I’m Jason, and my wife is Christina. We have been breeding and selling rabbits for many years. During that time, we have met a lot of wonderful folks, and had many great conversations. Regardless of whether our customers are looking for a pet, or they’re brand new breeders, or even experienced breeders looking to expand their stock, we get a lot of the same questions regarding our hutch design, and materials that we used. While we do enjoy answering questions and helping each other out, we found ourselves constantly looking at old receipts, and/or sending links to products that we used, so we decided to write this down to have it all available in one spot.
I have 5 or 6 future blog posts already in the works that will detail what we use, why we made the decisions that we did, and how we put together some of our systems. I will have some detailed pictures, and maybe even blue prints available later. Any links to products will be in the blog, as well as a separate page for links.
But, for now…
Why and how did we get into rex rabbits?
We purchased our first 3 rabbits from a friend whose husband was dealing with some serious medical issues. Raising rabbits wasn’t necessarily something we planned to do, but we had talked about keeping some sort of livestock off and on for years, but we live in a neighborhood, and the Lord hadn’t seen fit to move us onto a larger piece of land. Because we live in a neighborhood, the conversation always leaned towards something small, like chickens. Although chickens don’t require much room it just wasn’t feasible, or desirable to keep them at our house.
Then rabbits fell in our laps. Our friend that I mentioned earlier had 3 Rex rabbits that she wanted to sell because her husband was sick, and needed a double lung transplant. She wanted to reduce the amount of responsibilities she had while she cared for her husband, so she was looking to sell some of her animals. Her rabbits came from a good breeder, and had pedigrees (which is something we didn’t even know existed at the time). We discussed it and educated ourselves, and decided that rabbits would fill a lot of different needs that chickens didn’t.
We purchased her rabbits, and all of the cages and other hardware that she had for them, and became rabbit owners. We have enjoyed virtually every aspect of owning rabbits, except clean up day. No one likes clean up day. But besides moving a lot of rabbit manure, it has been fun learning and building new things. Our youngest son has learned a lot of responsibility, and is even moving towards selling his own line of rabbits. While we do not claim to be experts, we do feel that we are pretty knowledgeable about our rabbits. We have entered and won shows. We have learned to make hard decisions, and now we are working on the hardest variation of Rex rabbits, the TRI colored rabbit!
In case you’re wondering, our friends husband got his transplant, and is doing well. Thank the Lord!!!
Please feel free to come back later, as I’m already working on posts that explain:
- Why we chose Rex rabbits
- How we chose our cages and what brand we use
- Why we use a nipple system instead of bottles, and how we built our system
- Our hutch build and details
- Why we use crocks instead of J feeders
