All Buns, All The Time

Hey y'all, I've created a Google Drive containing a few of the PDFs of rabbit resources I've collected - hopefully this can serve as a good starting point for anyone looking to learn more about rabbit care/welfare that isn't tainted by misinformation from animal rights groups such as House Rabbit Society. I'll try to update this folder any time I find other resources (things like peer reviewed research and publications by the ARBA and other animal welfare groups)!

Currently in the folder:

ARBA Care Recommendations (ARBA) - A document containing all of the ARBA's rabbit basic care recommendations.

Feeding Meat Rabbits for Free (Megan Hight) - A bit of an outlier but still worth adding, this is a guide created by a homesteader for feeding rabbits a primarily forage-based diet. Note that this person is based in the southeastern USA, so while there is a lot of great information here, it may not be relevant to everyone.

Rabbit Feeding and Nutrition (Peter R. Cheeke) - Literally an entire textbook solely on the feeding and nutrition of rabbits.

Rabbit Production 9th Edition (Steven D. Lukefahr et al.) - A previous edition of the Rabbit Production textbook.

Rabbit Production 10th Edition (Steven D. Lukefahr et al.) - A textbook on just about everything you could possibly want to know about raising and caring for rabbits!

Storey's Guide to Raising Rabbits 5th Edition (Bob Bennett) - One of the most commonly recommended starter guides for raising rabbits, great for beginners and fairly easy to read.

I mentioned Sirius' habit of sucking on my fingers lmao. He goes between sucking on them and chewing on them 🤣

Oh they definitely were getting plenty of nutrition, they're on a high protein feed and they had three (at one point four, then three once their mom got moved) feeders, two of which are big j-feeders that I kept full at all times and the other two were smaller crocks that had extra just in case the j-feeders ran out for some reason, plus Timothy pellets and occasional loose hay on the side. Pleeeenty of good food lol.

They started chewing on their mom's face while they were still in the nest box and Electra would peek her head over to check on them, and she just let them do it. So I think it just became habit suuuuper early on when they were still 100% milk-fed (and we all know Electra was producing plenty of milk lmao). And then once mom was gone they were like. "Well who else's fur are we supposed to pull out??" And just started turning toward each other lol.

Initially I tried separating out the two that I thought were making the most trouble, leaving just four in the massive cage, but they still just kept at it so. At that point I figured I might as well just split them all up since making more space was going to mean putting the divider back into the big cage. Pairs would've been nice but I worry that with each of them having spots of fur pulled out, they'll just kind of compulsively gravitate toward those spots and keep at it even as pairs (they seemed to be hyper-focussing on those spots while grooming each other as it is which. Makes sense lol).