How To Raise And Manage Rabbits

The raising and management of domestic rabbits include the following aspects:

Site selection: Choose a quiet, ventilated, dry, and pollution-free place to ensure sufficient light and air circulation. The farm should be divided into breeding areas, living areas for breeders, and feces disposal areas, with clear separation between each area. 1

Breed selection: Choose breeds that are healthy, adaptable, and easy to raise. Young rabbits should be selected to be over 30 days old to ensure survival rate.

Feeding: Rabbits are herbivorous animals and should eat grass, vegetables, fruits, etc. as their staple food, with an appropriate amount of concentrated feed. Feed three times a day, and it is appropriate to feed 70% full each time. In addition, keep water sources clean and provide sufficient drinking water.

Daily management: Regularly inspect the rabbit house, observe the health status of the rabbits, and detect and deal with problems in a timely manner. Get regular vaccinations to prevent diseases. Clean the rabbit house regularly and keep the environment hygienic.

Rabbit cage design: Rabbit cages should be designed with a mesh bottom to facilitate the disposal of excrement. Keeping the rabbit cage dry with wood chips or grass padding can help control odors and the spread of disease.

Drinking water management: Rabbits are very sensitive to drinking water. Each adult rabbit needs to drink about 200-300 ml of water a day. Therefore, it is necessary to maintain sufficient clean drinking water in the rabbit house, and regularly replace and clean the drinking fountains.

Housing area construction: The housing area must be disinfected regularly to maintain air circulation, and pay attention to regularly cleaning rabbit droppings and dead rabbits to prevent the spread of diseases.

Disease prevention and control: Common diseases during rabbit breeding include infectious hepatitis, coccidiosis, hookworm, etc. The mental state and appetite of rabbits should be closely observed, and any abnormalities should be dealt with promptly. Vaccinate rabbits regularly and do a good job in disease prevention and control.

1. Stocking

Free range feeding is one of the most widespread feeding methods. That is, rabbits graze in large open areas for long periods of time, allowing them to eat and move around freely. This method is suitable for raising meat rabbits and is beneficial to the production and quality of rabbit meat. Rabbits can freely eat nutritious and fresh feed, breathe fresh air, receive sufficient sunlight and exercise, and grow and develop rapidly. Its disadvantages are: difficult to manage, susceptible to infectious and parasitic diseases, difficult to control due to mutual antagonism, and difficult to accumulate fertilizer.

The configuration of the stocking field can be designed according to the natural conditions and the land. Generally, a masonry wall is built around the foundation. The wall is one meter high, and a one-meter-high bamboo fence is connected to the wall. Rabbits can jump out to prevent pests from invading. The foundation of the fence should also be one meter deep. This is to prevent rabbits from burrowing and escaping. Separate sections of the site to sow pasture. Cut off all evergreen trees and deciduous trees around the fence where rabbits can eat. In order to cover up the darkness, the location should be selected In a relatively dry place, use soil to form a small hill in the center of the site, and use bricks and stones to build a rabbit hole. Several entrances and exits can be opened in the rabbit hole where rabbits live. The hole is slightly downward to prevent rainwater from entering the hole. A short straw shed is built in the field to protect the rabbits from rain and sunlight. Feed troughs, straw racks, buckets and other feeds should be set up under the shed so that they can be raised in rainy days or when natural feed is insufficient.

For free-range rabbits, in spring and summer, the pasture is luxuriant and can meet the general nutritional needs. Usually, even if no other nutrients are provided, clean drinking water is provided every day and salt water is only fed once a week. In other seasons, it must be appropriately fed according to the growth status of the pasture. Supplementary feed.

Once a disease occurs in free-range rabbits, especially infectious diseases, due to the difficulty of temporary control, the breeder must carefully observe and inspect the rabbits. If any sick rabbits are found, they should be taken out in time, isolated, raised, and treated to avoid affecting the entire group. The places where infectious diseases occur must be thoroughly disinfected and rabbits must be kept free for a short period of time.

