A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Rabbits

Discussing Death

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I was struggling with what to do for D and happened to wonder aloud what I should do. My 13 year old immediately popped up with “Death! Mom, you should talk about how you handle it when a rabbit dies.” I got to thinking it was a pretty good idea, so today we’ll be discussing death regarding raising rabbits.

discussing death

Happens to everyone

I don’t know of any rabbit breeder who hasn’t experience death in their rabbitry. Now I know, I just finished talking to you about culling. I’m not talking about the deliberate death that you either choose or is needful, I’m speaking to the unexpected death that happens.

Every rabbit breeder, unless they are extremely fortunate, has experienced unexpected death in their rabbitry. It’s part of dealing with prey animals.

What is a prey animal?

The term prey refers to an animal that is sought, captured, and eaten by a predator. Rabbits in the wild are eaten by hawks, foxes, coyotes, weasels, possums, raccoons and more. I’ve even seen a squirrel noshing on an injured rabbit. If often seems like everything wants to enjoy rabbit for lunch.

AND a smart rabbit knows this. They know not to trust a thing around them because lunch happens and they don’t want to be it.

They know not to trust a thing around them because lunch happens and they don't want to be it. Share on X

Oh.. why do I bring that up?  As prey animals, rabbits hide illness extremely well.  If you know what to look for you can tell if your bunny is not okay, but if you don’t know the rabbit, it’s harder to tell. 

Unexpected Death Happens

Unexpected death happens for a variety of reasons: Shock, illness, predation, and accidents. Different emotions happen as the result of death. I’ll talk about each of these areas and the end result in my thoughts and emotions.

rabbit in distress

Shock

Shock for rabbit can come due to a move to a new home, sudden unexpected noise in the night, change in the weather, change in environment and even feed changes.

Smart rabbit breeders know that if you buy a rabbit, you want to breed that rabbit, almost right away. You put new bunny into quarantine, and grab whatever bunny you can afford to lose (of the opposite gender) and breed that rabbit immediately, putting it into quarantine as well. That way if new bunny dies unexpectedly (they are prone to do so in the first month) then at least you have the genetics you paid for!

Two summers ago I put a solid roof on the rabbitry. This caused a doe to go off feed and I had to foster out her litter of kits. One would think a new roof wouldn’t be an issue, but for this doe it was something she couldn’t handle. Another doe went from being a sweet kind doe to a skittery one scared of everything. It was a needful change, but these two buns couldn’t cope. It saddens me when something like this mess with bunny heads.

This spring we had a howler of a wind storm come through. Three days of unrelenting wind and noise. It caused a young buck to go off feed, and then I lost seven weanlings in about four days. One after the other they simply stopped eating. It SUCKS big time. Promising young animals stressed out by wind, noise and cold drafts that you do your best to protect them from but it’s hard to predict who will get hit. Two cages out of twenty that most likely had a cold draft hit them. Straw and added boxes not withstanding.. I can’t force them to use what I give them.

With most animals, going slow with feed changes prevents shock or tummy upset. With rabbits they need to develop the gut flora to deal with the change in diet. This is why you NEED to go slowly with rabbits when changing their feed, particularly if it’s big change.

injury on rabbit

Illness

Rabbits are notorious for hinding illness. It’s in their own best interest as a prey animal to not show obvious signs of distress. A rabbit owner needs to educate themselves on signs of illness. Even so, sometimes rabbits die without an obvious signs of illness.

I had a buck once, GORGEOUS animal. Eating, drinking, pooping, peeing, eager to breed. Next day he was dead. I talked to a vet once, and without doing an autopsy, suggested a heart attack. And not to be too surprised if a heart attack is why an apparently healthy animal is suddenly dead.

This is not something you can predict. It just bites you know? When an apparently healthy animal is found dead. It frustratingly sad.

predation

Predation

Did you know that I HATE rats? Wild rats. I simply despise them. They nibble off bunny feet, if they get into a cage they will carry off newborns and frighten momma, and they poop and pee on everything causing mould problems. I had a distressing two winters of trying to get rid of them when the horse barn next door was torn down and the rats moved in my shed. Just awful awful awful. Now I see them, I trap them immediately. No second chances.

