Tag Archives: rabbit husbandry

The Scoop on Poop

Health May 20, 2014 Leave a comment
Image Credit goes to hopperhome.com

Image Credit goes to hopperhome.com

I just found this article on rabbit poop – I thought it was really interesting. Because, you know, poop is a really exciting topic and stuff.

 

The Scoop on Poop
By Charlcie Gill

Rabbits produce two types of droppings: fecal pellets and cecotropes. The latter are produced in a region of the rabbit’s digestive tract called the ceacum. The ceacum contains a natural community of bacteria and fungi that provide essential nutrients and possibly even protect the
rabbit from harmful pathogens. By consuming the cecotropes as they exit the anus, the rabbit takes in nutrient-packed dietary items essential to good health. Though often referred to as “night droppings”, cecotropes can be produced at almost any time of day.

Unlike the small brown “bunny marbles” we know as fecal pellets, normal CECOTROPES resembles a dark greenish brown mulberry, or tightly bunched grapes. Composed of small, soft, shiny pellets, each is coated with a layer of rubbery mucus, and pressed into an elongate mass.
Cecotropes have a rather strong odor, as they contain a large mass of beneficial cecal bacteria. When a rabbit ingests cecotropes, the mucus coat protects the bacteria as they pass through the stomach, then re-establish in the ceacum.

When things go wrong…

Diarrhea
True diarrhea is more common in young kits than older rabbits. One of the most common causes is coccidia. In a kit, dehydration caused by diarrhea can rapidly result in death. It is wise to consider incidences of diarrhea a true emergency. Common antibiotics used to treat coccidia
include Albon™ and the potentiated sulfas, such as Trimethoprim Sulfa (TMZ) or Bactrim™. Another cause of diarrhea in kits is stress at weaning. Very young rabbits have a sterile lower intestine until they begin to eat solid food at the age of 3-4 weeks. It is during this time that their intestines are at their most critical phase. Weaning too early or weaning under stressful conditions, can make kits susceptible to enteritis (inflammation of the intestinal lining), which can cause fatal diarrhea. When I wean kits, I always offer good grass hay. Adding rolled oats to the ration at a rate of 20% in relation to pellets for about a week is also a helpful preventative.

Unformed Cecotropes
The ceacum is a delicately balanced ecosystem. If the intestine is moving too slowly, or if the rabbit is getting a diet too rich in digestible carbohydrates and too low in crude fiber, the complex population of bacteria in the ceacum can become unbalanced.

 

Continue reading…. https://www.arba.net/PDFs/poop.pdf

Fostering Kits

Health May 8, 2014 Comments: 10
When to foster baby bunnies.

When to foster baby bunnies.

Today we woke up to find our Cinnamon doe, little miss Fancy, hovering over a nest filled with – count them! – 13 babies!

 

{Let’s have a moment of silence to be thankful that humans don’t have 13 babies at a time. I can only imagine the gray hair I would be sporting if I had multiples…}

 

We have a few more litters due right now as well, so once I saw the crazy number of babies in Fancy’s nest, I started hoping that another doe would have a small litter so we can foster babies to the other doe. That brought up the idea of fostering and I realized I haven’t blogged about it here yet.

 

One relatively common practice for rabbit husbandry is fostering kits from one doe to another. There are typically specific reasons why this would be advantageous as a management technique: perhaps the original doe had too many kits for them to thrive, perhaps one doe is exhibiting a distinct lack of maternal instinct, perhaps it makes sense to have a fantastic show rabbit birth the litter but not raise it so there is less wear and tear on her body. There are several rationale for fostering to begin with, so…

 

How do you actually do it?! The basic premise is to take kits from one litter and place them with another litter. We have had good success with this when we do the fostering within the first 2-3 days of a newborn kit’s life. We will remove both nestboxes from the cage and rearrange as needed. (I usually keep the nestbox away from mama for about an hour so that any scents will have a chance to mingle.) Then I put the nestbox(es) back and let the does do all the dirty work!

 

Remember to identify the moved kits in some way! Some will tattoo a dot in the moved kit’s ear, another idea is to put nail polish on the kit’s paws or fur. Just remember that all bunnies tend to look remarkably alike when side by side… and to keep your pedigrees straight you’re going to need some type of identification on the newborn kits.

 

I’ve also heard suggestions of putting a bit of vanilla extract on the foster mama’s nose so she won’t be able to smell the difference between her birthed and adopted kits. This might be a useful tactic for a high strung mother… but it’s not one we’ve yet practiced or even felt like we needed.

 

When do you know when fostering is needed? Most commercial breed does can very adequately handle 6-8 babies with plenty of milk for them to grow and thrive. When you have more kits than nipples, you might want to consider fostering! So far, the largest litter we’ve had a mama successfully raise is 10. Those kits were healthy but definitely did not have the weight gain and growth we see in a smaller litter. There’s a lot of flexibility in what an individual doe can handle with her milk supply. Regardless, consider putting her on 18% protein feed for as long as she’s nursing her kits.

 

We’ve only had one complete fostering failure and that was when we tried to put a baby about 10 days old in with a new litter. The foster mama was not pleased with this state of affairs and the kit was dead by the morning, which was a major bummer all the way around.

 

Only in rabbits can your animals actually claim the “brutha from anotha mutha” phrase! May your nestboxes be full!

%d bloggers like this: