Paradox's Bunny Caves for Miss M

[GBov]

Could you layer DE in the earth as you filled up the beds? Would that deter them? Fire ants, I mean. I don't worry much about snakes with half inch by inch mesh cages and a tightly closed lid on the cooler but ants inspire horror in me when I think of htem and baby rabbits!

What about ventilation in the cooler itself? Do you drill it for extra air or does enough come through the pipe?

And a layer of Styrofoam added to the underside of the roof would keep it even cooler.

We have one used cooler in the woods next door so we are going to give it a try for our Angora doe. She is the only one I am worried about in the heat this summer. All the others are southern stock and take the heat not too badly but she is a rescue new to us and is a HUGE ball of fur!

Sorry if I have asked questions already answered but I am surrounded by summer holiday kids and am a bit distracted :lol:

 

[paradox]

GBov - I think you could certainly use DE in the beds if you were worried. So far (knock on wood) we haven't seen ants near them. For some reason where we are they don't tend to get into pots or raised beds. We find them mostly under rocks or other items that have been stationary for long periods and dug down into the ground.

On ventilation we have not yet needed to add any. We discussed that if it seemed too stagnant we could easily drill some holes and cover with wire or put pvc vent pipes. But we have not tried it yet. That big 6" pipe seems to provide plenty of air.

Styrofoam is a great idea for added insulation. My hubby is already collecting some to do that very thing - great minds think alike .

Since your rescue has a lot of fur you might consider going ahead and adding a small frozen bottle into the cooler. Since it is insulated you shouldn't need a giant 2 liter. I would just do a 16 oz drinking bottle. That should give you another few degrees drop. We tried it for a few of our really hot days to see how they would react and they seemed to love it as they stayed in the caves much more than usual.

Best of luck. It was a fun project for us to do as a family so I hope you enjoy it as well. Let us know how it works out and post pics if you can. Especially if you improve on the design. We don't currently have plans to expand but you just never know. So I want to keep up with any ideas that get tossed out to make it better or cheaper.

 

[WildWolf]

Wow this is awesome! I don't think it gets hot enough here for the huge project to be worth it, but I'm thinking of mimicking your caves on a smaller scale

 

[owlsfriend]

saw something simular on a thrid-world How To article on raising rabbits....to keep them from soiling the cave, you could keep them in the main cage until they dedicate a pooh-corner before giving them access to the caves...their suggestion, but seems right.

 

[avdpas77]

It was great to see someone do this. I had seen a similar set up into a bank of dirt (and clay pots) on a website from India, but I never could really come up with a way I thought would work well. I was hoping to find a way to allow our does to kindle safely in our heat. Have you bred through the summer using these?

 

[AmysMacdog]

I was thinking this might be great to use in the winter as well as the summer to keep kits warm in winter as well as cool in summer. Hear in Georgia, we can have average temps in the 30s with dips in the teens and twenties and occassional temps as low as 0 for periods as long as a week. The soil would also insulate from the cold. What do you all think?

 

[Miss M]

I was thinking this might be great to use in the winter as well as the summer to keep kits warm in winter as well as cool in summer. Hear in Georgia, we can have average temps in the 30s with dips in the teens and twenties and occassional temps as low as 0 for periods as long as a week. The soil would also insulate from the cold. What do you all think?

Sounds like it would work to me!

 

[paradox]

Owlsfriend - that probably would have been smart - LOL. So far we are pretty lucky and they all keep a pretty clean house. We have one who is so OCD she immediately shoves anything in her box out the tunnel (including the nice clean shavings we keep trying to give her). She is like a little bulldozer shoving big wads of shavings out her little pipe and then going back in for another load. The only time we really had issues is before we built the second cave thing we sometimes put two rabbits in the same cage when bad weather was coming. They soiled the box then. Not sure if it was because they didn't want to go out in that weather, or if they just didn't want to use the same corner of the cage and so someone used the cave.

Avdpas77 - we have two litters now about 3 weeks old. It was high 80's to mid 90's when they kindled. Those does have been living in the first cave set up for a while now. All babies and mommas are doing great. We did put our other most heat tolerant doe in with a buck on the 2nd. Not sure yet if she took. The bucks had not been in the cave set up (we just finished the second one recently), they were in regular wire cages before that with temps up to mid 90's and not as good a shade as I would normally like, so it is possible they already went sterile - we shall see. If she has a litter, we will wait and see how those do before making a decision to keep breeding or not. I don't want to push it too far. My main goal was not so much to be able to keep breeding, but mostly just to be able to go off to work each day without dreading what I might find when I get home. I had to know they were cool enough in central Texas heat. We lost a few when we only had wire cages despite deep shade, a breeze, and ice bottles. I don't want to go through that anymore.

AmysMacdog - ours wintered very well in the cave set up. We only had the first one built with 3 caves so when nasty weather was coming we pulled the ones from regular wire cages and doubled them up in the cave system. Other than them soiling the caves as discussed above, it worked great. We don't get a lot of nasty weather, but we got some, and it was nice to be able to sleep peacefully with the sound of sleet on the roof knowing they were tucked away dry and warm.

We did have a little scare yesterday when my kids misunderstood their instructions, but everything turned out ok. But that is a story for another thread.