Up for adoption?

[Graham Lane]

Over lunch-time today one of my mother rabbits just keeled over and died.

She has two off-spring which have just started coming out of the box two days ago. The other half of the cage has the mother's fully-grown offspring with nine one-week old babies of her own. Can I safely remove the dividing fence and let the two babies in with the other mother or will she kill them?

 

[FireTigeris]

Sorry I do not know, are they old enough to handle food or milk (I guess there's no rabbit replacer milk, but sheep replaser might be close) soaked rabbit pellets?

 

[Habibs Hens]

how old are the new offspring

if they are comming out they should be able to handle netherland dawf pellets which are much smaller in size

they ideally need to be atleast 4 weeks to handle life without mum

dont remove the divider just yet

but what you could do is use daughter mum as a serogate where you put her in a box and allow the grandmothers babies to suckle

make sure you stay ther and watch them and take them out when finished

 

[Graham Lane]

Excellent advice. Thank you. I think they are about three weeks old now. They were suckling this morning but do eat a bit of apple peel and light greens now. I think dampened first phase pellets would be the answer. I'm popping out to get some now.

 

[Bunnylady]

When I have very young babies that wind up on their own, I feed them a mix of dry rolled oats and pellets. I will also put pelleted milk replacer in with the feed - Calf Manna is the brand available here. The other mother has about as much as she can reasonably handle with that litter of 9. While she might be persuaded to feed them once in a while using the method that silverfox suggested, she would most likely attack them if you just let them in with her and her current litter. Your best bet is getting these two eating on their own as quickly as you can.

Good luck!

 

[Graham Lane]

I've just been out a got a 10kg bag of conilatte primo faso. They seem happy enough at the moment. I'll be keeping a close eye on them over the next couple of days though.

Good advice on not putting them with the other mother. She must be adjusted to feeding nine and these bigger ones must drink a lot!