The Unexpected

Yesterday morning I woke up, and went about my as usual chores. As normal all of the rabbits but Sunny were out to greet me, and she was as usual not present but in her private space. Unfortunately when I checked on her for her daily health check she was dead.

Obviously we promptly and carefully checked her over. There were no signs of injury, no infections we could find. Her teeth were fine, her back wasn't broken, and her vagina was fine. We haven't been able to open her up for a necroscopy to figure out exactly what happened. Michelle Chandler suggests the possibility of a systemic infection from the prolapse 2 months ago. We aren't sure obviously but if that is the case it will be a little startling since she hadn't lost weight at all and usually an animal loses weight with an infection.

Over all though, an unpleasant thing to wake up to on a Wednesday morning. Not that it would have been any less so on any other morning, but you know what I mean.

Other than that we have been getting started on this round of breeding. On Wednesday Dawn accepted breeding from Dorado. He is a bit of a goofball about breeding and has serious confusion on which end is which. At one point I literally picked him up, turned Dawn around, and put him back down. Then he figured out what to do. We went to breed Twilight this morning, and she just was not having it for what ever reason. We will be trying her again tomorrow to see if it was just the day, and she wasn't in the mood.

Breeding as late as we are we do run the risk of a brutally cold day catching us out, and killing the kits. We hope not. We haven't been running through our meat at a terrific rate, but we don't want to end up with nothing left by mid way through winter and be stuck either being vegetarian at the part of the year that I really need meat to stay healthy, or eating normal store bought meat and compromising our ethics.