Issues In breeding rabbits

If you read the About Us section of this website, you know that we got our start by breeding rabbits "for educational purposes."

We planned to breed once, allow the children to experience the wonders of birth, and then stop.

For me, breeding was a great decision. I loved it and became hooked. Of course, I spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours per year on my rabbits. That's probably not going to be the typical response.

If you are committed to breeding rabbits in order to improve the breed and all that it entails, please refer to the breeding section of The Nature Trail Rabbitry. Although I talk about my Holland Lops specifically, almost all of the information pertains to any breed.

Breeding was not what I thought it was and it was not a good decision to involve the children. Here are a few reasons:

There was less than a 50% chance that there would be live babies. Sometimes rabbit mothers eat their babies.
With dwarf breeds, there's a 25% chance of producing peanuts with some breeding combinations; peanuts are babies that have no chance of surviving.
Having bunnies is not at all like having puppies or kittens; we were only partially prepared for what happened, which caused a lot of stress.
Sometimes bunnies get stuck in the birth canal.
Sometimes mother rabbits need cesarean sections.
Kindling rabbits sometimes die.
Nursing does can fail to produce milk, produce too much milk (enough to make a baby burst), and get mastitis (infection of the mammary tissue).
Singleton litters cause extra concerns (hard to deliver, hard to maintain their body heat).
Pregnant does sometimes retain kits which can cause anything from infertility to death.
A doe's uterus can become prolapsed.
If you don't know enough about rabbit genetics and matching bucks and does in order to strive to produce high quality offspring, you risk increasing the surplus population of unwanted pets, which is a poor example for our children.