Pet Rabbit Breeding Tips and Guide

Rabbits are well known for its prolific nature, that there is a familiar phrase ‘They breed like rabbits’. Over ages they had been most commonly served as prey in the wild to a wide variety of predators, rabbits had survived to a major extent by producing lot of offspring. But that could be a problem with pet rabbits for their owners to handle.

Rabbit breeding can be handled best by those with experience or professionals. Though the breeding is obviously a natural process and every species have evolved to handle it themselves, the effort required to breed a domestic rabbit is not simple. While planning to breed their food and frequency in feeding should be altered. Specifically a female rabbit after pregnancy consumes about double to usual quantity of food.

And most importantly it is difficult to manage a lot of kits, the babies of rabbit. Usually they have litters of 4 to 12 on an average. And there is a lot of planning to be done to sell or give away. And if you opt to keep them, they again grow and breed and that gets absolutely complicated with a runaway population explosion. However on understanding these complexities if you wish to go for rabbit breeding, you may follow some simple guidelines as listed below.

Usually when the rabbits are about 6 months old they reach sexual maturity however few larger rabbit breeds mature little later at about 9 months. Rabbits reach sexual maturity at about 6 months of age, some larger breeds later at around 9 months.

Like most of the mammal male rabbits have a penis and the female rabbits have vagina. Male kits are sometimes misunderstood as females since their penis is tucked in to the skin folds and appear like a female rabbits genitalia, but an expert can make that out. However, the male rabbit’s testicles drop at around 3 months of age making them clearer for a careful observer.

When the rabbits are about 6-9 months old, for those who desire to start breeding the rabbits, the procedure is simple. You need to separate the male rabbit known as buck in a separate cage from other males or female rabbits known as a doe. Then a female rabbit must be introduced to the cage where the male rabbit is kept.

Pregnancy is almost guaranteed if this is carried out for a few days. There are few rabbits which may be infertile and some females may not have oestrus cycle. Like the dogs they do not menstruate every six months and they are ready for a pregnancy anytime during the year.

Once they are pregnant, their gestation period is about a month and the doe would need a nest, which it will build by itself if it can. The nests appear like a soft mound, as if they are made of towels and actually they will line it up with the fur that they pluck from their body. The female rabbit feeds its kits from the milk producing mammary glands like every other mammal does to its own young.

Care for the kits is also to be taken into consideration, they take about 10 days to open their eyes similar to a canine puppy and they must not be help until then and gradually they could be fed with the adult rabbits with vegetables, pellets, hay and so on.

Another agitating fact is that about two third of does die out of uterine cancer by the age of five if they are not spayed. Rabbit breeding after maturity at around one year of age will tend to produce the healthiest offspring.

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