Next on my list are coons and possums. Both are seasonal, spring and fall. I no longer grow corn as that brings the coons in. If they can reach in and grab a baby… it’s not a pretty sight, and I won’t go into detail. Possums in the spring are youngsters finding their own digs, and in the fall it’s adults fattening up for winter. Removal of offenders is a given. NOTE: if trapping a possum and moving it.. don’t tell anyone, and move them at night, under cover, in an open bed vehicle. They STINK.

It frustrates me when I have the bunnies secured and then some bozo hops the fence and steals one and/or deliberately or possibly accidentally leaves a cage door open and a bunny escapes to be killed by a predator, shock, or on the road. IMMENSELY frustrated to the point of anger. Like HOW DARE THEY! Thieves and idiots.. stay away from my bunnies.

shelving babies

Accidents

Accidents happen. Both by me and by the bunnies.

A baby popping out of the box and chill to death, leaves me sad and becoming a problem solver. Babies pop out of boxes, ergo now why I shelve my babies in the winter. I don’t want them popping out and freezing.

Leaving a cage door open at night when tired and forgetful and a bunny hops out and injures themselves. That rabbit could have easily killed herself by breaking her back. That makes me angry at myself and vowing not to let that happen again.

The fore-a-mentioned windstorm? One result was a young kit with a broken leg. I assume from momma landing on it in a panic over noise. Fortunately kits heal well. 🙂 But if it was a bad break… it’s a death sentence.

Other posts in this series are: 

Letter D Link Up

Each week we will be linking up with the hosts of Blogging Through the Alphabet. Please visit some of these other blogs to get things like book lists, vegan recipes, and wonderful places to visit, just to name the topics I can think of off the top of my head.

C is for Culling Well

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I will freely tell you that this isn’t an easy topic, but it is a necessary one. When you raise animals as livestock, breeding and/or show animals culling is a necessary part of the equation. I breed rabbits (love the hobby) and have learned the importance of this vital task.

C is for culling well

What does Culling Mean?

Culling means that you are reducing the animals in your herd. You do this for a variety of reasons: Perhaps you need a meal for your table or your pets, you have a sick animal, you have too many animals, or just need to cut back. Life choices affect the animals under your care. This refers to when you are raising animals with an intended purpose in mind, not animals you have as pets. Rabbits, like many other animals can serve both as livestock and as pets. Using the correct terminology for how they used is important.

Methods to Cull

There are two proper methods to cull.

  1. Sell the animal. In my opinion only animals that you believe to be healthy should be sold. This means good temperament, no genetic defects and no health problems. Unloading sick animals on someone else should never be done.
  2. Kill the animal. You do this by the quickest, most painless method possible. I am not going to discuss those methods here. Always have a backup method. Sometimes your primary method won’t work and causing unnecessary pain to an animal under care is wrong.

Improper method is to

  1. Let an animal under your care slowly die because you aren’t caring for it properly…. whether that be from disease or lack of care
  2. Releasing it into the wild alive.
C is for culling well

Desire to save from Death

One of the things I run into on rabbit forums is this desire to save every animal from death. I don’t where it comes from. I sorta understand it, because honestly rabbits are cute. They are! Rabbits make excellent pets or livestock. They are great as companion animals, show animals, working animals, and food animals. Regardless of their purpose they are cute, easy to handle (usually), and are just lovely beasties.

But.. They aren’t always. Sometimes they get illnesses that never go away. You can make the illness hide, but not cure it (pasturella), or have Genetic defects (malocclusion). Sometimes they injure themselves badly (broken back, teeth). Other times they get an illness that is too expensive to treat, or even with treatment leads to an animal with a compromised immune system (enteritis). Occasionally you get a rabbit with a nasty temper. I am currently dealing with that right now. This doe wants to bite and attack me, and she regularly nips her kits for no readily apparent reason. Temperamentally, not the kind of rabbit to pet out or to continue to work with lest she cement that character flaw in my herd.

