Rabbits at five weeks old

The rabbit kits turned five weeks old yesterday. I weighed them and did a preliminary sexing too just to get some practice.

Blue Velvet has the following (consider the sexing very tentative): doe 2.0lb, buck 1.9lb, doe 1.75lb, and the runt (in picture above) is a doe 0.8lb. We’ll see if we get visited by what experienced rabbit folks call the “sex change fairy” later on.

The two surviving black kits of Oreo both showed snotty noses yesterday and one had audible wheezing to their breath. Despite both growing well I culled them first thing this morning to protect the herd. Her two REW (red-eyed white) kits are a little slower growing but seem healthy so far. One is a buck at 1.59lb and the other was hard to judge but probably also a buck at 1.6lb.

I will cull Oreo soon as the kits are at a weanable age. I placed an order for most of the supplies I will need to process her. Not sure if the kids will be willing to eat her. I will not force them. Once their mom is culled I will start a quarantine countdown for the two white kits and keep the best surviving one as I promised Maria we would keep an REW breeder if at all possible.

I love the ears on these rabbits. Both the black and the white kits are fascinating when backlit by the sunlight. The white ones were more cooperative so I managed a pretty good close up shot of its ear:

Rabbits at three weeks old

It’s been a rough week in the rabbitry. The litter I’ve been photographing is definitely sick, with snotty noses on at least one kit so far (I culled it this morning). So we’re no longer handling that one (except for me to check noses) to limit the risk of transferring disease back to the rest of the herd. After talking with my mentors, the goal is to hopefully get some healthy kits that are immune to whatever their mom has (probably bordatella).

Following that, yesterday I found all nine colony kits dead. Based on the damage (they were eviscerated and some eyes were eaten) I suspect rats got in and ate them. I had hoped with all of the modifications that the colony was rat proof, but it obviously isn’t. I am abandoning colony style raising for now. The location I picked up against our garage is proving very difficult to adequately seal against predators.

The progress so far. 

I was already planning on building some hutches to hold the growouts but with the deaths in the colony I will build more of them and transition back to all cages. Colony raising has a lot of pluses so I will possibly revisit it in the future. The hutch pictured above is 30″ deep and 96″ wide. Access will be from the top, which I’ve found much easier when needing to handle the rabbits. I thought about also installing a front door but I’m going to try top-only on this for simplicity’s sake. I can retrofit a front door later if I decide I want one.

So we’re down to 4 healthy kits and 5 maybe-healthy-maybe-not kits. Once the new hutches are complete and the colony does have a week to adjust back to cage life, I’m going to breed them.

Enjoy some more pictures of this litter as they turn 3 weeks old. These have an interesting size spread, one is over 400g, two are about 320g, and the last is barely over 200g.

Rabbits at one week old

I want to take pictures of a set litter at intervals to show you how they grow up. This is at one week old. It’s the same litter I’ve featured in most of the pictures to date.