Chickens with Rabbits?

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karebru

karebru

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Southwest Florida
After having chickens off and on for 35 years, I thought I was done with them last spring when I got my first rabbits. Well, I've been missing the chickens again and was thinking about getting a few chicks... being that spring is near and all that.
I went to Rural King yesterday for pine shavings for the buns, and the shavings were free if you bought chick starter feed.
They hooked me on that one... FREE shavings! ...But what would I do with chick starter without chicks to feed it to? :? ...It must be a sign! :mrgreen:
Six Rhode Island Red pullets ended up in my cart. They look to be about 5 days old.
I'm really starting to need that barn! :roll:
(It's in the works. I have a 15x25 steel carport on the driveway that used to house an off-shore fishing boat. I plan to move it to the back yard and close it in.)

One of the guys I got my rabbits from had a nice lattice sided shed for his cages. He also had a few hens and nest boxes for them on the rabbit shed floor. I guess he let them free-range during the day and locked them in at night. It seemed to work.
Anyone here keep chickens in your rabbitry? ...Or rabbits in your chicken coop? :hmm:
 
Here is our setup
fotografija0288.jpg


On the left is another big pen and on the right you can see chicken coop. We have this setup for years and those rabbits pens are sometimes used for baby chicks, broody hens or other feathery critters. We didn˙t have any problems during all those years, once we had chicken coccidia but it didn`t affect any rabbit. It is a bit dusty but we clean regulary.

It is important for me that they are separated, because direct chicken filth can be good for rabbits and hens would peck on baby popples and kill them, if they could.
 
Thank you.
Yes, I guess they would need to be separated some way. I wouldn't want chickens roosting on top of my rabbit cages and even though my rabbits are caged, I can easily picture a chicken pulling little baby bunny feet through the wire. :x
 
karebru":18oyjf1s said:
I wouldn't want chickens roosting on top of my rabbit cages and even though my rabbits are caged
Click to expand...

As long as the chickens cannot get on top of the cages (maybe run chicken wire from the front of the rabbit cages and up to the ceiling?), they can coexist. The main problem is dust from the chickens, since rabbits have sensitive respiratory systems.

The chickens will eat a lot of the rabbit poop and any feed that drops, but they will also scratch it everywhere which can be messy. Miss M uses a deep litter system in her rabbitry/chicken house, and just cleans it all out twice yearly I believe, and uses all of the bedding in her garden.

karebru":18oyjf1s said:
I can easily picture a chicken pulling little baby bunny feet through the wire. :x
Click to expand...

That did happen to one of our members here years ago, and was quite gruesome. Suspending a "net" of chicken wire a few inches underneath the cages to give clearance between chicken beaks and the floor of the cages would be a workable solution.
 
Please be careful when buying chicks from Rural King. We bought 20 Light Brahmas in may of 2015 to go along with the 1 year old chickens we had.

A few months after buying the new chicks our one year old girls completely stopped laying, and a few short weeks after that some started to dye off. Soon after we realized that the chicks we had got from Rural King had been infected with Coccidiosis, and it resulted in us losing our entire flock by August.

My best advice would be keep them separate from your buns, and buy a bag of Corid, and treat the chicks AS SOON as you get them.
 
HansenHomestead":2pvgyb4x said:
Please be careful when buying chicks from Rural King. We bought 20 Light Brahmas in may of 2015 to go along with the 1 year old chickens we had.

A few months after buying the new chicks our one year old girls completely stopped laying, and a few short weeks after that some started to dye off. Soon after we realized that the chicks we had got from Rural King had been infected with Coccidiosis, and it resulted in us losing our entire flock by August.

My best advice would be keep them separate from your buns, and buy a bag of Corid, and treat the chicks AS SOON as you get them.
Click to expand...
Sorry for your loss. I've been pretty lucky over the years, but this is my first batch from RK.
My beagle did get a Cocci infection when she was about a year old. She spent the night in the hospital, with an IV bag. It was pretty scary for a little while.
Mama wants a chicken tractor to move around the yard, so it looks like they'll be separated from the rabbits anyhow.
For now, the chicks are in a box in the garage with the rabbits cages, but they're several feet away. They are getting medicated feed.
I've been reading up on Cocci and found several references to it being species specific.
From Wikipedia: "While coccidia can infect a wide variety of animals, including humans, birds, and livestock, they are usually species-specific.")
Click to expand...
I'm open to contrary information, if it exists. We have all kinds of fun things growing here in swampy, South Florida. :roll:
 
Being also way down South in ultra hot Florida my chickens live in a chain link dog kennel in the deeep shade. The rabbit cages hang both inside and outside the kennel. I have shade cloth run round the top of every cage up to the roof so the chickens cant sit on them but the air can flow freely. The cages hang chest high on me so about 3 feet (am quite short :lol: ). It works really well but the manure which I need has to be raked up as the chickens scratch it to hell and gone every day when they get turned loose.

Inside the kennel I have deep shavings which has the feed tossed into it in the evening so it keeps fluffed up and outside I water under the cages so that even with scratching chickens I dont have much dust.

It works really well for us. :D
 

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