Recently at the ARBA Convention, held this year in Indianapolis Indiana, I took a few minutes to shoot and talk with some angora folks happy to share their rabbits and their pre-show preparations.
Also featured at the show were booths for all types and uses of rabbits. The fiber was awesome and available as yarn or as finished products.
Much of the USA is smothering under heat stress that makes it difficult for animals but this temperature load can be deadly for rabbits. It’s beyond the point of bucks temporarily (or permanently) going sterile – it can kill.
An article a while back highlighted several points to keep rabbits cool. When the temperatures climb there are several points to watch. At SlowMoneyFarm, Alabama weather can be *hot* so we have ‘heat days’.
Key points:
1. Shade with ventilation. Plenty of ventilation! Shade can keep it many degrees cooler than in the sun, helping them deal with the heat.
2. Plenty of water – iced water if need be (freeze bottles on their sides half full, fill in the morning for cold water all day).
3. Fans – box fans keep air flowing. Be sure to keep hair and dust from accumulating!
4. Frozen bottles to lay against or frozen’patios’ – some find 2 liter bottles of frozen water give rabbits a cool place to lay, while other rabbits don’t like the wet when the bottle sweats. An alternative is ceramic or stone 12″ tiles that can be frozen and put in with the rabbit to lay on. These are easy to clean, don’t get chewed up and inexpensive, but use care to keep from bumping them taking them out of the freezer.
5. Misters – especially effective in front of a fan. You can also mist down rabbits by hand – especially their ears and faces.
6. Check them often! If you catch a rabbit early in heat stress you can often safe it. If the head is tilted back, wet around the nose DO NOT WAIT!!! Get the rabbit cooled off…however that needs to happen up to and including in an air conditioned car if need be.
7. If you have a small number of rabbits an air conditioner is a help but don’t rely on it alone! Too many horror stories of a barn or shed with air conditioning working great…until the power goes out and 30 rabbits die because they were in a barn without ventilation.
8. Design! Put shelter breaks around your rabbits and consider putting small trees around it for shade. If space is an issue consider productive trees that bear fruit or nuts.
9. Consider geothermal design – providing ventilation is sufficient this keeps it cooler with less power needed.
Whatever the case may be make sure that rabbits are comfortable!
This is an easy question with dozens of answers. They’re pets. They’re food. They’re a subject of medical testing. They’re fur coats. The rabbit serves man in more ways than many realize and yet is low on the list of respected creatures. A news headline from the Bay area tells of 21 rabbits confiscated.
These were reportedly “meat rabbits” but starving, in poor conditions and severely overcrowded. The photos don’t show meat rabbits but show creatures that were produced just to be produced. No one eats skin, bones and fur! It takes muscle to make meat and that takes feed! It was for reasons like this that this site and blog was created – to give people a resource to come learn about rabbits whatever they are used for!
Breeding indicates a goal – either to a standard for show rabbits and/or production for functional meat animals. Either takes effort and good feed. The article says “Furthermore, raising rabbits is expensive, messy and time-consuming. For those seeking a profit, the financial incentive is to skimp on food and care, said Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, director of Compassionate Alliance for Food Justice in Oakland.”
This is not only ignorant of reality but biased and slanderous! The idea of a profit is not an evil and does not mean that people skimp on food and care! Raising rabbits can be done many ways. Good stock isn’t cheap but isn’t expensive, providing one makes an effort to select well. There are few other animals as productive as a rabbit that one can begin with for about $100. However, they cannot subsist on cooked rice, garbage, waste vegetables, lettuce and day old bread. It takes quality feed, hay, and a willingness to be active in raising them!
Here we figure we have approximately $5-7 in a young rabbit at weaning. We’re told that charging $10-20 is “greedy” yet “adoptions” of $60+ are ok. For that money one can buy regional or national level stock in some breeds. As meat rabbits they must be muscled – that means food and room to move. It means, like other forms of agriculture, paying attention to the care of the animals.
The rabbit can be a cost effective source of meat…but do not think anything is produced from garbage. Please…if you’re thinking of getting in to rabbits ask questions. Visit us online and at Facebook. Ask for information, no matter what you are interested in rabbits for. You’ll be better prepared, your rabbits receive better care and there is one more successful rabbit project out there. Do it right. It doesn’t have to be fancy but please – research and do it right.
A guest post from Newly Awakened at the ExclusivelyRabbits blog.
“When it comes to rabbits and how to water them, I have used both the water bottles with the ball tips and also the top-fill types with the metal stems or valves that the rabbit has to bite down against to get the water to come out. There are also valve types of “automatic” watering systems with plastic tubes that go to each cage with a valve and one central water reservoir or even hooked up to plumbing. I don’t have any experience with those but that type of system is one that you may read about or see on web sites if you do some more research on it. The issues with any type of watering system, especially those that have small parts, valves, or actual plumbing is you have to remember to consider freezing depending on where you live and if your rabbits are housed outdoors or in an unheated structure.
I ultimately chose water bowls as I noticed that some of my bunnies just didn’t seem to “get it” with the water bottles. I also like to know that their water is clean, and I can say from personal experience and several types of bottle brushes that it is just too dang hard to really get an icky algae bottle cleaned properly with just scrubbing alone. Also, I have to switch to bowls in the Winter due to freezing issues. I ultimately decided being certain that my rabbits could have unrestricted access to water was more important than convenience and switched over from the nice new top-fill bottles that I had purchased to the chew-proof plastic crocks. I do sometimes have to water twice a day as I have learned that a few of my rabbits tend to be clumsy or pigs and either dump their dishes or like to dirty the water. I also have a couple that keep their dishes pristine. Since I have several litters pretty frequently, I am at the barn twice a day and making sure they have plenty of water anyways so the entire barn gets a quick examination and watered again accordingly. Yes, it is more time consuming but it is what works for me.”
