French Lop Housing, Care and Breeding

French Lop are a large, commercial-type of rabbit in which the adults can reach weights of 16 lbs and over!  They have an overall thick, stocky appearance with heavy bones, large bulldog-type heads and thick, long, lop ears.  Personalities among different rabbits can vary but generally this is a fairly gentle, playful breed which can become quite endearing to their owners.  My daughter, Kelly, raised these giants successfully and below we'll tell you how we took care of ours:

Housing French Lops

French Lops require large cages - we had ours in stacking cages that were 36' x 36' x18", and we kept juniors and some less-active adults in 24" x36" x18" cages.  Our French Lop cages had the galvanized-after wire flooring in the standard 1" x1/2" size and we also used floor support brackets in the larger cages to help support their weight and prevent the cage floors from sagging.  Kelly used the plastic resting mats for some of the largest rabbits too although they weren't necessary- they don't seem prone to 'sore hock' problems. 

We used heavy crocks for the water and food bowls - the wide ones that hold a lot.  During winter, when the water bowls were in danger of freezing, we'd switch to using the large plastic clip-on style water bowls, but luckily, our insulated rabbitry building rarely allowed the water to freeze.  We cleaned and disinfected water bowls quite often - at least once a week during winter, and more often during warm weather.

Feeding French Lops

Kelly's French Lops were fairly easy to feed compared to our other breeds - I don't recall them being very picky eaters at all, like my Holland Lops were.  We fed both Purina Show Chow in the blue bag, which has 16 percent protein, and Purina Professional Formula in the gray bag which has 18 percent protein.  They seemed to do fine on either feed but Kelly usually supplemented with our own show conditioner mix of calf manna, black oil sunflower seeds, rolled oats, rolled barley and Omelene (horse feed). 

Most of her French Lops ate between 1 and 1 1/2 cups of feed each day, broken down into morning and night feedings.  Kelly emptied and refilled all water bowls nightly too - we like the idea of fresh water available all the time.

We fed hay every night without fail.  Many of the French Lops preferred the stalky marsh grass/oat type hay whereas the Hollands liked the finer grass hay.  They all really liked alfalfa hay of course, but our hay choice was usually limited to what we had available for the horses, so it varied considerably throughout the year.  The French Lops each got a large handful nightly and would eat it gone by morning.

Kelly had them spoiled too - she gave all her rabbits a slice of fresh banana every morning and they all just went nuts over this!   What started out as purely a treat kind of evolved into an indicator of illness for all our rabbits - any rabbit that didn't eat the morning banana was carefully inspected and monitored.  We rarely had health issues but when we did, we were able to catch them early because of this unlikely monitoring system.....

The French Lops did very well on this diet and Kelly had beautifully-conditioned show rabbits with lush, thick fur coats.  From memory, our intestinal problems were few; we only had one case of mucoid enteropathy and two French Lops with woolblock on all those years. 

French Lop Health

Kelly's French Lops were a hardy bunch of rabbits with very few health issues.  Probably our single biggest health issue we had related to their eyes.  Most of Kelly's rabbits had the very large bulldog-type heads, where is was difficult to even see their eyes.  A few of the older rabbits that we had purchased from others had problems with chronic weepy eyes.  In the beginning, we took affected rabbits into the vet (even different vets) for treatment and testing but no one was found to have a systemic disease that would cause the weepy eye problems.  We tried a whole gamut of eye drops and ointments, from the standard triple antibiotic eye ointment to the expensive ciprofloxacin human eye drops, and everything in between, and the condition would eventually clear up - only to return later on which frustrated us greatly.  If we did not treat at all, the condition never worsened.  This only happened with some of our French Lops, others were completely unaffected.

One year, when we went to nationals, many of the French Lops we observed had this same condition - I'm not talking about about extreme weepy eye where the animal has a thick discharge and severely infected-looking eyes, but a milder version, where the front corner of the eye is clearly irritated and tears spill over onto the fur.   The French Lops affected were housed at home next to rabbits who never had and never did developed eye problems so I slowly began to think this condition was simply a product of their head structure or a genetic trait.  Indeed, they didn't seem ill or bothered by it but I could tell it wasn't how the healthy eye should be.  One thing I found strange was that when we went to nationals again, our rabbits' eyes were clear, and so were all the others we saw.  It was almost a cyclic condition.

None of Kelly's rabbits every had teeth issues at all - no wolf teeth or malocclusion in these lines, although I've heard of, and seen, a few lines with this genetic defect.

Grooming

French Lops have a thick coat of fur, and when they are all molting, wow, it can become a hair fest in the rabbitry!  During molts, we were constantly brushing and plucking hair from rabbits and brushing hair from cage wire - hair accumulation on wire drives me nuts so I used one of those telescoping dusters with the stiff-bristled ball on the end to remove hair from the cages every few days.  It was a lot of work but it paid off in that our cages remained clean.