:lol: i agree! i am pushing it a bit with the santa hats 4 months on! :lol:i like yours with the grass etc! i will get some new piccies they hijack you again for more siggy making!
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Wild rabbit
- Thread starter Justine
- Start date
:lol: i agree! i am pushing it a bit with the santa hats 4 months on! :lol:i like yours with the grass etc! i will get some new piccies they hijack you again for more siggy making!
Hi :wave: I've got 4 wild rabbits that I hand reared from 4 days 3 does and a buck. They all have great characters and love playing with toys. 2 of the does are fine to pick up and will sit on your lap and grind their teeth but the other 2 prefer it if you sit on the floor with them and they will come over for nose rubs . They are about 7 months old now and are still tiny. I'm hoping to bond the buck with 1 of his sisters once he's neutered but his testicles haven't dropped yet :shock: hopefully it won't be too long before they do
Emily
. They are about 7 months old now and are still tiny. I'm hoping to bond the buck with 1 of his sisters once he's neutered but his testicles haven't dropped yet :shock: hopefully it won't be too long before they do Emily
I'm hoping to bond the buck with 1 of his sisters once he's neutered but his testicles haven't dropped yet :shock: hopefully it won't be too long before they do
Maybe that is a wild-boy trait then. Scamp was a very late developer too :lol:
:wave: Here are some pics of my indoor set up - minus the rabbits as they are outside in their run in the sunshine! (The hutch that is in there is where foxglove lives at the moment and is not normally there.) THis is the biggest dog cage you can get wwith a shelf built in and covered in lino type flooring and then the run you can get from zooplus attached. They did have free range when i am at home til a week ago when my new sofa arrived (they ate the last one and the curtains). My boyfriend is building a house onto their outside run this weekend so that in the daytimes over the summer they can go outside all day and then I want to get a shed with lots of shelves/levels for Nettle to climb for them to move into permanetly eventually and then i can go and sit in there with them - am in a rented annexe of a farm house so got to speak to landlady and work out where shed and run combo could go hence the delay on that project.
ps the cardboard at the back and side of the dog cage did go nearly up to the top but you can see where nettle has chewed it down and made holes in it! he chews holes in the bottoms of the boxes on the top of the dog cage from underneath as well. Barney does though too - he has massacred their cat tunnel - now has about 400 entrances to it! But it keeps them busy! :shock:
pps nettle jumps from sitting on to the top of the dog cage easily so they are great jumpers.
pps nettle jumps from sitting on to the top of the dog cage easily so they are great jumpers.
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dont anyone jump on me for saying this but when i volenteered at a wildlife rescue centre we re-habilitated the buns and re-released although they were adult or young rabbits and did not need hand rearing (during my time there) i wondered if the same could be done for the hand reared ones? could they not be slowly and graduly re released?
ps we did not have many rabbits in generally it was birds and hedgehogs (we did have a badger and some polecats and the occasional fox too)
ps we did not have many rabbits in generally it was birds and hedgehogs (we did have a badger and some polecats and the occasional fox too)
Yes they are indoors at the moment although they go outside in runs during the day . They have chewed everything incl the curtains, the carpet and the wallpaper and they also spend their life digging and tearing the newspaper in they cage although the boy doesn't wreck his cage as much as the girls . How heavy is scamp now Tamsin? Mine are all tiny compared to our other rabbits even the netherland dwarf is bigger
. They have chewed everything incl the curtains, the carpet and the wallpaper and they also spend their life digging and tearing the newspaper in they cage although the boy doesn't wreck his cage as much as the girls . How heavy is scamp now Tamsin? Mine are all tiny compared to our other rabbits even the netherland dwarf is bigger I guess so. With Wobbles I had no choice due to his car accident making him wobbly for weeks. The guy at dorset wildlife rescue said with Nettle it was up to me (and i posted on here and got lots of conflicting opinions)- ie they make good pets as pretty much rabbits are rabbits and the average life expectancy of a wild bunny is 1 year old so it was a 50/50 argument ie they could get to go free and be wild with wild bunny friends but have the down sides that go with that or become a pet and have a longer/easier life but aren't out there charging around fields. I debated and agonised for ages but decided to keep Nettle in the end (esp as he had sat in nettles for 24 hours not moving). With Foxglove he/she was full of holes so had to be kept to heal and then was so tame that it made sense to rehome him/her domestically so I took him/her. The dorset wildlife bloke did say baby bunnies are easier to release into warrens as rabbits ignore babies whereas an older one would get attacked.
I found it a really hard decision whether to release them or not and still feel guilty now as to whether I have made the right decision, although 1 of the girls has got malocclusion and needs to have her incisors burred regularly so couldn't have been realeased. Also all the wild rabbits around my area either have myxi or are shot by farmers so I felt they would have a safer life becoming domesticated . They don't seem too bothered as they were so young when I hand reared them that they don't know any different.
. They don't seem too bothered as they were so young when I hand reared them that they don't know any different.I hand reared Merry for about 3 weeks before weaning her, I did debate releasing her, but my concern was her diet while I had her, she was fed milk for about 2 weeks and then weaned off on to rabbit food and hay. I may be wrong but I thought an incorrect diet while young especially could cause serious teeth problems later in life, also bone development in a young rabbit could well be affected. Anyway, based on this we kept her, at 6 months, while Mike was putting her into the run she jumped out of his hands and broke a hind leg. The vets x-rayed and advised PTS for her welfare,had I been on this forum then I would have gone for amputation but neither I nor my vets were aware this was an option. I do wonder if this accident was partly due to her diet and bone density. It was one of the hardest weeks of our life, one of our 15 year old cats was in the vets on a drip at the same time and ended up being PTS a week later. Thats why I probably wouldn't release a young wild rabbit now, I would keep it as a pet, as they seem quite happy.
Yeh they do seem very tiny. Mine certainly look smaller than most of the wild rabbits you see in the wild, although they might still have a bit of growing to do
I think that about Nettle - lots smaller than wild ones in the wild - just tried to weigh him and think he is about 1.2kg.
I found it a really hard decision whether to release them or not and still feel guilty now as to whether I have made the right decision, although 1 of the girls has got malocclusion and needs to have her incisors burred regularly so couldn't have been realeased. Also all the wild rabbits around my area either have myxi or are shot by farmers so I felt they would have a safer life becoming domesticated
Wild rabbits rarely if ever survive in the wild. They are killed by other rabbits when they try to rejoin a colony (esp if they are male) or driven out to live alone, where upon they are killed by predators. If you release a rabbit on it's own you are condemning it death.