2. Fence feeding

Fence breeding refers to building fences randomly outdoors or indoors, and raising groups of rabbits in pens. This is a better group breeding method, and it has made significant progress compared with the free-range method.

Movable wood feeding can unify the advantages of stocking and fence feeding, making a mobile fence, moving it to any location, and setting up a fence where the pasture is lush. The advantages of fence feeding are that it can save manpower, material resources, and financial resources, is easy to manage, and breeds in a planned way, allowing rabbits to get sufficient exercise, fresh air, and sunlight, and promoting their faster growth and development; the disadvantage is that it is difficult to grasp the quantitative The spread of diseases is difficult to control due to poor breeding, and bites caused by fighting between animals are prone to occur.

As with free-range breeding, all male rabbits except those used in the species are castrated and bred. In order to maintain the cleanliness of the environment and control the occurrence and prevalence of diseases, the place should be cleaned every day, the indoor fence should be raised, the grass should be replaced every 3.5 days, cleaned, and then disinfected regularly. Be careful not to change the feeder layer on the outdoor movable fence and not to run outside the house. It can be considered that areas and farmers who temporarily and unconditionally perform cage nutrition adopt this feeding method.

In order to improve the quality of rabbits and improve product quality, when using fence feeding methods, they should be actively raised in separate pens. That is, well-bred male rabbits and pregnant mothers should not be raised in separate pens. For other rabbits, male and female rabbits should be separated. When feeding, it is necessary to effectively control the occurrence of turbulence and blood source mixing. In addition, the spread of disease, prevalence and parasitic infections can be reduced. In addition to cleaning and disinfection, fecal isolation beds should be gradually laid under the shed in places where conditions permit to reduce the chance of infection.

3. Cage feeding

Cage nutrition is to raise rabbits in cages. Most domestic and foreign rabbits adopt this feeding method, especially breeding rabbits. Cage nutrition is the best of all feeding practices and has proven to provide complete control over all stages of rabbit feeding and management. For the growth and development of rabbits, it plays a particularly significant role in the improvement and improvement of breeds and the prevention and treatment of diseases.

Depending on the location of the rabbit cage, cage feeding can be divided into indoor cage feeding and outdoor cage feeding. Indoor cage feeding involves placing rabbit cages indoors and raising rabbits indoors. In this way, it is easy to manage during the rainy season, easy to keep warm in winter, and generally easy to prevent animals from being harmed. Outdoor cage feeding is to place rabbit cages outdoors and raise rabbits in the open air. This feeding method enables rabbits to exercise under hot and cold conditions, has strong vitality and resistance, and has excellent performance in adapting to harsh environments. However, in the coldest winter and hottest summer, you should still pay attention to keeping warm and cool.

Although the construction cost of cage materials is relatively high, the investment cost is high and it requires labor and time. In particular, indoor cages require a lot of labor to clean every day and must be disinfected regularly. However, the advantages of cages are particularly high and create It has good economic benefits and should be actively promoted and popularized.

The common requirement for both cages is that the place where the rabbit cage is placed should be high and dry, and the bottom of the cage should have an appropriate height from the ground to prevent moisture. It is best to face south to maintain ventilation and light, prevent direct sunlight in summer and cold wind in winter. Baby rabbits and young rabbits have a lot of activity and require regular exercise to promote growth and health. Therefore, it is best to establish a sports ground adjacent to the rabbit cage inside the rabbit to facilitate feeding and management.

4. Cave Feeding

Hole feeding is a way of raising rabbits in holes. Cave feeding can greatly save basic materials, not only reduce the workload of breeding managers, but also conforms to the rabbit's primitive soil cave-dwelling living habits, and can avoid or reduce the infection and occurrence of common diseases. Due to the small change in underground temperature, a certain normal temperature environment can be maintained in both severe winter and midsummer. Therefore, winter delivery can avoid the freezing to death and frostbite of rabbits and the "suspended milk" phenomenon of nursing mothers. In spring and summer, moisture comes out of the cellar and becomes cooler, which is not conducive to rabbit fertility. The female rabbits raised in the cave were born deep in the cave, so the number and lactation status of the rabbits were not checked.