Rabbit Farming For Beginners: Getting It The Right Way

A successful rabbit venture is underpinned by three essentials: appropriate housing, quality feed and perhaps most importantly, picking the right breeders.

Housing can be renovated whilst the enterprise chugs along and better feed can be sought in time, but picking a substandard starter stock will undercut your entire venture, with even the very best housing and feeds wasted on poor sires.
For this reason, here are the essentials to ensuring your rabbit venture is not a sunk cost even before the first kits are born.

Gene purity

A pedigree-registered rabbit whose bloodline is trackable is your best bet. But in reality, things are not as straightforward. Anyone purporting to sell you pure-line rabbits in Uganda is probably taking you for a ride. Most rabbits in the country have been bastardised to some degree.

Your best bet would be ensuring that the rabbit has attained the requisite weight for its sex, age and breed.

The rabbit should also exhibit phenotypically corresponding characteristics to its breed. As an example, a Californian White rabbit should have black markings on its nose, feet and tail, while its eyes will be pink.

Due to the extra vigour that can be achieved sometimes through hybrids, there are particular crossbreeds that are particularly good options.
For instance, a New Zealand, Flemish Giant cross has the giant’s propensity to gain lots of weight and the New Zealand’s fast feed-to-meat conversion.

Inbred rabbits – especially siblings within the immediate litter – will tend to be tiny compared with those of the same variety that are crossed with other lines and so ought to be totally avoided for breeding purposes.

Temperament

This might seem superfluous, but anyone who has handled a wild rabbit has scratches that attest to it not being a fun experience. Your breeding stock could be with you for more than two years.

Does will need moving for breeding; rabbit hutches need daily cleaning and replenishing of feed and water. It is torturous ending up with bandages on your hands every time you have to handle your rabbits.

A boxy muscular frame

Your rabbit should be blocky and filled with pronounced musculature. It should not be bony or lanky.

The pivotal areas for inspection are: the rabbit’s loins, that is, the back of the neck. You should feel meat and muscle, the rabbit’s spine should not be stuck out. The hind of the rabbit’s back should be well filled, their backbone must not be easily felt. These parts are essential as they constitute most of the meat harvested from a dressed rabbit. A silky coat, clean ears, bright attentive eyes and unscabbed feet. Smooth fur and alert eyes are signs of a healthy vital rabbit.

Their ears can fester parasites, such as mites, which cause ear canker and might be transferred to your existing colony.

Scabs on the soles of rabbit feet could be a sign of soar hocks, which is genetically transferable.

Mothering ability

This refers to both litter size and a rabbit’s ability to care for its young till weaning. It can be ascertained by asking for her breeding records or those of her parents if she has not yet given birth.

Common rabbit diseases

While rabbits are adaptable and hardy animals, their diseases often prove fatal due to the lack of drugs dedicated to their treatment, a lack of veterinarians with any rabbit-specific background, and a shortage of information on their treatment.

As a result, easily communicable ailments such as colds and diarrhoea can easily wipe out your entire colony and most of your investment with it. But these common rabbit diseases can be simply treated on the farm, as detailed below.
Fevers, cold and coughs

Symptoms
• Coughs.
• Nasal discharge.
• Ears are warmer than normal.
Treatment
• Enrocin type antibiotic drops administered for three to four days orally.
• Daily Gentamicin injection to thigh for 3 days (severe cases).

Diarrhoea

Diarrhoea can be fatal to rabbits as it leads to the blockage of the rectal cavity.
Diarrhoea and ‘sticky butt’, as in chicken, is at times experienced in weaning rabbits in their transition from a milk-exclusive diet to pellets and forage. Caking on the anal region blocks bowel movement causing death, the farmer thus needs to check on the kits often as they leave the nesting box.

Prevention
• Offer clean feed and water.
• Dry out excessively dump forage before feeding.
• Ensure cages are clean.
• Reduce drinking water provided.
• Ease the transition from mother’s milk to solid food, don’t start kits off with fresh feed.
• Wipe the dung off rabbit kits’ bum to avoid blockage.
Treatment
• A regimen of one injection of Sulphur medicine to the thigh for three to four days.
• If the problem has spread to many rabbits mix into pellets Sulphadimidine and Furazolidone tablets for three to four days.

Bloat

Rabbits are monogastric animals, meaning they have only one stomach, but they are ruminants.

This means they do not chew cud like cattle and all the plant water taken in can fill up their stomachs, leading to blockage.

This can be easily avoided by not offering fresh greens directly plucked from the shamba. As with diarrhoea, weaners are especially affected and special attention should be given to rabbits being introduced to a solid food diet.

Other than at birth and in the first few days after birth, farmers suffer the most losses of their litters during the weaning phase. Easing this transition by offering them few concentrates and even less dried greens will help lower the mortality rate.