was putting a couple with Buglet to lighten the load on Jade. We also shelved buglets biggest so the little ones would have a better chance. The ones with Buglet gained but those left with Jade's didn't. Everyone talks about holding a doe to force them to feed. We tried holding babies to Jade, to Buglet and to Blue. Unfortunately the babies did not seem to get much from any of them and we know buglet and blue have plenty of milk. During these first few days we unfortunately lost the smallest one. He became too weak to nurse. Finally we settled on switching the litters every day. One day with Jade and one with Buglet then. Now we are switching them every two days..

After Buglets perfect Kindling- Jade's was not quite so perfect. Again She started pulling fur while I was feeding and watering. We gave her some time and then went down to check. She had 10 babies. 8 red and two shockingly pink. This is definitely a reason to check the nestbox right away, Being a new mom and 10 babies she had not taken care of all the placentas and a couple were still attached to the babies. We cut them off and discarded all debris. That certainly could have chilled the babies or other issues like entanglement if we had not been able to check them right away, Turns out this was not going to be the only challenge with this litter. More to come in the next post.

Buglet was the first to kindle. I saw her start pulling fur while I was feeding and watering. We kept Buglet to breed and then sell as a proven doe at the Fryeburg fair. She had 6 babies and has been an amazing mom. She is even helping to feed Jade's babies(Jade had 10). She has been such a good mom we wish we could keep her. If she does not sell we will be happy to bring her home again!

We have not been posting much about the two new litters. "Knock on wood" it seems like we are over the hump. We will go into much more detail over the next few days to explain the issues we came accross and multiple fixes we attempted. Some were not successful and some were. Here are a couple pictures of the day they were born and tonight. We are happy to report we only lost the one little runt. At tonights weighing everyone seems to be gaining and eyes are starting to open!

When I was looking for the frozen waterbottle picture I came across this one from a few years ago. Talk about pulling fur!

Playing with a toilet paper roll.

Jade is just loving attention laterly. She just wants to be petted, burrow into your armpit, crawl between your legs. Definitely a change from her normal- maybe pregnancy hormones??

We are hearing a lot of talk about other rabbitrys losing whole litters and even adult rabbits to the heat. Our first heat wave is coming this week. Wanted to make sure everyone is prepared and share some ideas. Shade is very important. We have used frozen bottles. We found snapple or similar bottles are the best because of their thicker plastic. Our rabbits would chew holes in the thinner plastic water bottles. We have also given them bowls of ice and put ice in their water dishes. Frozen tiles work well. Fans are a must to keep air moving, but be sure to clean them. We have tried it but we have heard others talking about putting the reusable frozen cubes or tubes into water bottles or bubblers to keep them cool. Don't use icepacks in a way that rabbits can eat them.(i'm sure most are toxic.) You can also dip your fingers in cold water and rub it on their ears if they seem overheated. Their ears help them stay cool. Be sure to keep an eye on them so you can intervene quickly if needed. If you are not able to keep your rabbits cool, try not to breed them during the hotest months.

We have two does hopefully due on Wednesday. Rich gave them their nestboxes on Thursaday and they both started stashing hay and making a nest. Buglet gets an A+ for her beautiful round nest. Jade's needs some more work. It is a first litter for both of them. Hopefully will have a litter of show quality calis and a litter of red new zealands.

Blue's babies starting to get their chestnut color.

First time loose in the sun room. They had an amazing time. Storm will not be happy they were in her spot.

Run Buggy Run!!!!
She is so food driven. As soon as you open the pen door and say Bug go home. She runs as fast as she can for her cage and her food.

Two rabbits went off to their new home yesterday. A couple of our favorites-a bred broken opal doe and the little gold tipped steel buck.

We wanted to share a little about weighing babies and why we do it. Here is our log. We weigh babies everyday for the first couple of weeks. You want to check them as soon as you know they were born for any that were born dead. A dead kit can chill the rest of the litter and kill everyone. Remove any dead ones and any bloody or wet material. We then weigh the babies one a day we do evenings because we have more time then. We do reach our hand in every morning to make sure everyone is alive, warm and popping.
Weighing them will allow you to know if any are not gaining. This will allow you to decide early if you need to intervene. Blue's littlest lost weight on Saturday. So I gave Blue a bowl of treats and let her eat while I put the baby under her to nurse. It only seemed to gain a little but this morning I checked it and it had gained a lot. Not sure if the extra nursing was what helped but it did not hurt it. We have also used our weighing log to decide to shelve the biggest babies to let littler ones get an extra feeding.

An exhausted Blue and the four brand new babies she had last Sunday. She did use the nestbox!! Pulled enough fur to make three nests. Yes, we pulled a bunch and saved for when we might need it.