Rabbit Welfare

Today the rabbit kits are thirteen days of age. Their eyes had now opened and they are moving about.

One of the kits was making its first outing into the hutch from the nest. Prodding Blackberry for a bit of milk, though Blackberry was not willing to allow such a treat without the other two kits partaking as well. Good mother! She has done better this time around and has taught us that intervention is possible and that kits can be handled if done sensibly.

Part of our success appears to be the very early handling of the kits by Mrs PP and getting our scent on the kits so that Blackberry had some sort of reference and familiarity. When Mrs PP attends the hutch to check the kits she allows Blackberry to greet her and smell her hand first, then she can handle the kits easily without Blackberry fretting. 

It was a good thing that we managed to do this because one of the kits was not getting fed adequately. Possibly due to its size, though it certainly wasn’t the runt, which sadly did not survive. To save losing any more kits we would regularly move this smaller kit to the ‘top of the pile’ in their nest so that it was closer to Blackberry when she came to feed them. This approach has apparently worked due to a healthy three remaining kits and would not have been possible without the early intervention and ‘marking’ of our scent on the kits as soon as practicable. There may be something further to this approach, but that is our explanation.

Some of our recent dealings with the rabbits have gone against the information that we have found on-line. We can inform ourselves to some extent but there is also still much to be learned from real life observation and thinking things through.