There are many different brands and different kinds of litter boxes available in the pet rabbit market. But some work, and some don't. How can you know which one will work for your specific rabbit? There are so many to choose from!

When choosing a litter box, there are a few important things to consider before buying one.

• The litter box has to fit inside the rabbit's cage/room/enclosure. 
• It has to be big enough for the rabbit to turn around in and dig. 
• There have to be high sides so the rabbit can't kick the litter out and can't pee over the side (which can also happen because the box is too small).
• At least one side has to be short enough for the rabbit to hop over comfortably, even in old age.
• It has to be easy to clean.
• It has to be a material that the rabbit will not be interested in chewing in or paying much attention to. A wooden or cardboard box, for example, would be the perfect thing for a rabbit to eat. If you get a plastic box, which some rabbits like to nibble on, make sure it won't harm your rabbit if ingested. 
• It has to be a material that will last a long time. Rabbits have pretty long lifespans, and purchasing a new litter box each year (or sooner) would soon run your rabbit bill quite high! I do recommend replaying your rabbit's litter box with a new one very few years (2-4), or as necessary. 

Below are some popular litter box options. All of these can be purchased at any pet store or on Amazon.com.

I don't suggest using a box such as a cardboard or wooden box. Of course, these CAN work, sometimes, but will need to be replaced frequently.

This is the 4th and final installment of my rabbit teeth series. I hope you have all enjoyed this series and learned something new. To see my other posts in this series, follow the links below. 
PART 1 - HERE
PART 2 - HERE
PART 3 - HERE 

 Dental disease can be easy to treat. But it is not always "curable". It depends on how the malocclusion was caused. It also depends on if the malocclusion is in the molars or the incisors. 

If the malocclusion was caused by genetics, and the rabbit was predisposed to have dental disease, than typically it will need to be treated each month by your vet. 

If the dental disease is from trauma, biting on the cage bars, or otherwise, it's usually pretty easy to treat with one vet visit. 

Incisor malocclusion isn't major, unless you let it go to long. A vet can treat it easily by clipping the teeth down. DO NOT try clipping the teeth yourself unless you are shown by a vet how to do it. There are many ways you can make the teeth worse by clipping them too short or crooked. 

Malocclusion of the molars is much more serious. It requires taking your rabbit to the vet, and putting it under anesthesia. Then the vet will use a dremel tool or blunt diamond file to file the spurs smooth. Usually the procedure is quick. 

Do you have any ideas for new blog posts, or a series of blog posts? Feel free to leave your ideas in the comments! 

Okay, get prepared....this is a long one. 

I had so much fun at the WSHLRC Cluster show yesterday! What a great day! In the first show, both Wicket and Butterfly got second place in their very large classes, under judge Allen Mesick.

In the second show, with judge Jenny Poprawski, I table wrote. In this show, Wicket only got 5th place out of 7, but the rabbits above him had awesome bone and massive heads so it was totally understandable. In Butterfly's class, BJD, she got 1st place out of 6 and then went on to score BOSV!!!!! She gets her first leg at only 15 weeks old! I kind of in shock when it happened, because since I was table writing I didn't see it coming! 

What is BOSV (feel free to skip this part if you already know)?

After a rabbit has won its class, it stays on the table to compete for  Best of Variety and Best of Breed, with all the other rabbits of that breed that got first in their classes. 

Varieties are judges within the solid or broken pattern. Since there are 8 classes, there will be 8 class winners. 4 of these class winners will be solid and the other 4 will be broken. The judge chooses one out of the solids to be Best Solid, which Best of Variety, and then the runner-up to the Best Solid is the Best Opposite Sex Variety. Two of the same sex cannot win BOV and BOSV. If the BOV is a buck, the BOSV is a doe. This was the case with Butterfly in the broken category. 

THEN, (wait, there's more!), the BOVs and BOSVs (there are now 4, two for each categories - broken and solid), compete for BOB and BOSB. Best of Breed is the best rabbit on the table, within that breed. Best Opposite Sex Breed is the runner-up to BOB, and is of the opposite sex. 
Butterfly didn't make it that far, which is perfectly fine with me! She did so well for her second show!

Ok, back to the show news....sadly we were unable to participate in the third and final show, because my cousin's 17th birthday party was that afternoon and it was over an hour away. 

Over lunch, around noon, there was a rabbit auction to raise funds for the WSHLRC. They hold one at this show every year. A lot of amazing rabbits were donated by lots of amazing breeders. 

