The rabbit can abandon the offspring due to mastitis, low air temperature in the room, a state of wild hunting, stress, etc. In this case, you can plant the offspring with another rabbit or artificially feed it.
For what reasons can a female give up her little rabbits? In fact, a lot can affect her desire and unwillingness to feed offspring. Most often, the rabbit abandons her children due to inflammation of the mammary glands and a state of wild hunting.
The main reasons for refusing to feed
- in addition to mastitis and the state of wild hunting, this is a low air temperature in the room;
- insufficient or poor feeding;
- unsatisfactory condition of the premises according to sanitary standards: dirt, the presence of parasites, etc.;
- metabolic problems;
- stress.
If the rabbits are abandoned by their mother and hungry, it is necessary to check the quality of the feed and monitor the nutrition of the rabbit, because in one brood there can be up to 8 rabbits, and it can be difficult to feed such an amount. If the rabbit's body is not replenished with the necessary amount of vitamins and minerals that she loses daily with milk, then she will be forced to abandon feeding offspring, which is doomed to death.
If the air temperature is low in the room where the rabbits are kept, the offspring becomes inactive, the rabbits sit in one place most of the time and soon die. If the cold conditions of keeping are aggravated by poor nutrition of the rabbit, this increases the risk of abandoning the offspring several times. The same applies to conditions under which cleaning and cleaning is rarely carried out in the room: if it is clogged with food debris and animal excrement, parasites will appear, which will also affect the mother's desire not to feed her children.
A metabolic disorder in the rabbit's body can also be one of the reasons why she refuses offspring. The mother's diet must be completely balanced, it is necessary to exclude stressful situations, it is strictly forbidden to move the female from place to place during the birth. How to understand that a rabbit has developed mastitis? On closer inspection, you can see that the skin of the mammary glands has grown and darkened, the nipples have hardened, which means that the animal is constantly in pain. Treating a disease is harder than preventing it.
What to do if it happened
Alternatively, the young rabbits can be added to another rabbit or switch to bottle feeding. You need to feed babies 2-3 times a day with whole cow's milk. You can try to lay the rabbit on its side and put the children on it. She will not constantly be with them, but she may agree to feed.
