What Rabbits Do You Have? Show Off Your Rabbits Here!

[jermoatc]

It really depends on what you want to get out of your rabbit. Health? Production? Quality? Quantity? I know some people on certain homesteading sites will breed back as many as 8 times a year (or about every six weeks). Some of us breed every 12 weeks. How quickly you will need to turn over your does increases exponentially. I've had five year old does still popping out 6-10 kit litters by breeding back every 12 weeks.
The longer a doe goes between litters (within reason) the bigger and healthier the litters you can expect to get will be, the longer the doe will be breedable, and the better condition the doe will stay in. But it seems like the average wait time is 8-10 weeks. I think anything under 6 weeks in inhumae and inefficient as the doe gets no chance to recover from nursing each litter and will quickly loose condition.

Incidentally, unspayed doe rabbits over 6 years old have high tendencies of reproductive cancers and at about 8 years old that figure reaches nearly 100%. But under 4 years it's almost unheard of. Just some food for thought for doe retention time.

Thank you very much. Those are exactly the type of answers I was looking for. A couple more though. At what age do you typically wean the kits? How long do the kits need to nurse? Is there a benefit to weaning at a certain age or is it more beneficial to leave them with the doe for a longer period of time?

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Well, getting them weaned off of mom sooner lets the doe recover faster, leaving them on mom lets the kits nurse more.... Having said that, I have never seen a kit still drinking milk at 6 weeks. I know it happens sometimes, I have heard a lot of people talk about it, but I have never seen it. Wild rabbits wean at 4 weeks. If you want to breed back every 6 weeks, pushing to wean at 4 weeks might be practical but you also might loose the occasional kit. Less than 4 weeks and they are still on milk, more than 8 weeks and they're just taking up personal space in your doe's cage. I've pulled as early as five weeks before if I wanted to re-breed pretty quickly and I've never lost a kit during weaning. I think having hay for the kits to eat as they wean really helps.

Another interesting tidbit, most animals have a similar time frame for weaning and gestation because in the wild they might get bred back almost immediately.

 

[Bunnylady]

A couple more interesting tidbits:

Rabbits have rather unusual reproductive systems. If a doe gets pregnant, and conditions are too stressful for her, she can absorb the fetuses, and it was like she was never pregnant. If you are breeding on an intense schedule, and a lot of does accept service and then miss, the fault might be the buck, or it may be that you are pushing the does too hard and they are absorbing the babies.

One of the strangest things a rabbit can do is to release eggs, have them get fertilized, and then hold them in a state of suspended development until a later date. The longest suspected period of this happening was something on the order of 6 months. We had a poster on another forum that had a doe that was bred once, kindled a moderate litter (about 6, I think) after about 6 weeks, had another litter of similar size about a month later, and then a couple more kits a month after that - all from one breeding; she had bought the doe bred and I don't think she even owned a buck until about the time of the second litter. A couple of months later, she bred the doe again, and she pretty much repeated the performance. Craziest thing I ever heard of; if I had heard it all at one go instead of over the period of several months, I wouldn't have believed it, but the whole thing took so long and seemed so odd, I can't see why she would have been telling anything but the truth. Very, very unusual, but just about the time you think you've seen it all, they show you something new.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Wow, that's crazy. I have never heard of THAT before. That's pretty interesting! I wonder if anyone has tried to study that phenomena. It must be pretty rare.

 

[Bunnylady]

The first time I heard about delayed implantation was in an early edition of Rabbit Production. I thought, "sheesh! If a doe can hold them that long, if you have bred her to more than one buck, how can you ever be sure who's the father?"

While I am sure there are ways to induce embryonic diapause (the fancy scientific term), I'd think finding rabbits that do it spontaneously would be tricky. This rabbit (termed a "freak" by her owner) was obviously exceptional. I can think of one other animal that I thought might have done this; a rabbit that gave birth when her first litter were not quite 9 weeks old; her owner insisted that one of her then 4-week-old offspring must have been the father (if you've examined 4-week-old rabbits, you know how likely that is). I've met a number of rabbit breeders that believe does can conceive litters without being bred because they've had litters when they hadn't put the doe in with a buck in ages; while some of those might be cases of breeding through the wire, I have to wonder about this other possibility as well.

 

[AxolotlLove]

SQUEEEEE BUNNIES!!!! SUPER CUTE!!!! I'm getting 3 in May 14, 1 French Lop (CUTEST RABBITS EVER) 1 English Spot (so PRETTY!!! ) and 1 to be decided lol, I'll look around the rabbit show for a real pretty one. Please post pics of English Spots. Also, has anyone litter trained their rabbit? Anyone's rabbit know tricks? What tricks? Is it hard to train them?

 

[dan26552]

I showed you Elsa's litter when she first had them, so here they are at 6 weeks old.

 

[AxolotlLove]

Oh dan, don't worry if those bunnies go missing, I might come steal them

 

[dan26552]

Oh dan, don't worry if those bunnies go missing, I might come steal them

As long s you leave $20 for each one you take we'll be good. But you can't have any whites, one of my friends wants a white

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Lol, aint that the truth. XD I have a litter of rex right now.... They're growing up pretty good. They're about 3-4 weeks right now, so getting close to weaning. I will probably wean these ones at six weeks and then snap some photos. I think ya'll will like those. They're awfully cute.