Breeding Taboos for Rabbits

1 Rabbit Breeding Taboos

1. Avoid close inbreeding

Inbreeding is common on many farms, but the offspring tend to be weak, disease-prone, and slow-growing, with lower productivity, vitality, and fur quality. Avoid it whenever possible.

2. Avoid mating too early

Rabbits reach sexual maturity earlier than physical maturity, so a doe in heat is not necessarily ready to breed. Does are usually bred starting at 5 to 6 months, and bucks should be about a month older.

3. Avoid random, excessive mating

A buck should mate no more than twice a day, ideally once, and rest a day after two consecutive days of service. A buck’s total services per year should stay under 60, and does or bucks with serious defects must never be mated. Prime adults produce the most stable, productive offspring.

4. Avoid breeding in summer

Summer is hot and rainy; does breed irregularly and conceive poorly, and the few that conceive often eat less in the heat, producing little milk and stunting kits, sometimes fatally. Surviving kits may later die of coccidiosis after weaning due to weakness. Heat can also cause pregnant does to abort or have difficult labor, and causes bucks’ testicles to shrink with poor semen. Stop breeding in summer.

5. Avoid weaning too early or too late

Weaning too early raises mortality; too late makes kits dependent on milk, impairing digestive enzyme development and slowing growth, and harms the doe. Wean at about 35 to 40 days.

6. Avoid blind mixed-group housing

Mixed housing spreads disease and causes fighting. Group by sex, growth rate, and size, about 4 to 5 per cage, and separate bucks and does once they become sexually active.

7. Avoid poor management

Build a complete management and disease-prevention system based on rabbit behavior, breed, and season: control hutch temperature and humidity, vaccinate on schedule, and enforce biosecurity.