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Winter Housing
Rabbits seem to do just fine in cold conditions - but the bitter cold makes it
difficult and uncomfortable for us spend extra time with the rabbits!
All our
rabbits live in a sheltered building that has electricity and access to
water. We have been fortunate in that even during bitter winter weather, we
rarely have had frozen water cups! Rabbits must have water and should not
have to rely on licking ice for their water supply - if your water cups freeze
during winter, it is important to remove the ice and provide fresh
water at least morning and night, if not more often!
We don't heat the building unless it is
bitter cold and we have a young litter. We've used a variety of space heaters,
everything from a small ceramic heater, to a propane-tank coil heater, and
recently we purchased an oil-filled radiator-type heater. The small ceramic
heater seems to be able to put out the most heat, the fastest, but I am more
comfortable using the oil-filled radiator heater, especially if I am not right
in the building when it is running.
I am a little paranoid about
fires so we
never leave a heater on for more than a few hours- just enough time to take the
chill out of the air, but it does give us a little assurance that the young kits
will not freeze immediately if they happen to 'ride out' with mom-hopefully
giving us time to find them!
We also
think it's important to provide fresh air so we run an exhaust fan a few times a
day even when it is bitter cold out.
This fan
also does a wonderful job of removing excess moisture. We use our
building windows as a type of 'moisture gauge'; if we see moisture collecting on
the windows, we run the fan until it is gone...this usually keeps it at about a
55-60 percent humidity in our rabbitry.
Warm
water - all of our rabbits absolutely love to drink warm water! Now
I've heard from others that warm water can cause digestive problems, but we've
never experienced anything of the sort. We empty all our water cups every
night and refill with lukewarm water - and every rabbit just goes frantic until
he/she can dive in to lap up the warm water!
Winter appetites - our Hollands especially, seem to develop quite an
appetite the colder it gets! We are careful not to overfeed pellets
though, but for the particularly 'starving' Hollands, we'll give a little extra
hay, which seems to satisfy their craving for more food!
Pest
Control - every early winter we find that some small creature (either mice
or moles) thinks that our rabbitry is going to be their new winter home...wrong!
To control these little pests (who will climb up and rob the rabbit's food out
of the feeders!) we start by setting out traditional spring-loaded traps.
We don't like to use these but they are more humane than glue traps, in my
opinion. If we do not catch all the mice/moles with the regular traps,
we'll progress to using the glue traps. The glue traps always prove to be
effective and end our pest problem, but we are not thrilled by the slow death
for the caught animal-even if they are just mice or moles. We do not like
using poisons of any type for obvious reasons.
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