Never to be Sold

These animals should NEVER be sold.. in my opinion. Why? Well part of my opinion is that I used to work in rescue. I know what happens with rabbits with poor health in the hands of pet people. I do. It’s not a good picture. Rabbits slowly starving because their bad teeth are clipped once a month. Rabbits developing complications from hidden illness. Bunnies with eyes perpetually running and developing skin lesions or going blind as a result.

A secondary reason to not sell unhealthy animals, particularly those with an illness that hides. If you watch ads on any site that allows the selling of animals you will find numerous rabbits, many of them coming out of pet homes. People will often breed their pet rabbits together without knowing you shouldn’t breed weepy eye bunny to snot nosed bunny. The end result? Young rabbits with a compromised immune system. That’s not good for rabbits long term. Just isn’t.

If you breed rabbits DO NOT sell unhealthy animals. Not to the pet public and not to your fellow breeders. Just don’t.

C is for culling well

What animals to Sell

Animals that are healthy with good temperament, can be sold for a variety of reasons. These rabbits can be sold as pets, breeders, companion animals, food, and more.

It helps other rabbits. If rabbits with health issues are dispatched humanely, you keep that rabbit out of the genetic pool. A rabbit with strong genetics will hardly ever get ill. Strong immune systems and genetics are what we need in rabbits. Not coddling of ill animals, with their potential to pass on their poor genetics.

C is for culling well

Kill the Animal

Humanely culling an animal that is not in peak condition is the best thing you can do for that animal and any future rabbits you may have. Killing an animal when you have need for it is fulfilling it’s purpose. Rabbits are prey animals, and treating them as such is not a bad thing.

You need to cull humanely and calmly. Always having a back up method at hand. Being able to cull means you can also quickly end suffering, because sometimes injuries happen, or illnesses strike hard. Do you want an animal you care for to suffer?

Culling an animal doesn’t mean it is a waste. Raptor rescues, snake owners, raw feeders of cats, dogs and other animals, zoos and animal sanctuaries will gladly take your animals. You can eat them yourself or feed them to your own pets. if you can’t find an outlet you can bury them deep (letting them return to the soil) or bring them to a forest for wild animals to enjoy. No waste, just a well cared for rabbit right to the very end.

Sorrows and Joys

I have had the misfortune of having to cull babies when momma over cleaned them taking off a foot or when a baby is born wrong (it happens, you just don’t rebreed the parents). I’ve had rabbits do a crazy kamikaze leap out of my arms and break their back. Windstorms come creating lots of noise and fright and sometimes rabbits don’t cope well with that. You need to end that pain and suffering as quickly as you can.

I have also had the joy of sending a rabbit off to a new home, owners grinning with delight. Experienced the expressed gratitude of a large snake owner when he finds me saying “wow.. now I can feed my big girl properly”. The joy of seeing my son’s cat do better on an all protein diet. The pleasure in helping the family budget with a home-raised meal. These are all good things.

Cull your animals well. It’s an important part of raising rabbits.

Each week we will be linking up with the hosts of Blogging Through the Alphabet. Please visit some of these other blogs to get things like book lists, vegan recipes, and wonderful places to visit, just to name the topics I can think of off the top of my head.

Other Alphabet Posts

American Fuzzy Lops.

Bunny Babies.

The Highlights of This Week

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This week has gone by much too fast so this week I’m only going to talk about my highlights of the week .

1. My son cooking another meal.. a good one.    Then Hubby made Spaghetti and meatballs last night.   It’s so nice not having to think of what to make a couple of nights a week.
     Poutine and ribs.

2. Learning that I and the lad may be accompanying hubby to the states in May. We do some sightseeing, he does some pastoral learning.   So plans are in the works.  Biggest thing will be to find affordable place to stay (most likely Pinchot State Park) and then affordable things to do driving around the area.    Will be looking at the Hershey Chocolate factory and apparently there’s a driving tour of Gettysburg and such like.

3. Building Lego together because the Lego Fair is coming up (tonight in fact!)  and I can’t show you pictures until AFTER the fact… oh and making cookies!   Always good to make cookies you know?  🙂

4. Two litters of bunnies born.  Not as big of litters as I hoped, but alive so all is good.  One litter had two broken orange (though one might be a really like tort.   And the other had two torts.   Both were litters of holland lops.

