Breeding
Westley's World strongly advocates pet desexing & desexed Male/Female pairs vs same sex pairs.
We understand that accidental litters happen. In this instance we expect you to provide suitable, comfortable and completely seperate housing to ensure happy, healthy Does and Bucks and that appropriate measures be taken e.g. total separation and desexing, to avoid further unplanned litters.
If you are considering breeding your rabbit we respectfully urge you to rethink this. Rescues around the country are absolutely groaning under the weight of unwanted rabbits, TradeMe has literally hundreds of rabbits - many of them unwanted, being sold and given away and every day rabbits are found wandering after being dumped because their owners have lost interest in them.
It is quite likely that a rabbit you breed at home will end up neglected, discarded or at a rescue within a year once they are no longer a cute kit.
Apart from the risk of losing kits, breeding also runs the risk of losing mum rabbit and if she is a loved pet then this can be heartbreaking and is totally avoidable. Although we think of rabbits being easy breeders it is actually a very stressful thing for a female rabbit to go through and if she dies you are left with the difficult task, stress, expense and heartache of hand raising a litter of kits - many of which may die.
Not only is breeding risky and stressful for the Doe, a responsible owner of a litter has a duty of care to ensure that suitable homes; that will care for and provide a good life for the kits, are found. This is time consuming, stressful and can be pricey if vaccinating and desexing is included as it should be.
Please consider whether a rabbit that you breed will get a home well it will be well cared for the duration of their life. This could potentially be for 8-12 years. We know of some incredibly responsible owners who have taken nearly a year to find top class homes for accidental litters. Many of these kits were already desexed or were re-homed with vouchers for desexing. Even with these measures in place, it was hard to find good homes...
Another factor to consider is lack of knowledge in regard to genetics. There are fewer and fewer truly purebred rabbits available now due to reckless, ad hoc and greedy breeding. The impact this has is that the standards for a specific breed can suffer - we are seeing this in Flemish Giants who as a breed are getting smaller and lighter as cross breeding with smaller breeds dilutes their blood lines and genetic profile.
A further issue with cross breeding is that crossing breeds that have different skull shapes; such as Lops with their flat faces and breeds with narrower face shapes, means that the resulting kits are at high risk of having serious dental issues such as malocclusion which can lead to a life time of suffering, enormous veterinary bills for their owners and indeed can necessitate being put to sleep to alleviate suffering.
Please think very carefully about adding to current the oversupply situation and the potential for suffering - unless of course you are committed to desexing and keeping the whole litter yourself.
My Own Personal experiences
Both of the following rabbits were my own rabbits and came to me as rescues.
Both suffered due to poor, ad hoc, back yard breeding - having being bred ‘for fun’, because it was cute and for their breeders to make a quick dollar.
Both rabbits suffered intensely and needlessly due to the breeders’ ignorance, selfishness and greed.
Both rabbits’ lives were shortened due to their genetic faults.
Westley
Westley was a very poorly; probably Backyard bred, Cashmere Lop. He was found starving and bewildered in the middle of a main road, having been dumped by his ‘owner’. Around 6 months old, he was severely emaciated, was a solid mass of matts, was heaving with fur mites, and had appalling malocclusion. In fact he was so severely brachycephalic that his face was literally inverted. We took him on and over two weeks removed his matts, had him neutered and had his incisors removed after it became obvious that they were going to grow too fast for regular trimming to be feasible or humane.
The other major and ongoing issue Westley had - most probably attributed to a very poor diet before coming to me, was a ‘broken’ GI system. He regularly suffered GI stasis - around every 2 weeks, throughout his life as well as episodic poopy butt. Over the years we learned to deal with this and optimise his diet to reduce the severity and prevalence. However due to his disposition, any stress - and this included being clipped, would set off an attack.
So for this poor wee boy, life was often a torment.
Westley was the most amazing little bun and I absolutely treasure the 5 1/5 years he was with me as well as all of the lessons he taught me. Westley needed to be clipped monthly due to his very poor coat quality - another result of his poor breeding. Also, living with no front teeth made eating more difficult than it needed to be. He lived with a gut that meant he regularly had to suffer the pain and stress of GI stasis along with the resulting treatment needed to resolve it. The upshot of all of this meant that for him very often, life was not pleasurable or as happy as it would have been had he been a well bred, healthy rabbit. We ultimately lost Westley to Pododermatitis which was caused by his very poor rear end conformation. This was yet another genetic fault caused by poor breeding.
