Welcome to RabbitTalk, Beylerbey!
It is possible you will lose a few of them, but you may be able to help, without completely handraising them.
Maggie's right, if they all have tummies that look like they swallowed a marble, they have a good chance.
Squeak's most recent litter (10), she (for some unknown reason) was not producing enough milk. Oats coated in blackstrap molasses helped, but we supplemented what the kits were getting with homemade formula. We didn't usually feed them all, but we did bring them all in, to keep Squeak from feeding only the ones we left out there.
Our only loss was one we lost to overfeeding (he bloated up really bad). We cut back on the formula, and the runny, yellow poops cleared up, and the other bloated kit went back to normal.
They are now 4 weeks old an doing great! A couple of them are smaller than the rest, but they're raiding Mama's food now, including the plain rolled oats I put out there. :lol:
There are several recipes out there for bunny formula, and you can search this forum and the web for them. This is what I did:
I identified the kits that were not keeping up with the generally larger ones.
I fed formula to those kits once or twice a day (twice worked better), increasing the amount slowly as they grew.
I compared the kits I was feeding to those I was not feeding every few days. Eventually a couple of them caught up, and I stopped feeding them. One of the larger ones fell behind just a little, so I started feeding that one.
This is the recipe I used, and it seemed to work really well:
1/2 Cup undiluted, canned evaporated goat's milk (goat's milk is easier to digest than cow's milk)
1/2 Tablespoon cane syrup
1 egg yolk
Whisk together with a fork. Pour what you think you will need for one feeding, and heat it 5 seconds at a time in the microwave, stirring before heating more, until it is nicely warm (15 seconds for mine). The can of milk will make 3 batches of formula. Each batch of formula will be enough for 2-3 days of feeding. Refrigerate both the remainder of the milk and the remainder of the formula.
Feed the babies with an eyedropper, only 2 - 3 eyedroppers when they are very small (much of it will end up dribbled). I had to wrap them up in a little towel to keep them still and dry. To begin each feeding, I generally had to put a touch of formula on the kit's mouth for him to lick off, until he figured out that the eyedropper had food in it. At first, I had to feed them about a half a drop at a time, wiping their noses frequently as they got milk in their noses and started sneezing. It is time consuming, but it is also fun. Once they were old enough, and better at keeping it out of their noses, my kids had a blast feeding them.
Eventually, I was able to stop wrapping them up for feeding. Finally, they were standing on the newspaper, drinking from the eyedropper with no restraint at all, except to hold them back from trying to swallow the entire dropper!
In this way, you can supplement what they get from their mother, without completely handraising them. As long as you return them all to the nestbox in their mom's cage, she will take care of pottying them and all that.
You certainly don't have to do all this, I just wanted to give it a try when one of the kits missed a couple of feedings after he got out. Then I started feeding the runts as well, and it went from there. :roll:
