The Rabbits

These are my breeding stocks. I lost a female New Zealand doe with the red eyes just 3 days ago for some unknown reason. That's her in the picture at the top with the red eyes. She was doing okay the night before but the next morning, she was looking lethargic and would not eat anything. We brought her inside the house and tried to give her some water and tempted her to eat some carrots but she still would not eat. I was going to bring her to the clinic that morning but was told that the vet won't be in until 2 in the afternoon. We called another vet listed in the telephone directory but unfortunately, he was also on field. So we asked if he could drop by our house to check on our sick rabbit, that was 11 AM. By around lunchtime, that rabbit passed away, just like that! I felt so devastated because I could not find anything wrong with her and I felt helpless not knowing what to do because it happened so fast.

 So now, I have only three does left, one New Zealand mixed breed and one Cinnamon mixed breed and one Chinchilla mixed breed. The spotted white and brown buck is a mixed breed of Chinchilla and Cinnamon, he was born on December  15, 2011. The black buck is a mixed breed of New Zealand and Chinchilla breed, he was born on January 02, 2011, barely 6 months old. Baguio City's elevation is at 5,000 feet above sea level and it is usually cool up here but lately, the weather during this summer has been hot. So what we do to make the rabbits feel more comfortable is to give them some iced water bottles. We fill up several 1-litter plastic soda bottles with tap water and freeze them at night. In the mornings, we give these frozen bottles to the rabbits. They would stretch out on their full length on the wire floor and lie down right next to the frozen bottles to keep themselves cool.  They usually spend a lot of time sleeping during the daytime but they are active during the late afternoon when it's almost supper time. We give them more greens and feeds at night because that's when they like to stay up and just keep on eating.

The Rabbitry

We re-purposed the old pigsty in the backyard to become a tiny house for our rabbits and chickens. The top picture is now the rabbitry part and it houses 2 bucks and 3 does, these are my breeding stocks. We kept a lot of  scrap GI sheet materials in the old run-down pigsty knowing that these may come in handy someday. I'm glad that we didn't throw these away because we used them all up in building the rabbit hutches.

We made a two-tier steel frame rabbit hutch with two hanging cages on each level. The bottom picture shows the steel frame inside the doorway. Under the cages on each level, we made a slanted floor made out of scrap GI sheet materials and then  covered these with cheap linoleum. The bottom of the slanted floor has a pvc pipe that was cut in half and this serves as a gutter. The wastes and urine that falls down on the slanted floor goes to this gutter and then it goes to a bucket with a strainer. This strainer serves as a screen to separate the urine from the wastes materials. The urine drains into a pvc pipe that goes into the creek and this leaves the wastes behind which is then taken out and put in a closed bin with earthworms on it.

All of our 4 cages are made of all-wire welded wire mesh material. The size of each breeding cage is 2.5 feet wide by 3 feet long by 18 inches tall. Based on the numerous research that I've done on the internet, this is the ideal space for a medium sized breeding doe and her litters as it can accomodate a nest box. Since I have only four cages at the moment, I placed 2 rabbits in each cage. When I bought them, they were only 2 months old and I thought it would make them feel better if they had company. I will be separating each of them soon after we finish making the rest of the cages. I plan to start breeding them by mid July as they will be 18 weeks by then.