Rabbit & Cavy News

Today I finally installed our new Rabbit Care booklet on our website.  You can find it here:

http://www.lopsandcavies.com/pdf/Rabbit_Care_Breeding_Book.pdf

This is the same booklet we hand out to new pet rabbit owners and new breeders who buy our stock, and it covers basic rabbit care for both pet owners and breeders.

We cover basic cages requirements and best places to keep your rabbit, along with tips for keeping bunny comfortable in a variety of weather conditions.

We also cover feeding, with info on rabbit pellets, hay and supplements, plus we discuss the importance of water.

We touch on rabbit behavior and habits and how to keep your rabbit happy with toys, excercise and play.

Several pages cover rabbit health and illness, and how to check your rabbit for health problems.

For new rabbit breeders, we have information on basic rabbit breeding and kindling plus tips for making pedigrees, culling rabbits and tattooing.

Lastly we offer descriptions of rabbit club types, how to join and how to show your rabbit at both 4-H fairs and ARBA rabbit shows.

We hope this booklet is helpful to you - our other book was downloaded a lot, despite it not being well-optimized (and very slow-loading) so we hope this recent improvement will make this booklet easier to download for those rabbit owners who want to use it!

Have a happy Turkey Day! 

Cathy

Finally, I’ve taken the time to run acrobat distiller and optimize the currently super large file of the Rabbit Care Booklet located on our website.

Initially I made this booklet to hand out to all new rabbit breeders and rabbit owners that buy from us.  Our booklet contains a lot of basic rabbit care information, health and illness info, feeding and grooming tips, plus how-to’s for beginning rabbit breeders. 

Soon after I made this booklet, I decided to put it on our website so others could use it too. 

In my haste to get it installed in my website, I neglected to optimize it for use on the web, making this booklet a very slow downloading file for users, and I am sure, frustrating….

The new file will load much much faster for you, plus I’ve added some info and modified a bit too. 

I’ll be putting this new file into my website either late tonight or tomorrow morning, providing I don’t have some other crazy task come ahead of it.

The old large file was downloaded an aweful lot, so I am hoping the new optimized Rabbit Care handout will be even more useful!

Visit our website tomorrow to see our new file! 

Kelly just came in and announced that she bred her nice agouti buck, Thunder, to her broken chinchilla Garrett doe, Star.  She also bred Talon to her other Garrett doe, Acorn.  these should be some very nice crosses - and we are very excited! 

Wow, I think we might have a lot of baby bunnies in December! 

Cathy  LaReau Lops & Cavies

Last night I bred several of our does:  I bred three of my newer Polish does, two chocolates and one black.  I can’t tell you how excited I am about this breed.  Not only are they the perfect size for both our rabbitry and for me, but I find them to be quite funny little rabbits.  I am really looking forward to these litters and showing my own Polish rabbits in 2007!

We also bred some of Jody’s Holland does.  We bred Shorty to Candycane and the Narragon ’sweety’ doe, and bred Muggins to the doe that Tina Zabler gave us at the last show - this should be a nice cross, with Muggin’s exceptional crown, ears and bone! 

We also bred a doe to Kelly’s only Holland Lop, Zack - he’s not a showable color and he’s about a ounce over the top weight limit for Hollands, but he’s got just an awesome body, ears and head, plus an outstanding personality.  The doe we chose to breed to him produces tiny rabbits, so we are keeping our fingers crossed and hoping we don’t create a mess of strange Hollands with this cross.

Last month we went through all our Holland Lops.  We did need to step back and take a serious look at our Hollands and decide which ones can contribute exceptional qualities to our herd. 

It can be difficult to cull with the lines we have - almost all are very slow developers and many don’t mature until they are well into adulthood.  As an example - YRA Shorty;  we got him from Eric Henning when Shorty was just a little guy - probably 3-4 months old at the most.  Other than his obviously short body, he was quite an ugly Holland with major airplane ears and just a plain underdeveloped type to him.  Eric kept promising he’d turn out nice, “be patient” (there’s that evil word again - Patience, this word haunts many Holland breeders)

Well two years after we got Shorty, this rabbit placed 2nd senior broken buck at the 2005 ARBA Convention!  He deserved it too - he is an absolutely gorgeous Holland Lop, but he spent his earlier days as quite a strange looking creature. 

Well I am certain I’ll need another dose of patience for our youngsters and upcoming litters.

Back to work -

Cathy

Last week, we were finally graced with YRA Shorty’s first litter….actually only one kit as one littermate was a peanut, and the other littermate was born dead.

A fat little broken tort, and the doe (LaReau’s 57LL) is being an excellent mom!  Very excited about this baby - can’t wait for more.