- Thread starter
- #11
Duckfarmerpa1
Herd Master
Hmmmm. Guess I should’ve joined this for a few months ago.... geez, everything you read says bucks..six months!oh well. Charlie’s, huh? Good to know. I’ll watch out and supplement if needed.Well, now how's that for an early Christmas present? Congrats!
Maybe she can manage it, maybe not. It's not uncommon to lose a few, especially with a litter this large. Some does have more milk than others, but a doe only produces so much each day. Studies have shown that litters as a whole seem to gain the same amount of weight, regardless of how many kits are in the litter - so the individual kits in a numerically large litter grow slower than kits from a litter of just a few. As long as each kit is getting enough, being born in a large litter is actually better for the kits than coming from a small one; when too few bunnies get all the milk intended for a mob, they may grow too fast, and wind up with skeletal and digestive problems. Commercial breeders believe the optimal number to balance kit growth to feed consumption by the doe is about 6 kits per litter, and often cull or swap around to get litters near that number. One thing I've learned to be wary of is a doe that has a large litter, and the kits grow like mad in spite of their numbers - does like that may wind up dying when their kits are only 3 to 4 weeks old due to hypocalcemia (supplemental calcium and/or alfalfa hay can help head that off).
Sometimes bunnies get out-competed in a litter like this; buns who are smaller than their siblings at birth are the most likely to lose out when (literally!) push comes to shove. There can be other issues, too. Since it appears that both parents are broken patterned animals, it is likely that there will be some Charlies (nearly all-white bunnies that got the gene for the broken pattern from both of their parents) in this litter. Just how bad it is varies from rabbit to rabbit, but Charlies have sluggish digestive systems and trouble absorbing nutrients from their food, so they tend to grow slower and can lose out as their siblings become bigger and stronger. It's not unusual to lose Charlies in the nest box, even in numerically small litters where competition isn't an issue.
But as to the sire of this litter being only 4 months old - yeah, that's quite normal. Rabbits become fertile as young as 12 weeks of age, which is why most breeders separate by gender at 8 to 10 weeks.