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Posted
My daughters rabbits have been breeding like the preverbial! I have four too many. I've tried selling them and I've tried giving them away. I can't afford to keep them so I got in touch with a local animal charity who said they would take them but I had to pay £10 for each one! I've had all the jokes about making stews and slippers, but has anyone got any idea how I can get rid of these bloomin' things please?! If anyone wants them, I'm in Trimley St Mary, near Ipswich.
Posted
where i live just now rabbits are a pest and are shot, poisoned, eaten etc. Just wring their necks and be done with them. They are in the same family as rats, squirrels etc.

 

Likewise, some rural areas even have an easter bunny shoot. A pack of farmers even illegally imported and released mixamatosis here to deal with them.

 

Do you have a local resteraunt that may want them :)

Posted
erm....preloved?

 

Thanks... I just chocked on coffee...

 

That just conjured up some strange images. [i think my brain is broken today... I'm seeing adult themes everywhere.]

Posted

Firstly - separate your daughter's rabbits so this doesnt happen again!!

When you say you have tried giving them away - what did you do? You could try your local Freecycle - animals frequently appear on ours?

Posted

You bred them you look after them! :p

 

In all seriousness, if you let them breed then you have a duty of care to look after the animals (that goes for all of you mean sods ;)). Trouble with rabbits is they become fertile very quickly and at a very very young age so they need to be seperated early. And yes, they will happily breed with their mother!

 

Have you asked local schools? They might want a pet rabbit or two. Oh and we need pictures!

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Posted

I knew I could rely on you lot for helpful, sensible answers! LOL! I guess it's my own fault for putting this up on a Friday afternoon really? ;)

 

Firstly - separate your daughter's rabbits so this doesnt happen again!!

When you say you have tried giving them away - what did you do? You could try your local Freecycle - animals frequently appear on ours?

 

The rabbits each have their own hutch. "I don't know how it happened Daddy" was the quote. She's 13, she knows exactly how it happened!!

 

I've put signs up in the two local pet stores and the vet, put it as my status on Facebook, done an "All Staff" email and now put a message on here. I'm not putting them on Freecycle as really you're not allowed to put anything alive on there. Freecycle is for stuff which would otherwise end up at the local dump (and I do realise that just opens up another avenue for jokes.....) If you get them on your Freecycle then your moderators are more generous than mine.

Posted
You bred them you look after them! :p

 

In all seriousness, if you let them breed then you have a duty of care to look after the animals (that goes for all of you mean sods ;)). Trouble with rabbits is they become fertile very quickly and at a very very young age so they need to be seperated early. And yes, they will happily breed with their mother!

 

Have you asked local schools? They might want a pet rabbit or two. Oh and we need pictures!

 

Or take them to a vet and get them 'fixed' people who breed animals needlessly irritate me, it is much harder with rabbits. If you can't keep them, can't give them away and don't want them take them to the vet and have them put down. Its the kindest thing to do, while your there, get the ones you are keeping fixed.

Posted

The problem is the age from which rabbits breed. People think "Ohhh he's a baby! He can't breed yet!" then it starts building it's nest...

 

Had this with someone else's rabbit that we were looking after. It started behaving weird a week before it was booked in for fixing, we asked the vet and she said it could be pregnant even though it was in a cage alone. Turns out my brother's girlfriend let the female rabbit share a cage with a male thinking they were too young and didn't tell us that a month ago they tried it on. We were expecting baby rabbits within a few days! Thankfully it was a phantom pregnancy.

Posted
Nice to see that people who don't know the full circumstances behind my financial and family situation can judge what I'm doing.

 

If you could not afford them to start with why did you get them in the first place.

Posted
If you could not afford them to start with why did you get them in the first place.

 

How do you know I couldn't? Exactly what I mean about not knowing the situation! I have been left with too many rabbits and am trying to do the right thing. I don't like the fact that I am having to do this, but that fact is that I do have to. I don't need people on here making me feel worse about it. Wish I hadn't bothered asking.

Posted
let them out into the wild?

 

Gah! No, don't do that - that's how many places gained a rabbit problem in the first place. Rabbits aren't even really native to Britain, although they were introduced a fair while ago (late middle ages) and seem to fit in to the ecosystem here okay. They are causing havoc in Australia where they compete with the native animals for grazing.

 

I was at university at UVic in Canada which had a rabbit population problem - there were enormous, lop-eared, extra-large bunnies all over campus. Some domestic rabbits had been let loose at some point to breed with the wild rabbits (campus legend said an animal rights raid on a science lab during the 60s, but campus legend also said a nearby hollow of trees was an old native American burial ground, etc) and the general effect was that you were living on the Teletubbies set. They were cute, and attracted interesting predators (seeing a large hawk whisk a bunny away was a daily occurance) but made a mess of the campus and didn't really get enough to eat so were in pretty poor shape.

Posted
How do you know I couldn't? Exactly what I mean about not knowing the situation! I have been left with too many rabbits and am trying to do the right thing. I don't like the fact that I am having to do this, but that fact is that I do have to. I don't need people on here making me feel worse about it. Wish I hadn't bothered asking.

 

Well sorry, you said in the first post that you could not afford to keep them and you did not take the preventitive step of having them fixed at the outset, from this information I drew conclusions. I feel strongly that pets not used for controlled breading should be fixed as part of their basic care. It prevents more unwanted pets and stops them from roaming about as much/getting killed on roads.

 

I have contacts with a charity here in NZ that fosters all sorts of pets and finds them new homes. I have seen all types of animals dumped and abused because people have not had their pets fixed and don't think of the conciquences. If you were in NZ I probably could have swung the fostering of them and half the cost of fixing the ones that you kept.

 

You asked for other ways of dealing with the situation and I provided one, sometimes the best option for them is simply to have them put down if there are no other solutions.

 

It is good that you are trying to help and its ashame that your rabits got out of hand but you did ask for solutions and that is what you got. I posted the first one before you posted the circumstances of the breeding which is unfortunate I was not initially trying to be judgey anyway, it was just worded poorly.

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