The rabbits are multiplying.
Last summer, we had a family meeting, and decided to have no more baby bunnies. Since we try to raise all of our own meat, we’ve had to learn to butcher. We raise rabbits, chickens, and a couple of pigs for meat. But we’ve started eating a lot less meat, and, while rabbit is a good lean meat, we like it only rarely now that we actually know each and every animal we eat. We’ve decided to eat meat once or twice a week, and so we didn’t need to have any more rabbit babies for a while.
This decided, we put Maurice, our boy rabbit, in with his favorite girl rabbit, Poofy, the one who never did get pregnant in the three or so years we had her. The other two females (Sylvia and Bonnie) get along well, so they got to room together too. They like to cuddle.
Poofy and Maurice had spent those three years trying to be in the same cage. Poofy would chew through her chicken wire and sit by Maurice’s pen. We’d reinforce her home only to have Maurice chew through his roof support to get out and into her cage. Sometimes they both would get out and have romantic weekends together until we could catch them both. They never left the chicken pasture, and they were fairly easy to catch— when they wanted to be caught.
Poofy had ample opportunity to get pregnant, but it never took. When we finally decided to stop raising rabbits for meat, we made a big double pen for them to retire into. It was two separate pens, connected with a hardware cloth tunnel, so they both had their own space.
However, they had only been together about 5 months, when Poofy had a litter. Shortly after, Maurice died. It was sad, because she obviously missed him, and we were all fond of him. It was in January, and we enjoyed bringing Poofy and the babies indoors to play with them and give them treats during the most miserable winter weather.
But the baby rabbits grew quickly. We discussed whether to butcher them, even though we have plenty of meat. We decided that we would if we had to, but that would be our second option. Around Valentine’s day, we put an ad on Craigslist, and found homes for them as pets, since we had handled them and they were pretty tame. We sighed a relieved and satisfied sigh when the last baby bunny got a home, but we also made sure that Poofy got extra attention, in case she was lonely.
After a couple weeks, we put Sylvia and Bonnie in the double cage with Poofy, thinking she might like the company. It didn’t work out. At first, Poofy would thump her hind feet in anger whenever Sylvia or Bonnie tried to come through the tunnel to her side of the cage. Then she started sitting outside their nesting box and wouldn’t let them out to eat or drink, so we took the tunnel off to make it back into two separate cages, and patched the holes where the tunnel had been with hardware cloth. Life settled down in the chicken yard and in the rabbit pens.
Until the baby bunnies appeared about a week ago.
Four tiny babies appeared in Sylvia and Bonnie’s pen. The first thing we did was to check to make sure that Bonnie and Sylvia were both girls.
They were.
Then we watched to see which one was the mother, but we couldn’t tell, because both seemed to be mothering the babies. A few days later three more babies appeared, so we assume that both rabbits were pregnant, and gave birth a few days apart.
We had no idea how the rabbits could have gotten pregnant, until today.
I went out to feed the rabbits, and found a really big rabbit stuck halfway in and halfway out of Poofy’s cage. It was a large brown rabbit, and he had tried to force himself into the cage where the wire had been patched from the tunnel. Poofy was repeatedly kicking his face with her hind feet, so he had tried to back out, and gotten stuck. I’m guessing he is the father of the other baby rabbits too.
Bonnie and Sylvia seem content to raise their babies together, and Poofy wants no part of this new interloper, so the Rogue is in a pen away from the other rabbits.
I know a few people on our little road that raise rabbits. I’ll take this fellow around tomorrow and see if anyone is missing a big buck. If we can’t find his home, he’ll stay, but he’s going to have to start living a celibate lifestyle. I know it is April Fool’s Day tomorrow. I feel like the rabbits celebrated it early, and the joke is on us.