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Posted by Kimberly Graham about 8 years ago
We built an adobe rabbit housing system modified off of a research paper I found. The research paper discussed Egyptian and Italian dry climates and how to protect rabbits from heat is these climates. Our rabbit system has 4 rows of 5 cages per row. They have a metal cage that connects to the adobe portion. The metal cage is where we place their food. We installed a nipple watering system to the outside of the metal cages. The metal cages have doors we can close off from the adobe to isolate them in the metal cages (still requires quite a bit of chasing through the tunnel). We can also open all 5 cages in the row, or close them off from each other. Due to the way the females fight, we usually keep them closed off. We used one 5 row section for males. Obviously rabbits mature sexually rather quickly so when there is a new litter, we need a new place for those males, or we end of with a whole bunch of rabbits in 30 days.
The metal cages are raised so that chickens can scratch under them and the ground is sloped toward the middle and toward the main aisle to help chickens scratch rabbit droppings and hay downhill. (I don't think we sloped it enough- it needs a bit of work still)
The adobe portion has 2 50 cm square rooms with a block on the top that we can lift to look inside on both rooms. There is a short tunnel connecting the two rooms. Originally there was no steel under the adobe, and the rabbits dug it all up. We had to re-do the bottoms with steel mesh under the adobe rooms to prevent them from digging it all up. There is still some digging happening, but much less than before. We have lost less rabbits to heat and they are still breeding in the summer (which we did NOT intend to have happen) We are finding that we need to seriously reduce the number of rabbits we have because they are multiplying quicker than we can eat or sell them. Also transporting them to market in the heat here is not feasible.
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