question about playing nicely with others

Yes, all rabbits molt. They will initially molt their baby fur into an adult coat. After that, they'll typically molt in the spring and fall -- get rid of the summer coat, grow the winter coat, get rid of the winter coat, grow the summer coat. Some rabbits will molt when stressed, or when given too much rich food (like BOSS - black oil sunflower seeds). It seems to be a common practice for rabbits to wait to molt until the day before a show. :lol:

Some rabbits blow their coats in giant clods of fur, even leaving bald spots (this is the favorite way among show rabbits, because it leaves the owner with a rabbit that looks like it just got a haircut with blunt hedge trimmers wielded by a maniac). Others just generally lose individual hairs all over their bodies, which makes it difficult to tell that they are molting -- except that there's more and more fur around, hanging like clouds from the cage and such.

Hay is a good thing to keep available during molting, as it will help carry ingested fur through the body. Some will feed papaya tablets as a preventive measure, as the enzyme helps break down the fur and help it pass.

During molting, a rabbit may eat less. It is important to watch and make sure the rabbit does continue to eat and drink, and that it continues to poop normally. If you start seeing lots of bunny berries dangling from the floor of the cage, you might want to go ahead and start that papaya, or feed fresh papaya or pineapple to try to break up the fur that has built up in the stomach. If the rabbit completely stops eating, it is an emergency. You can search for back threads on wool block to help you be prepared.

I think a lot of the contradictory information is the result of people believing that their way is the only way, or only correct way to raise rabbits, and really...rabbits are too variable and adaptable for hard-and fast-rules like that. An author's rabbits may have followed the trends they noted, but other people's rabbit may not. :lol: It seems like rabbits have an exception to everything.

One thing I love about this website is that experience is highly valued,
and there are some very experienced members on here to learn from.

I just notice her hopping away when one is trying to nurse

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This isn't the doe weaning. The kits just don't get to nurse on demand.
She might ignore one or two of them if she's eating, but hops away it it starts to be a bother.
Does only really nurse once or twice a day and will refuse until they are ready.
Diving under the doe to try to get a quick suckle is common in the "pestering phase" I mentioned.

I don't believe that it's very natural for the doe to be captive in close proximity during this time. To help her out, many breeders provide a ledge or box for the doe to jump up on and get away from the babies. Does tend to appreciate this, and by the time the kits can jump up there with her, they will have mostly grown out of that behavior.

You will typically see the kits try to pester the doe frequently when they first start moving around pretty well, but aren't very mature yet. It's coincidentally around the same time they discover that they can reach the food bowl and hay racks too.

It might look like she's refusing milk and they are turning to solid food, but if you watched closely, you might have seen them nibble hay in the nestbox before their eyes even opened. They start on solid food as soon as they get the chance, but will continue to take milk for as long as the doe is willing.
She won't change her routine much though, and I've often seen does with older litters return to the nestbox to nurse long after the kits have generally abandoned it. The kits know whats up, and will try to crowd themselves into the box to get a drink. It can be pretty funny to watch.

Watching nearly 5 lb fryers trying to cram themselves under an 8 lb doe to nurse is also pretty hilarious. I'm waiting to get that one on camera.

__________ Wed Nov 12, 2014 2:58 pm __________

As to weaning age. It's generally accepted that kits will be OK without the doe's milk by 4 weeks,
and that 12 weeks is the longest you would ever want to allow bucklings to share a cage with the doe or their sisters.
Some have had accidental pregnancies happen before 12 weeks with smaller pet breeds, but I haven't heard of it yet in meat rabbits.

Miss M":3t0tc93k said:

Yes, all rabbits molt. They will initially molt their baby fur into an adult coat. After that, they'll typically molt in the spring and fall -- get rid of the summer coat, grow the winter coat, get rid of the winter coat, grow the summer coat. Some rabbits will molt when stressed, or when given too much rich food (like BOSS - black oil sunflower seeds). It seems to be a common practice for rabbits to wait to molt until the day before a show. :lol:

Some rabbits blow their coats in giant clods of fur, even leaving bald spots (this is the favorite way among show rabbits, because it leaves the owner with a rabbit that looks like it just got a haircut with blunt hedge trimmers wielded by a maniac). Others just generally lose individual hairs all over their bodies, which makes it difficult to tell that they are molting -- except that there's more and more fur around, hanging like clouds from the cage and such.

Hay is a good thing to keep available during molting, as it will help carry ingested fur through the body. Some will feed papaya tablets as a preventive measure, as the enzyme helps break down the fur and help it pass.

During molting, a rabbit may eat less. It is important to watch and make sure the rabbit does continue to eat and drink, and that it continues to poop normally. If you start seeing lots of bunny berries dangling from the floor of the cage, you might want to go ahead and start that papaya, or feed fresh papaya or pineapple to try to break up the fur that has built up in the stomach. If the rabbit completely stops eating, it is an emergency. You can search for back threads on wool block to help you be prepared.

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Thanks, Miss M, I think mine must do the slow molt. I do remember that as spring turned to summer there was some shedding, like we see with our goats, but no bald spots or anything very drastic. They always have hay and they all kept eating except for a few hours on the hottest days. Maybe this is one thing I don't need to worry about/figure out right now. At least that's one thing I won't keep asking more and more questions about (until I see bald spots or someone refuses food!!)

I haven't been on RT much lately, so I'm late but thought I would add my 2 cents. For what it's worth since we've only had rabbits since March 1st and have only had four sets of litters born so far! We have New Zealand reds and blacks.

We start breeding our does at 4 1/2 months. I've read that you can start as early as 3 months, but may run into problems with gestation and/or kindling. When we initially bred our two starter does we did check their vulva color, but since then we don't bother, we just stick to our schedule!

