7 Unique Ways to Keep Your Rabbits Healthy and Maximize Profits
It’s easy to keep rabbits healthy and to maintain them throughout the rearing period.
Rabbit farming is a very good and lucrative business, and also a good means of earning a decent livelihood, due to its prolific nature.
If you feed them well and take good care of them. They have a way of paying you back by multiplying geometrically, and before you realize it they are all over the place. Making you smile to the bank at the end of the day.
You can only achieve these multiplying effects of rabbits if you passionately take good care of them meticulously.
For you to keep rabbits healthy, so many factors have to be put into consideration. Factors such as their feeding, shelter, sanitation, etc.
Rabbits farming I can say is an escape route particularly for those farmers who are running away or are frustrated with either poultry or other livestock farming, due to the high price of feed or other factors combined together.
Another factor is for those farmers, who want to start on a low budget because farming particularly poultry farming is much more expensive than rabbit farming.
This may be due to the fact that rabbits can feed on a wide variety of food ranging from vegetables, leaves, treats, leftovers, hay, grass, pellets, etc. with fewer health challenges.
Unlike poultry birds, they are not restricted to a well-formulated feed in order for them to thrive.
Provided you introduce the feed to them gradually, and is not harmful or toxic to their digestive system.
This article will help you understand in simple terms how to keep rabbits healthy, and reduce the incidence of diseases to the barest minimum, and maximize your profits:
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To Keep Rabbits Healthy, Provide Your Rabbit with Quality Nutrition
People normally have this notion that rabbits eat virtually everything, by just introducing it to them, with time they will get used to it.
In as much as this statement is true extreme caution has to be taken in order to avoid unnecessary losses. Emphasis should be placed on quality rather than quantity. If you want to keep rabbits healthy.
Rabbits eat a wide variety of leaves and leafy vegetables such as green leaves, bitter leaves, and other leaves such as mango leaves, banana leaves, etc.
Care must be taken at the same time to avoid giving them toxic or poisonous leaves that may cause harm to them.
Be very observant once they are avoiding particular leaves stop giving them immediately, or if they are having a watery stool it is advisable to stop immediately.
Rabbits do very well when you provide them with good quality hay and green fresh grasses.
Hay and grass should constitute a larger chunk of their diets than treats and manufactured pellets.
They should be served treats once in a while but not as their major diets, you should serve them just a handful of pellets like in the money followed by quality hay throughout.
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Provide Them with Good Ventilation and Sunlight
In as much as they are like nocturnal animals i.e, they are more active at night they still need some sunlight.
Not the very hot sunlight with high temperatures could be detrimental to their health.
In order to keep rabbits healthy, you need to provide a good shade over their house or cage, to reduce the intensity of the sunlight. And a conducive rearing environment should be provided.
To also cushion the effect of the excruciating heat on your rabbits.
Especially if you live in tropical climates such as the West African region particularly Northern Nigeria.
Where afternoon temperature can reach almost 430C.
This can make them very uncomfortable and may even affect their production during such season.
Please provide them with plenty of water at all times, to reduce the effects of extreme weather conditions.
In addition to the provision of shade over their cages provide them with adequate cross ventilation.
And plenty of free flow of air to avoid the build-up of poisonous gases such as ammonia, and also prevents stuffy environment.
If these two things are well taken care of, it will help keep rabbits healthy. And also improve their immune system.
To fight against common rabbit diseases such as coccidiosis etc.
In Order To Keep Rabbits Healthy, Avoid Overcrowding
The number of rabbits in each hutch should be regulated or limited to avoid overcrowding.
If you keep them on the floor reduce their numbers so as to keep rabbits healthy.
The floor material should be easy to wash, keep clean and dry to reduce harboring bacteria and germs.
The more they are in a particular hutch or cage the more they litter their cage with manure. And if you are the lazy type it will translate into a big problem for them.
Constructing their hutch in such a way that it will self-clean itself, will make your work easier and this will keep rabbits healthy as well.
As mention earlier, too much manure or faces without adequate cleaning can generate poisonous gas which will adversely affect the health of your rabbits.
READ MORE: 6 Unique Advantages of Rabbit Rearing over Poultry farming
Selecting a Good Breed
If you want to starts rabbits farming go for breeds that have high disease resistance. Good productivity with superior performance over other breeds.
Breeds such as Dutch rabbits breed, New Zealand breed, or the American rabbits are all very good breeds with good disease resistance. And reasonable life span when given proper care and feeding.
Protecting Your Rabbits from Predators
Keeping rabbits healthy involves putting in place security measures that will prevent death and injuries from predator animals.
Protecting your rabbits from predators such as dog’s particularly stray dogs, and wild cats that are capable of attacking them especially at night.
These predators are capable of consuming your rabbits within a blink of an eye, always have a protective barrier protecting your rabbits. So that they will not have access to your rabbits.
Another very important predator to note is the giant rats that are capable of killing and eating up your kittens.
From personal experience on one or two occasions, I have seen pieces of baby rabbits scattered in different places such as car bonnet or under or beside their cage.
When building your rabbit’s hutch endeavor to invest in a standard and sturdy structure.
Eliminating and controlling the rat population around your farm and properties becomes a necessity.
So as to reduce the level of damage or losses to your rabbit farm.
To keep rabbits healthy, rats must be kept completely away, or eliminated because they are vectors and carriers of diseases.
READ also: Dangers of Rats, How to Eliminate Them from Your Farm, Home, and Property
Don’t Introduce Strange and Sick Rabbits to Your Flock If You Want To Keep Rabbits Healthy
In other words introduce only healthy rabbits into your flock, particularly if you want to increase the number of rabbits, and expand your farm.
From experience some years back when we started rabbits farming and wanted to increase and expand our farm.
We went to a near buy market where they sell rabbits and bought some rabbits not knowing their medical history.
Unable to detect the presence of a very disturbing disease known as Menges (highly contagious rabbit’s disease).
The disease spread and affected the remaining of our rabbits at the end of the day, we incur some serious losses.
The best way to keep rabbits healthy is to avoid any situation that could lead to infection.
Unlike poultry, rabbits usually have less incidence of diseases with little research and available drugs for treatment compared to poultry.
Therefore prevention is far better than cure in rabbit farming.
Handling Rabbits with Care
Most people make the mistake of lifting, and handling rabbits with their ears. It is very wrong.
Imagine somebody holding and pulling your ear how painful it could be, just because they cannot talk does not mean they don’t feel the pain they do and it is very wrong to handle rabbits by the ear.
Hold rabbits from the flesh over their back and support it with your hands it helps a lot in reducing pain.
Treats them with care and at all costs avoid animal cruelty in order to keep rabbits healthy.
Always treat them humanely so as to avoid unnecessary injury to them.
READ MORE: Is There Really Market for Rabbits?
Conclusion
To keep rabbits healthy requires deliberate effort on your part. Customers would always be attracted to healthy and beautiful-looking rabbits.
Such rabbits would always attract good prices, have a ready market, and good value from customers.
Particularly those that consume them as meat. Nobody will like to buy or be attracted to sick, malnourished emaciated rabbits, that don’t really look good or have market value.
Cutting corners will not keep rabbits healthy and well, in fact, it will create more health complications for your rabbits, particularly if they do not have the right kind of nutrition.
Providing an enabling environment and proper nutrition will keep them healthy throughout the rearing period.
