My First Experience With Rabbits

I never once thought about having rabbits on my farm. I have a very difficult time with the idea of keeping a farm animal that doesn't give me anything in return. About two weeks ago, my sister-in-law was getting rid of her three pet rabbits. My husband decided we had to have these rabbits. In theory, IN THEORY (key words here), the thought was to breed them for meat because these specific rabbits are meat hybrids.

Fast forward to the day he brought them home. The first words out of his mouth were, "there's no way I can make these meat rabbits." Now, I knew I wasn't going to be able to raise meat rabbits, and I had a very suspicious feeling that my husband wasn't either.

We brought home three rabbits: Peter, Thumper, and Daffodil. Now, the backstory on these rabbits is very important to my story. Daffodil (then Ruby) had just had a litter before we took her--11 to be exact, and all of them died. She had two litters before this, and only one survived, so she's notoriously not a great mom. My sister-in-law told me, "if she starts pulling her fur out, then you know she's pregnant again." We separated the male from the female as soon as we got them, and for two weeks, I thought we were safe. That was until one Monday afternoon when I went out to give them lettuce and daffodil looked at me like this:

I immediately started panic googling everything there was to know about rabbits giving birth and baby bunnies. On Wednesday, I woke up to find 7 of the smallest, cutest things I have ever seen. I tried not to get my hopes too high or get too attached, because in all my googling, I found that there are a lot of losses in bunny births. Because they have so many, it's hard to keep them all well-fed, and I knew this girl's track record with the whole motherhood thing.

But, I was still devastated when I checked on them Friday morning to find 4 had died, most likely due to the low temperatures. Feeling nervous about mom rejecting the surviving ones, I decided to give her one more day to try and take care of them herself. But I had a sinking feeling I would soon be syringe feeding these babies.

My suspicions were confirmed Saturday morning when I found that all three babies were severely malnourished. I instantly brought them inside, put them inside a tote with a heating pad and towel, and started mixing up some formula. Thankfully, my coworker had some rabbit formula on hand and so generously gave it to me.

I've been syringe feeding them every couple of hours. It's long and tedious, but if it can help even one of those babies survive, it will have been well worth my time. So far, so good.