What I have learned about keeping rabbits you won't find in a book or on the internet.

What I found on the internet was a very informative and happy account of how wonderful it is to keep rabbits, how they produce 6 x the kilo's in a 2m2 hutch than cows on 1 acre of land, how much easier and relatively cheaper it is to produce this meat, and how they don't smell...   The latter fact was where it all fell down from the get-go.

Kept in welded steel cages (read batteries) such as one is 'supposed to do' to keep it 'practical' and 'commercially viable', they stink.   There is not a suitable euphemism for the phenomenon.   We cleaned the trays, we fed and watered them, we fed them green stuff and not just pellets.   They stank.   And the little ones died like flies.   I'm sure there are 'factories' which is what the article called them which work well.   Huge structures where the rabbits never see sunshine or feel the wind blow, that are super-controlled and not to make the author out to be a liar, perhaps they don't smell.   Perhaps they have systems in place because the business is big enough, to ensure total cleanliness, no smell and perfect record-keeping which I believe is necessary and where I fell down because I simply don't have all day to stand and watch when a buck has been brought to a doe to know when exactly "it" happened with the result I probably left them together too long just to be sure.   Also being semi out of doors there were other factors, eg rats running over the cages at night freaking out the rabbits.

Perhaps I didn't have the ultimate perfect cages, because the rabbits always sat in their food bowls and defecated there, and for some reason urinated in their water bowls.   The ideal would have been to have had those little water spouts where they have to put their mouth over to get the water out, rather than open water, but I just couldn't find them straightaway when I needed them.

I don't know whether they feel happiness or not but those rabbits didn't seem happy to me.   Perhaps it was just me being unhappy for caging them so but the point is it was not working and the babies kept dying, most of a litter being dead within three to four days.   I decided they had to get out of the cages.   So I took them into a facility with a cement floor where they couldn't dig and gave them wooden hutches placed far apart to crawl into that would be nice and dark, cosy for moms with babes.   The does were all together in a large room and the buck in a smaller room adjacent.   My totally unprofessional method would be to open up between the two rooms for a week or so, and then separate them again until all the does had dropped and weaned their litters, when the young ones would be removed and the process started again.

It seemed to work well, until one morning there was a dead doe on the floor with some fairly large pups lying dead as well.   I asked a helper to reach into the hutch and see if there were any live ones left, and all he felt was a snake.   A very large snake, none other than a black mamba which proceeded to emerge from the hutch hopping mad and with tell-tale bumps where the rest of the little ones had been swallowed.   We killed and measured it, more than 3m in length.  

This happened on three different occasions, each snake being between 3 and 4m long, and try as we might we simply could not stop every last hole in that shed, the snakes always found one we had missed.   Or they came armed with their own wire cutters and hammer and chisel, I don't know.   We lost about 30 rabbits big and small to those mamba, which was substantial given that we only had four buck and about six doe to start with when we moved them there.   They were breeding successfully, but the snake issue was a huge one.   It was simply too dangerous for us humans, let alone the losses in does and pups we were experiencing.

I drew on the experience I gained as a young mother, keeping rabbits for pets for FJ and his sister when they were little.   We dug around the perimeter of the new cage 1m deep and placed concrete blocks close together in the trenches.   Each rabbit was going to have at least 2m2 with the trays from the original cages to serve as a roof where they could hide from rain.   They were going to be able to dig their burrows and do their ablutions in or on the ground, and make their own nurseries underground such as rabbits do.   The difference was the pets were all kept together, and here I was going to separate the rabbits inside their own smaller enclosures.   Double gates and bird netting see to it that no rat and no snake gets in there.

I'm happy to say they have been in this new facility since November and I haven't had to clean it once.   It does not smell of anything and yes, even if it is perhaps my imagination, I swear they look happy!   Moreover, they are doing what rabbits do best...

 Let the pictures tell the story.   These three pics were taken around Christmas...

   

And these were taken last week...

I have just finished a new facility along the same lines so this is the last day they will all be together - we don't want to hear complaints about overcrowding now do we?