Hello, I've just started into meat rabbits (Silver Fox) and am happy to have found what looks to be a great place to talk about raising rabbits well. Glad to meet you all.
I do have a question. I live in WY and our winters are cold and long. Right now our nights dip into the mid/low 20s. Nov. average temps are 15-55f; Dec is 5-30f; Jan & Feb are 0-25f. It is a dry cold. At what point do I need to give the rabbits a small box to keep warm in? They currently have cages with three-sided protection on one half.
Welcome! There are a lot of experienced and generous people here that will be very happy to talk about rabbits!
Here in our barn in Alaska, I don't start thinking about adding anything extra for cold protection till it's well below zero. At -15F to -20F we give the little rabbits (Polish, Mini Rex, Hollands) boxes with hay/straw. My bigger rabbits (Satins, Californians and Champagnes) tend to sit on the boxes or use them for litter boxes, so I don't bother with them. Although, several times when it was -35F for a week at a stretch last year, we gave the bigger rabbits, especially the old guys, lots of straw/hay to burrow into. But I tend to drag my feet on putting
anything in the cages because of the resulting difficulties in clean-up, e.g. increased waste accumulation, wetness, and humidity.
Making sure the rabbits are out of the wind is pretty important. The other thing I've found is that keeping humidity to a minimum goes a long way to keeping the rabbits happy in the cold. When I first got my new insulated barn, I did not pay attention to humidity levels, and that was the first time in more than 15 years of raising rabbits in AK that I saw frost nip on our rabbits' ears.
Now I go out of my way to make sure water bowls are not dumped under cages, etc.
Here's a recent thread for additional discussion about cold temps and boxes:
https://rabbittalk.com/threads/cold-preparation.37620/#post-365215
