Saturday, July 30, 2011

Today...

I rearranged cages so that my pregnant does are all in bigger cages. I currently have four bred does.

Put my growers out on the grass today and gave just fully weaned momma's time out on the grass.

Separated Dusty and Betty since Betty decided that Dusty really really really needed to be anywhere else but near her. Dusty will be hanging out with the guinea pigs for a spell.

Bred are
Jayda to Revell
Ginge to Bandit
Stella to Blaze
KC to Bug

Hopefully all those litters will come through.

I also had the misfortune of needing to cull four youngsters. They came in with bad teeth and I had considered letting them grow out a bit to see if the teeth would correct themselves, but I gave them a solid going over and discovered that
1st. had just one tooth on the bottom (that cannot self-correct)
2nd. the teeth didn't even meet
3rd. the bottom teeth had a gap.
4th. may have corrected over time, but I doubted it. One top tooth was twisted and appeared over the past three days to get worse.

Over time these kits were simply starving to death.

I dislike having issues with my rabbits and I really really dislike culling kits (hate it in fact). I have had one rabbit in the past with a bad tooth...I think gained from pulling on the wire. But four kits in one litter says something isn't right somewhere. The breeding that resulted in this problem won't be repeated, and the doe may be sent to an outside breeder to see if we can figure out just where the problem lies.

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