We are on a 25 day breed back schedule, which by chance worked out perfectly that when we held back a doe from our first litter it was exactly 4 1/2 months old when it was time to breed the does for their 4th litters! We bred our two does on the same day to sync their litters (got lucky all three times that they took and kindled fine), and starting with round 4 we had a held back doe who we also bred.

We have two holding cages, so each set of litters we choose one doe we like best and hold it back, then 3 rounds later we evaluate whether we want to eliminate an existing breeder and replace it with the held doe. We are getting ready to breed round 5 next week and we have a doe in both holding cages (one from round 2, one from round 3) and our 3 maternity cages are in use, so we will be culling one of our original does (not very sociable and has too many injuries to kits) and putting the doe from round 2 in play. Then in two weeks we will be moving our then 5 week old kits into the grow out cages, and at 9 weeks will process them, with one doe being held out and going into the now empty holding cage. And so on and so on....

Our bunny barn is just 8x10, and we only have 9 holes, so space is really at a premium. Our breed back schedule works perfectly with only having two holding cages for growing out does, so that at any given time we have a doe in each of our "maternity" cages as we call them, and two does in waiting. I don't worry about the new does size at 4 1/2 months because we only hold back the best doe, and if for any reason it doesn't achieve size or has some bad habit we don't want then when it comes up in rotation we would just cull that doe instead of replacing an existing breeding doe. To my way of thinking, if a doe isn't ready to go at that age, it doesn't fit in my goals for our little rabbitry!

I'm sure it will vary by lines and breeds, but our original does had a combined total of 20-22 live kits in their first two sets of litters and were both very good mothers. There is a school of thought that starting them early goes along with what happens in nature, so they breed more easily and seem to have better mothering instincts. That certainly seems to be the case for our buns.

Something we find interesting - our two starter does don't really like to be handled, as we got them at 12 weeks and the lady we bought them from never pet her rabbits. We handle ours fairly often, and so far all of our rabbits are very friendly and like a good pet, and once they get into their own cage their personalities really shine. Our doe that we held back and then bred last round was an even better mother than our original does, with the added benefit that she is really sweet and an excellent housekeeper!

Like Zass said, there are many different ways to be successful with rabbits and there isn't one right way of doing things.

My does, for example, are in 8'x8' stalls with shelves and I don't bother weaning the kits. Buck kits stay with the doe until they are butchered at 10 weeks. Doe kits stay longer, until I have pen space or a buyer or until they are up to butcher weight. Right now, my senior doe still shares her pen with her 4 - 14 week old daughters which I want to keep as future breeding does. They all snuggle together in a big pile under the heat lamp, grooming each other.

I know that kits still nurse at 8 weeks old from postmortems. Like with other mammals, babies will begin eating solid food, but this doesn't mean they no longer require the mother's milk. I believe it is intended as a gradual transition with milk and solid food overlapping for some time.

Taking baby mammals away from the mother's milk too soon usually means that their rate of growth slows dramatically, because they are not, yet, very efficient in digesting solid foods and also may not consume enough of it, at that early age.

BC Belgians":1vg8pd3c said:

Taking baby mammals away from the mother's milk too soon usually means that their rate of growth slows dramatically, because they are not, yet, very efficient in digesting solid foods and also may not consume enough of it, at that early age.

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That's an interesting thought. Our breed-back schedule would allow us to keep the kits with the doe until they are maybe 6 1/2 weeks instead of 5, but I wonder what evidence of and/or real benefit would be achieved by that. On such a small scale of 3 working does, even if we tested it I'm not sure that our results would be statistically significant. But our pregnant does so far all demand a nest box at about 10-11 days prior to their due dates, so I really like them to have that little break! We know they want their boxes because they start digging out their pellets until we give them a box and hay!

BC Belgians":820cnidg said:

Like Zass said, there are many different ways to be successful with rabbits and there isn't one right way of doing things.

My does, for example, are in 8'x8' stalls with shelves and I don't bother weaning the kits. Buck kits stay with the doe until they are butchered at 10 weeks. Doe kits stay longer, until I have pen space or a buyer or until they are up to butcher weight. Right now, my senior doe still shares her pen with her 4 - 14 week old daughters which I want to keep as future breeding does. They all snuggle together in a big pile under the heat lamp, grooming each other.

I know that kits still nurse at 8 weeks old from postmortems. Like with other mammals, babies will begin eating solid food, but this doesn't mean they no longer require the mother's milk. I believe it is intended as a gradual transition with milk and solid food overlapping for some time.

Taking baby mammals away from the mother's milk too soon usually means that their rate of growth slows dramatically, because they are not, yet, very efficient in digesting solid foods and also may not consume enough of it, at that early age.

Click to expand...

I'm learning so much from all of you--especially that there isn't just one right way to do this. Also finally downloaded and read a couple of the older books on rabbit raising and see how much some advice has changed over the decades. As available feed changed, I guess the rabbits change over generations to adapt to that and now with some folks going back to more natural feed, again the rabbits will adapt. And all that must affect the time to fryer weight and to maturity, time to weaning and to breeding age. And then the space and time and goals we each have suggest different approaches. We have another year with wire cages in an 8 ft x 6 ft shed and that sets certain limits. But next year we'll be putting up a bigger multi-purpose barn. So I'll have lots more questions over the winter about how to use more space and whether to stick to wire cages or try some sort of colony.
I really appreciate about the mix of old-timers and new-comers at RT--willingness to share what has worked and what hasn't and patience with those trying to figure out a bunch of things at once. I feel hopeful, confident to try some things and see how they work and ask questions and try again.