who's the daddy, & erm mummy!

Hi my work thought it would be nice to have some rabbits so they rescued 5 rabbits from a few different places. 1 pair of sisters, 1 pair of speyed sisters and a single stray doe. Or so they were told. The manager of that area came to me as I do have quite a knowledge of keeping rabbits because 1 of them was pulling out its fur. So I checked them and found we actually had 3 girls and 2 boys! Both males clearly un-neutered and they were fighting not pulling its own hair out. As I had been told by the rescue centre the 1st 2 had been speyed we only took 1 female and 1 male out and seperated them. Obviously she had a litter. Then one morning we find out actually the other 2 arn't speyed as we found 4 dead kits in the hutch. Not knowing which doe they belonged to we separated the last 3 as the likelihood was the other one hadn't been speyed either and was pregnant aswell. Both of those does built nests and I thought the one who had already birthed a litter was confused and a few days later there was babies, in BOTH nests. How is this possible? Can they stagger the birth over a few days? Also can they carry from 2 different donors?

When you say 'rescued' presumably you don't mean from rescue centres but taken from general public who no longer wanted the rabbits?

It could be one of the does had a difficult birth and wasn't finished when you found the dead ones? Or one had a large litter and used both nests to give birth in? I don't know for sure. Not sure if you ever will know for sure.

Get them to contact the rescue centre over the spayed rabbits, since they're clearly not been spayed! Not sure what they can do about it, might offer to take in the babies if they're good but made a mistake, but might make them less likely to blindly accept people who say they're spayed, if that's what happened.

We got the 2 pairs from 2 different local independant rabbit rescues. The 5th one was a stray that was brought to us by the person that found him after getting our details from one of the rescues. One pair were supposed to be 2 sisters that had lived together and are both over a year old. One of which is infact a male. When we found out the doe could be pregnant I contacted the other rescue to find out if it was them that got the other pair spayed but was informed they came in as a 'spayed' pair so it was just taking their word for it.

As for the 15 kits we now have there are over 500 staff, many of them are very keen to rehome some of them, as am I. The mums I am hoping to keep them with their daughters and try to pair up the bucks in new homes (with them being neutered) the exsisting bucks are booked in to be done and suitable wives will be sought. One of the rescues has offered to help should suitable, forever homes not be found.