If you are following Money in Agribusiness on Twitter, then you might have seen one of my tweets about my plight with my rabbits only four days after sharing the exciting video of me helping the kindlings suckle the doe after parturition. Early in the morning, four days after parturition I went to check on my rabbits in their hutch and you can imagine my shock when I noticed two of my rabbits missing, including the lactating doe. A neighbor’s dog was responsible for my loss.
Now I had three beautiful kindlings in their cradle waiting to be fed. And believe me I had no idea how. You might’ve read my recent post on feeding orphaned piglets I did after watching a friend of mine struggle with saving his orphaned piglets after loss of sow. But that was different, rabbits was a whole new thing to me. But still, even in my frustration, I still had to do something. I knew if I could save them, which was now the challenge, I would learn from it which is the most important thing in this farming business.
I did some research and found out the best solution was to give the bunnies to a foster mother and solve the problem, but the question was where to get the foster mother. I didn’t have one. The other was to feed them goat milk or buy powdered milk. But there was no goat milk in my area — no one I know keeps dairy goats — and instead of powdered milk I decided to buy fresh cow milk. I did this because, thank goodness the poor babies had had the opportunity to suckle the doe’s high quality milk which contains 15.5% protein, 10.4% fat, 2.5% minerals and 1.9% sugar for four days. And now all I needed was milk to feed them for few more days until they open up their eyes and are ready to be fed on pellets, grass and other feeds.
As I’m doing this post the kindlings are alive and strong and ready to open their eyes in a day or so.
How I feed them the milk? I use a five millimeters syringe which was new and I always keep it clean. I boil the milk, let it cool to finger warm and then feed it to the kindlings.
I started by giving each of them four millimeters which I gradually increased and now I’m giving them 6-8 millimeters thrice a day. So far so good and even my own mom was impressed.
I hope this post would be helpful to another farmer grappling with a similar problem. Don’t let orphaned kindlings die because you don’t know what to do.