A single kit, dead :(

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ruby is a boy

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My doe had a litter yesterday, or so i thought. She had them in a barrow so i thought best to let her do her thing- my buns live in a very large rabbit enclosure (7 meters x 9 meters). This would have been her second litter. She did birth as i saw all the blood on her when she emerged. She built her nest in the days leading up as i saw her taking hay, grass and just before kitting in the afternoon spent the morning plucking her fur and taking it into the burrow. This morning i found a dead bunny :cry4: outside the burrow and alot of nesting material. worried about the rest of her litter i decided to dig them out, however i found it totally empty. no other babies and no nesting material left inside. Is it usual for a rabbit to only have one baby and if it doesn't survive will they destroy the nest like this?? She has been plucking fur again this morning and making a nest now in the cage nesting box. Is she just hormonal and confused? or could she deliver more babies as yet? its been about 17hrs since she birthed yesterday. The other odd thing was the size of the dead baby. he was huge - easily the size of a 10-14day old kit. would this be simply b/c it was the only one she was preggers with and so it got more nutrition in utero than would usually be the case??

We didn't really set out the breed, we were told we had too females, but ruby turned out to be a boy! He is now fixed so there will not be any more babies unless i decide to mate Lilly with a new or borrowed male at some future point, but its unlikely. They are just mixed breed muts and nothing special for breeding. If we do go into breeding i think we will chose a pedigree and chose our breeding lines carefully.

Anyway i guess there are no real answers for the questions posed in this post. I'm just a but sad and needed to vent a little about todays discovery. Even my 3yr old son cried and told me to put Lillys baby in the nest box b/c he didn't want it to be dead! I don't think he understands that it wont be waking up. :(

anyway i guess i'll go make out introduction now, i just had to share our sadness with some people who would understand.
 
It's always possible she might have more. Most kindling is finished within 24 hours. It sounds like she had a fetal giant, and they are usually born dead or die during the birthing process. We've had does deliver them a few times and we've always found them outside the nestbox.
 
majorv said:
It's always possible she might have more. Most kindling is finished within 24 hours. It sounds like she had a fetal giant, and they are usually born dead or die during the birthing process. We've had does deliver them a few times and we've always found them outside the nestbox.
Click to expand...

when you've had does birth a giant has it been a single kit or with other siblings? I think maybe she was just confused this morning with plucking fur and making another nest as she only half made it and then stopped and hasn't been showing any other signs of kitting throughout the day. So i think it very unlikely that she still has more to deliver now.

its still all very sad though... probably doesn't help that i myself am extremely clucky and trying for another baby myself right now.
 
As woahlookitsme said, it's usually just the one in the litter; however, if the large one was born first then the doe usually has problems delivering it...getting stuck...if it takes very long to expell then any others there might be behind it would most likely be DOA.
 
Oh that's so sad, I'm sorry to hear that. I had bought my girl in a pet shop and 3 weeks later she gave birth to 3 babies. As we were not prepared for it, in the morning of the labor she made her nest in the litter box. The first baby was born in the litter box, the other 2 in the floor of her cage. The last two didn't make it. It was very sad for me and i decided that if the little one would make that i had to keep it, and so far he is 2 month old.
 
yesterday i found another 2 babies also dead, they were kind of buried in the dirt/garden area outside of where she had dug the burrow, i was cleaning up the remaining straw and fur that had been pulled out of the burrow and found the other two babies buried under it all and under dirt too.

I'm wondering if she destroyed the nest herself or if one of her first litter did this?? will older babies kill new babies?? The first litter is only 5 weeks today so i didn't think i should take them away from her as they would still be feeding.

Maybe she had complication. Maybe they died and then she pulled them out of the nest. Maybe the other babies pulled them out.

Lilly was a fantastic mother with the first litter. Had 6 babies and all survived even a tiny runt that was a third of the size of the next smallest and didn't even get any fur till 3.5 weeks of age. She was so funny and ugly/cute but i didn't think she'd make it. We did give her some top up feeds in the first 2 weeks as well as letting her feed from mum and remain in the nest with the siblings and she is now probably one of the prettiest now she's got fur and showing really beautiful markings. But yeah Lilly seems to have been and really good and dedicated mother with this first litter. Maybe she herself or the other babies saw the new litter as unwanted competition??

Anyway like a said the male is fixed and there wont be more babies anytime soon.

I am considering going into angora buns for breeding though but wont be looking into buying a breeding pair for about 6 mths from now if we do.
 
I doubt the first litter had anything to do with their deaths, not at their age. You'll probably never know what happened. Where was the first litter...in the burrow too?
 
she did have the first litter in a barrow also but i dug them out and moved them into the cage nest box and she was fine with me having done that. B/c the first lost of babies were still using the nest box i thought i'd let her keep the second litter in the burrow, she did such a good job with the first lot that i thought i'd let her do what she wanted, trust her own instincts.

like you said though, i wont ever really know what happen - unfortunately Lilly cannot tell me that. I guess i just have the chalk it up to one of those tragic things that happens.
 
Totally different pet, but I had a Persian cat that delivered a tiny mummy on the due date. She went to the stud once more and again on the due date she pushed out two placenta's. That was it.
Psychologically, she was so bad, that I had her speyed. I would not let her go through such stress again.
Is your doe allright?
 
she is eating but she doesn't seem herself. She sits most of the day in front of a tree thats in their enclosure. she never sat in the spot before, not for long enough periods for me to notice, interestingly it is at the base of this tree that i found 2 of the 3 dead kits mostly buried. It really does seem like she is hanging out there grieving. She still comes running to me when i go in to them to see what food i might have for her. but she's not laying in her usual spots at all, just hanging out under/at the base of this tree.

Do rabbits morn??
 
Maybe they don't really mourn but maybe they just feel sad all the same without knowing why. Poor mama rabbit. They say when kits get stuck the delay time makes it so the others can't get oxygen in time- so if the giant was the first one coming out and got stuck the others may have not gotten oxygen in time. Very sad, I'm sorry for your loss.
 
I would agree. With my research, perhaps there could have been one breeding with her one egg fertilized (the large kit), then she took to another days later, causing them to be born later (or all at once when they were all off schedule) causing everything to be "out of whack", and all DOA... Does that make sense?
 
LILLY DIED OVER NIGHT!!!!!


She seemed unwell yesterday but it was a public holiday and where we live there was no vet on duty unless i drove 2 hrs away. She was docile though and just not herself but her bum was clean no discharge, eye, ears etc looked fine. They told me on the phone that if she wasn't injured or had no discharge from bum, eyes, mouth etc then to keep her warm and take her to the vet today... but she died over night!!!

I had her inside and she didn't eat at all yesterday but she did drink a fair bit.

I had thought she was acting different since the birth last tuesday afternoon, but she'd still been eating well, but was acting different which is what i described above and asked if they could morn. I thought it was related to the delivery of no live babies. I now think that she must have gotten septic from something going wrong with that delivery. but she had no discharge suggesting infection or internal damage.

i don't know what happened. All i know is she was very very dead when i checked her this morning!! :(
 
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