My kids are raising meat pen rabbits for a local county fair. The show date is March 30, 2025 and the max weight allowed is 5 pounds 8 ounces with minimum being 3 pounds 8 ounces. I am including the weights for both kids rabbits from yesterday. Any suggestion to help them put on weight (muscle) to be ready for the show. I fear they won't gain what is needed prior to the show. Right now we are feeding MG Market Pen Elite and using Bounce Back in their water. Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Those are fairly low weights for meat pen bunnies at less than a month till showtime. However, sometimes you can see some serious growth in the last few weeks, so hang in there. Even if they don't quite make 3.5lbs, but get close to it, go ahead and take them if they're in good condition. Some fairs are quite flexible in that regard. What breed are these bunnies, and when we they born?
I don't know anything about MG Market Pen Elite or Bounce Back products. We raise our meat pens on Nutrena, usually 16% protein. We don't give our meat pens any supplements, since we've been specifically breeding for good growth rates. But in the past I've had good luck using Calf Manna as a supplement to put weight on bunnies. If that's not available near you, try black oil sunflower seeds (BOSS) and/or oats (as in uncooked oatmeal).
How are the bunnies being housed? There seems to be a fair range of weights in each group, so you might think about splitting the bunnies into smaller groups, where there would be less competition among the bunnies for food and water. We've had many instances of "resource guarding," in which the larger, more dominant bunnies keep the smaller, more submissive bunnies from getting as much food and/or water as they'd like. In any case, if you have the cage space, you might split the groups in half according to weight (larger bunnies in one cage, smaller bunnies in the other), which will reduce any competition that may be affecting growth rates. If you can't do this, you might try giving each cage more than one source of food and water.
Here are some charts showing my daughter's 2023 meat pen growth rates. These were Satin rabbits, which we expect to be in the 4-5lb range at 10 weeks. But you can see that they put on 1-1/2 to 2lbs or more in the final month.
