Major Catchup!

A great deal has happened since I last posted – not all good, but also not all bad, either.

For a start, the rabbits who were running around outside have all died, very suddenly and within 48 hours of each other. I suspect they picked up one of the 2 Rabbit Haemorrhagic Viruses that are endemic in the UK now, which can be carried by midges, are exceedingly infectious and almost universally deadly.

Mistletoe had a burrowful of kits in the lawn, however, so I had to dig the little orphans out. I found 8 youngsters in the nest, all still blind and barely crawling – about 8 days old, at a guess. It is horrendously difficult to hand-rear baby rabbits, for various reasons, but I had no choice! I brought them in and started phoning around local vets for a kitten replacement milk, Cimicat, which is the closest commercial replacement for rabbit milk, and for a probiotic called Avipro, which I’ve used before for orphan bunnies and which helps to keep the digestions going properly. I was also able to buy a kitten feeding bottle and some extra-small rubber teats, which make life very much easier and safer for the kits than trying to syringe feed.

It’s always a struggle at first with hand-rearing orphans. They’re accustomed to their mother’s milk and nothing else tastes right, it doesn’t suit their digestions as well and it’s the wrong temperature. There’s no warm furry Mum to nuzzle into, either, just a bare hand and a nasty rubbery thing that pokes at their mouths. For the first few days they lost weight hand over fist and I was just trying to get a single gram of milk into them at each meal, but then they started to catch on and learn to suck the rubber teat.

Baby rabbits have evolved to get a whole day’s nutrition in five minutes. They can suck like vacuum cleaners! They suck so hard they’ll pull the plunger down a syringe and I can feel the pull on my thumb on the end of the kitten bottle. This is great, in that they can suck down a bellyful of milk (about 5-7 grams) in ten seconds or less – but it’s also risky, as they can also suck the milk straight into their lungs. Rabbits have sensitive lungs anyway and filling them with milk almost guarantees either respiratory arrest or aspiration pneumonia, so every cough and sneeze makes me cross my fingers!

I lost one of the kits the first night, which was probably shock at being dug out and moved into the house. I lost another on day 4, just refused to feed and lay curled up and unresponsive. Probably gut stasis, which is always a risk with a bunny – if they get a stomach upset their digestive system just shuts down completely and refuses to start up again. It’s an emergency in an adult rabbit that requires a vet visit and probably a stay in a vet hospital, but in a tiny kit it was just impossible to do anything to help.

The remaining six, however, have started to gain weight again, their eyes are now open and they’re beginning to nibble a little of the dried grass I buy by the sackful for the horses. There is faint light at the end of the tunnel, though they’re far from out of the woods yet! Here they are this morning, lifted out of their between-feeds nest (under one of the chick heater plates, on a towel in a cardboard box) and into their mealtime box, where I’d put the hay. They get a minute to run around in that box and relieve themselves before I pick each one up, weigh them, feed them until they’ve had enough, weigh them again and then pop them back into the between-meals box again. If they’re still hungry they climb out and run around again – if they’re full, they settle under the warmth and snooze until they’ve digested their meal properly.

I also had a hatch of chicks; six white bantam silkie eggs went into the incubator and a stunning six little chicks came out! One failed to thrive and died a couple of days later and one had splayed legs and needed a tiny hobble making to hold his legs in place while his muscles developed properly, but the five chicks are growing strongly and doing fine now.

Making a hobble to fix splayed legs in chicks is fairly standard – you just take a drinking straw and cut it to the right length, then thread a strip of sticking plaster through it and wrap the plaster around each of the chick’s legs to fix it in place. By the time the plaster falls off (about a week) the muscles have strengthened and the joints are able to function correctly, so then you have a perfectly healthy chick again.

The ferrets are all now in the lounge for the winter – I bought another big cage to add to the two big indoor cages I already had, so I have a complete wall of ferrets! Ajax, Rambo, Fido, Paris and Hector are in one cage, Ivy and her babies Helen, Ulysses, Iris and Penelope are in the new cage, and Holly, Yarrow, Cassandra, Hecuba and Angus are in the third cage. They’re all enjoying themselves enormously as they get to come out and run amok all over the lounge every evening while I clean out their cages!

The dogs are thrilled as the ferrets scatter some of their kibble on the floor!

The horses are fine, as are the geese and hens. I had something of a drama with the ducks as Little Madam suddenly appeared with 8 ducklings in tow, but she managed to lose 6 of them within a couple of days by staying out in a rainstorm, so I incarcerated her in the barn for a while. She’s just been liberated again today and I have my fingers crossed for the ducklings!