Hello! My daughter’s show is on the 26th (11 days out) and we still have the rabbits grouped by 2 in cages. They will be 8 weeks old tomorrow and all doing well on weight. Our goal is to go in at show as close to 5 pounds as possible, but not much over if possible. Should we keep them grouped together by weight as they are or start separating them?
When to separate
- Thread starter stx4h25
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how much do they weigh now? at 11 days out, I'd pull out the ones closest in weight (assuming you need four?) and feed those separately. (as long as they are from the same group, I wouldn't be mixing rabbits from different groups at this stage).
We weighed yesterday and they range 3Ib 12oz to 3Ib 15oz. Everyone is paired up in cages and all from the same litter. Pairs are within an ounce of each other.
I'd be careful about putting rabbits together that have been living apart for more than a few days. If they're already in cages in pairs, my inclination would be to leave them where they are, unless one bunny is getting abused or prevented from getting food or water by its cage mate. In that case, before you move the rabbit, you might try offering two or more food and water sources in that cage. Rabbits that have had their own space are sometimes a lot more motivated to keep it that way.
In the past, when we've created meat pens by combining litters that did not grow up together, we've seen some ugly dominance battles. At the least there was fur pulling and chasing, neither of which is good for the purposes of competition - one ruins the perfection of the coat, the other can cause weight loss and/or loss of condition, or worse, blood (which is unreasonably obvious in a white-coated rabbit and often gets on the other rabbits) and/or scabs, and always makes for stressed rabbits.
One thing to think about is how long before judging you pen them together. Sometimes it's necessary to combine litters on arrival, depending on how the weights fall. Since meat pens usually must be shown all in the same pen, our strategy is to wait until the last minute to check them in (we have about a 4-hour window for check-in), so they'll have the least amount of time to make trouble before the judging happens. Once they're in the pen at the Fair (or wherever), they usually - not always - just cower, spooked for a while, so you have a little grace period before the chasing begins. If judging is the day after check-in or later, you might be out of luck.
At our fair, any pens that are not getting along are divided into separate pens (the last thing we want to show the public is a bloody, screaming battle for dominance), but that happens after the judging takes place.
