In the same vein, the babies are approaching, or in the case of Dawn's babies have reached, time to start weaning from their mothers. Weaning is not simply taking them all away from their mothers at once. In fact, if you remove all of a mother's babies from her at once she can get sick and develop mastitis. In rabbits mastitis can develop if all babies are removed at once, and the unaccustomed drop in use of milk leads to swollen teats and thus infection. To avoid that there is a process suggested weaning process that varies from individual to individual. We are going to be using the weaning schedule suggested by Rhudolphs Rabbit Ranch where we got a lot of our information.
Number of Kits Weaned | |||||
| Litter Size 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | Day 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 | Day 2 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 | Day 3 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 | Day 4 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 | Litter sizes greater than nine kits may be weaned over five or six days if desired. |
To begin that though, I have to get the last touches done on the growing out hutch. The lady of the house has a few pictures of progress on that monster which I, of course, did not bring with me today to show you. Suffice to say it is almost done. All I need to get done now is the doors, and putting in the feed and water stations. Eventually for the future I will be adding in shelves, and further attachments, but to get it working that is all it specifically needs.
To insure sufficient room the growing out hutches are quite substantial and draw a lot from the standard hutches.To begin with the growing out hutches have the same sort of basic construction with a tall slanted roof to support any snow on it, and allow easy access for humans to get in to the hutch easily for handling rabbits and cleaning the hutch itself without difficulty.Another feature that the hutches will share in the long run, but will not have for initial use due to the rush nature of the job is the private space. Right now they have the back, and outside wall but not the wall separating them from the inside. That second wall separating the inside will go in when I have time to put it in, but right now we just need to start weaning. The differences for the growing out hutches are fairly minor.
First of all due to the learning process that eventually between Fisher Cat harassment and the weight of the moving rabbits the bottom wire will eventually get loose, the growing out hutches were built with blocking to hold the bottom wire on with staples as supplemental weight bearing not primary. Then there is the general increased size. Overall they are 8 feet wide, 3 feet deep, and the same 6 feet tall. There are two private areas, one on each end of the hutch each 18 inches wide.The middle section is over all around 4 feet 6 inches wide after accounting for the total width of the 2x4 framing. Obviously the doors have to work differently than in the standard hutches. To deal with having easy to use doors that allow access to the whole hutch I designed doors that are essentially double fold doors like on a closet that open out instead of sliding on a track.That way the whole thing can be folded out of the way when appropriate. Hopefully Thursday I will remember to have a post done ahead of time with photos so I can show you all.
Re Breeding
On Saturday the Lady of the House and I re bred Sunny and Dawn to Umbra now that his mites are gone. The breedings went much more smoothly this time than the first time. Some of that was handler confidence, and some of it was that both of them were receptive to breeding at once this time. Having both of them giving birth around the same time will be good, as it will allow us to foster off babies to one mother or the other if litters are unbalanced, or if there is some sort of problem like a mother rejecting a baby. So having bred them on the 16th we are expecting babies around the Edit for typo: 14th of July, which also happens to be right around when we will be butchering the first babies. We went with an early re breeding so we can hopefully get three litters in before it is too cold for us to safely have kits born. Normally we would be able to space it out more but we got started later in the season than is recommended due to me having to build the hutches in spring rather than have them ready for spring.
Weight Charts
In both charts there is suspect data on Sunday morning as the Lady of the House and I were going to a dog training clinic in Connecticut and were rushed leaving. Being in a rush while trying to deal with rambunctious and increasingly hard to weigh babies has led to some squirley data for that day.
Dawn's litter weight chart
Sunny's litter weight chart
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