The other major and ongoing issue Westley had - most probably attributed to a very poor diet before coming to me, was a ‘broken’ GI system. He regularly suffered GI stasis - around every 2 weeks, throughout his life as well as episodic poopy butt. Over the years we learned to deal with this and optimise his diet to reduce the severity and prevalence. However due to his disposition, any stress - and this included being clipped, would set off an attack. So for this poor wee boy, life was a often a torment.
Westley was the most amazing little bun and I absolutely treasure the 5 1/5 years he was with me as well as all of the lessons he taught me. Westley needed to be clipped monthly due to his very poor coat quality - another result of his poor breeding. Also, living with no front teeth made eating more difficult than it needed to be. He lived with a gut that meant he regularly had to suffer the pain and stress of GI stasis along with the resulting treatment needed to resolve it. The upshot of all of this meant that for him very often, life was not pleasurable or as happy as it would have been had he been a well bred, healthy rabbit. We ultimately lost Westley to Pododermatitis which was caused by his very poor rear end conformation. This was yet another genetic fault caused by poor breeding.
Matty
This little bun only had 15 short months on this earth. He came to me at the age of 4 1/4 months when a RA&SNZ group member told me he was on TradeMe being given away for free. He was being discarded by his (back yard) breeder because she could not sell him as he was heavily matted and she did not know what to do about his coat.
This lovely wee bun arrived with terrible ropes and plates of matting. The matts were so tight that they had pulled his skin up into the matt and had ripped it. The breeder had been trying to ‘brush out’ the matts ... this would have been appallingly painful for Matty and indeed, even once I got the matts off him - which took over two weeks of painstakingly slow and careful work, he would scream when I touched him in the areas where the matts had been the tightest.
Like Westley, Matty was a Cashmere Lop but he was a genetic throw back having been born to short coated parents. As a result his coat was also of very poor quality and needed to be kept short. This was pure torment for Matty and was extremely stressful for him due to his history. Over the months he did learn to trust that I was not going to hurt him and did stop screaming, but he never really recovered from those early life experiences.
At 12 months as he matured, Matty’s skull changed shape a bit and the molar malocclusion which had already made itself known through molar spurs which needed removing at 5 months during his neuter, returned with a vengeance and he started needing dentals more and more often. In the end the interval between dentals was too short and Matty’s quality of life was suffering so we made the painful decision to let him go peacefully over the Rainbow Bridge to end his torment.
In the months prior to his death, I also discovered that he had a worm burden as well as Coccidia - both the result of poor husbandry on the breeder’s part as well as the conditions he had been bred in. He also had other underlying issues which had been highlighted by blood tests, so this poor little rabbit never really had a chance and was doomed from the start by his poor breeding and genetics.
Other stories that have been shared with us -
I had a mum with a litter of 7. Mum died when they were 4 weeks - so luckily they did not need bottle feeding, but not until hundreds of dollars had been spent on trying to save her. Two kits had died in the first 2 days - as is to be expected, but then every 2 months another died and again involved after hours expensive trips and heartbreak. Only one kit ultimately survived and was kept by the family.
The terrible heartbreak would have been much worse if they had been bred for children to experience.I went to a breeder this evening to look at a male bun for my girl, but everything was dodgy. they didn't have any sort of set up, except about 10 bunnies in one bareish room with some straw on the floor, it was so filthy. the "breeder" wasn't expecting his brother and sister buns (x3) to mate, and there has been a few litters. I tried to take some photos but he got angry at me, so I left. however about 50m down the road, there was a cardboard box with 4 very, very young kits inside, and their mother. they are extremely thin and boney, and very very anxious. the mother has bits of fur missing and seems injured. i called the police immediately and they are dealing with the breeder, but i took the box of bunnies home and have set them up in a warm room with plenty of hay, pellets, herbs, weeds, and toys, with somewhere to sleep too. The police and SPCA were notified.
I saw a post on TradeMe and when I went to go pick him up the person had about 10 cages with over 7 bunnies in each (backyard breeder) was fed bulk food too fatten up and when I emailed the person he said that the mini lops were 5 weeks and ready to go. When I first got him he was no bigger than my hand (I’m a teenager so don’t have big hands lol) and now he’s happy and healthy on a better brand of pellets.
I have one girl... I went to a house because the lady said she might have a girl bun for me... She was over run with bunnies in tiny cages as well as free running everywhere. I was about to leave and she pointed to one girl and said "oh that's a girl, I caught her out of the garden 3weeks ago". The cage she was in was the size of a large cat travel cage, I couldn't leave her there so took her. She's half wild and never wanted to be tamed so she lives a free range "wild bunny" lifestyle in our backyard.. That was 4years ago. She had 7kits the week after we got her.
Copyright 2019 - Jen Herd/Westley’s World