I have a litter old enough to go to new homes, spunky kits these three.   The broken chestnut already has someone interested in her.

 Let’s see.. other highlights of the week… My sweetheart brought home a few more things from the church this week.  Slowly he’s getting his stuff out of the church.  It’s a hard process so this is a step forward.. 18 years of his life was invested in this church.

Homeschooling and life:
Abandon – a word prompt post 
From Singleton to Many – finding ways to teach many when having a singleton
A wife’s understanding of sin – continuing to learn from “the Excellent Wife”
Middle – a poem on Middle
Five Advantages in Learning how to Cook.
Profile: Henry Hudson. Learning about the man behind the name
Multi-grain, whole wheat bread. 
A God who Hears and Acts.  Devotion on Ezekiel 37:1-14

Reviews: 
 A Kid from Diamond Street – women in baseball – Edith Houghton
 Fantastic Planets.  adult colouring book
 A Dog in A Cave.  Humans and Dogs, influencing each others development
Really Woolly Easter Blessings.  Board book  
 Three Great Middle School Reads.   Good books
 

Today… a good learning day

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Despite the “I can’t do this mommy” .. he did. 🙂 Just needed some encouragement.

Despite the “the letters are all mixed up mommy!”… he managed to sort them out. And yes, the letters are all mixed up as I have “garage sale” numbers so don’t have full sets of lower and upper cases letters so we make do with what we have. 🙂

here I asked him to match the numbers with the words and then spell them out.

He even made up a game afterwards with them where he had to practice his memory. It was interesting watching him work through it.

We finished our timeline of transportation.

I don’t recall where I found the pictures or the timeline.
We added kites, dugout canoes, and walking.
He was even able to tell his dad about the timeline abit too!

We did math. Pages 89-91 out of the complete book of numbers and counting

We did the alphabet. He knew ALL of them today! woot woot!

I will note that he stumbled on d, g, e, f today, but when he saw the picture on the
back of the card he knew them immediately.
This is a HUGE improvement over two weeks ago. 🙂

He also did a lower case alphabet dot to dot out of the My Heavenly Helper book.

We finished “It’s True, Pigs do Fly” book. It was fun. He learned a ton and asked TONS of questions. This book was written in a humourous style with fun captions of pigs doing the various things that inventors were doing throughout the history of aircraft. An enjoyable book. It did not cover every facet of airplane history, but it gave an excellent overview.

He asked if people ever made a car that can fly and we learned the answer to that is YES! It’s called the Skycar.


We did have to take a break at one point to catch these two that escaped from their lawn pen. Silly little boogers. 🙂 Just the two black ones, the broken black was good and stayed put!

What we Learned today – November 16

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Well…we learned that the lad’s bunny Peek-a-Mommy is a good first time mommy. She had seven kits in a nicely made nest. 🙂 Peek-a-mommy is a vienna marked New Zealand bunny and as such obviously isn’t a purebred. But she’s a good bunny for the lad. 🙂

We started to work on our Ben Franklin unit study from DownLoad’nGo. I honestly didn’t think we’d enjoy reviewing this study, but to our surprise we did! The lad practiced writing, colouring, drawing. He learned that sometimes different webpages will give different information and its not always easy to find the correct answer. He practiced listening closely to videos to get answers. Not always so easy to do, but a necessary skill. We had fun with writing out the word draw. He got it right the first time, and then the next two times wrote out dram, and so the third time he asked for (and received) help in getting the “w” right. He’s a boy who worries about having the right answers, so it’s better to have fun with mistakes and keep the learning going rather than correct over something that is a child learning writing skill set.

We learned the grey squirrel was imported by Ben to England where they proceeded to give the native red squirrel a run for the money. (not a good thing that) and he even wrote a poem about a squirrel. 🙂

We headed off in the afternoon to go to gym time with the homeschool group HOPE from Stratford. We got there a bit late but the lad had fun.

We got back home with a tired lad who ended up taking a half hour nap while watching Corner Gas and still went to bed easily at 8 p.m. I really wish we could fight off this cold.