young Rabbits advice

Hi
I have just lost the mother of 5 young rabbits through an unfortunate accident. the young are 10 days old? can you give me any advice on keeping them alive and at hat age do they feed on solids?

If you can, you need to find a foster mum for them because handrearing is virtually impossible. I would suggest contacting rescues in your area to se if they have any nursing mums and also breeders and if you find a responsible and trustworthy one, seeing if they are willin to hlep.

If not, then you will need a teat they can suckle, you will also need to get a mix for them that is appropriate for them (goats milk, evaporated milk, kitty milk replacer, etc, is not ok). Hopefully on www.rabbitsonline.net they would be able to tell you some good supplements and the mixes necessary and how to do it. They have at least one wildlife rehabilitator who handrears a lot of baby wildies who knows a huge amount.

They will need feeding regularly, with hand feeding, probably every 8 hours or so. You will need to stimulate them to go to the toilet using a warm, damp cloth and stroking it over their belly after they feed.

You will need to keep a water bowl and also some food (both pellets and hay) in there all the time from about day 14 (i.e. after all their eyes have opened) because they will, at this age, already be chewing on hay (although not eating it) and they will choose when they are ready to eat those things.

There is some useful handrearing info on the Cottontails website. I hope it's ok to link to it here:

http://www.cottontails-rescue.org.uk/handrear.asp

I'm afraid I don't have any real advice to give, but I just wanted to say there is hope!
I know its different doing it with 5, but my mum hand-reared one of my rabbits when I was younger. I remember the most important thing was persuading her to eat and keeping her warm. She had a heat-pad next to her all the time, or during the day she used a pouch to keep her by mum's chest. She fed her every 4 hours, including during the night.

Only thing is, try and make sure they have a rabbit role-model asap, as ours developed some weird personality traits. Like she wasnt fond of other rabbits at all... and then as soon as she hit puberty she hated all humans except my mum too - as in she would properly attack us, even if we just tried to feed her or stroke her. Other than that I couldn't really pinpoint how she was different, she just seemed to act/behave very differently to the others.

Young Rbbits

Thanks for the advice guys!
All five are doing really well now 3 1/2 weeks old and on solids. all advice paid off. Taken a lot of patiance and attention. feed them every 8-10 hours at first they had to be pursueded, but starting to whein them off the milk now...

regards
Podge