From the auction I got a fantastic new buck!!! SURPRISE!!!! He's opal! He can produce colors like chinchilla, other opals, squirrel, maybe even blue....I'm going to have some amazing colors in the agouti program I am finally starting up! He has great short bone which my herd needs, and a nice body! His head isn't very good but he's in a crazy molt right now it probably looks worse because of that. His name is Bramblehedge's Typhoon, but around here he's going to be fondly called Ty: 

I got Ty for such a deal, because he was the first Holland to go up for auction and everyone was waiting for the does that wouldn't be displayed until closer to the end of the auction. Lots of people have too many bucks right now and not enough does, so they didn't want another buck. Some of these does went for $390 and $375!!!! These were some super nice does too! This is so much money for our club! We're all really pleased at the turnout. 

Ty is proven and registered, and he has two legs. He is almost exactly a year old (in August), and he is related to L&R's McMolly, who is a famous rabbit that won a Convention show in recent years!

What I find pretty interesting too is that he shares a lot of the same rabbits in his pedigree as Hazelnut does. I sold her so these guys can't make babies together, but Zuzu has her lines and so Ty, Zuzu and Wicket are all somewhat related! It's good to breed rabbits together that are partially related because then you can "fix in" good traits and get more reliability in your offspring. 

Also something I noticed is that he shares one or two rabbits in his line with my first breeding doe, Gracie. They are also distantly related! 

Super fun day! I hope you guys all enjoyed the news, see you in my next blog! 

Malocclusion of the incisors is pretty obvious. But rabbits can also get dental disease in their molars, and this is much harder to recognize. 

Symptoms of malocclusion are generally one or more of any of the following: 

•  Not eating as much as usual/complete lack of eating
• Being excited for food but eating slowly/hesitantly
• Gradual or sudden change in eating habits, such as only eating pellets and rejecting hay (or the other way around), or only eating one or two foods and avoiding others/etc.
• Weight loss (due to not eating properly)
• Drooling/excessively wet chin
• Runny nose or eyes
• Drinking more than normal (also a sign of renal disease)
• Rabbit sitting hunched in pain
• Abscesses on, in or around the mouth and jaw
• Swollen jaw/mouth

If your rabbit is showing any of these symptoms, seek veterinary advice. Rabbit malocclusion is very serious and if left untreated, the rabbit will die because it will be unable to eat. 

Malocclusion, or dental disease, is when a rabbit's teeth get too long and they stop wearing down properly. Malocclusion of the incisors is the most common form and the most obvious, but malocclusion can happen in the molars as well, in the form of spurs, where sharp pieces of the tooth rub against the rabbit's tongue and cheek.

See you in my next post, SYMPTOMS OF DENTAL DISEASE.

On Saturday, July 11, I had a show in Monroe. It was a pretty small youth Holland show, so unfortunately, even though my rabbits placed well, neither of them received any legs. 
In youth show A, Wicket scored 1/2 and Butterfly won 1/2. In show B, Wicket got 3/3 (due to his small size - he was only 3 months old and the others were easily 4-5 months), and Butterfly got 1/2. 

I'm pretty pleased with how my little juniors did, especially since they are so young! Both judges LOVED them, and Wicket and Butterfly both got comments on how promising they are. Butterfly wowed the judges with her cuteness, haha! 

My next several posts are going to be linked together with the theme of rabbit teeth. Today's is an overview, all about rabbit teeth. My next posts will be CAUSES OF MALOCCLUSION, SYMPTOMS OF DENTAL DISEASE,  and TREATMENT OPTIONS FOR MALOCCLUSION/DENTAL DISEASE. 
In the following posts I will be using the terms malocclusion and dental disease interchangeably, as they mean the same thing. 

Rabbits are hypsodonts, meaning that their teeth never stop growing. Rabbit teeth grow about a millimeter each week. If rabbit's teeth never wore down, they would be a foot long by the time the rabbit is 6 and a half years old. This is why it's so important to keep your rabbit's teeth worn down. 

Rabbits have 28 teeth. Their most well-known teeth are the incisors, which are visible when you open your rabbit's mouth. Behind the incisors are the peg teeth, which are what distinguish lagomorphs from rodents. Behind a gap in the rabbit's mouth, are the molars, or "cheek teeth". These cannot be seen by simply pulling up the rabbit's lips; they typically have to be checked using a tool that all vets have. Below, you can see a vet using that tool to check the back molars on a rabbit I used to have, Gracie.

When rabbits eat food, the incisors bite and break the food down into manageable chunks that the molars begin to grind down. The molars do most of the work. The molars are relatively flat around the edges, but they have sharp tops. The incisors are pretty short and have slightly jagged edges. 

Well, that's all for today's post. I hope you learned something new. See you next time!

A rabbit's gastro-intestinal tract (or, GI), is very complex. A healthy GI tract is constantly moving, processing food and hay, producing cecotrophs, and then processing the cecotrophs to produce regular poop. 

This is why rabbits need hay constantly available to them. Their gut needs to be moving all the time, to maintain a healthy GI tract. When rabbits don't have access to hay or pellets all the time, their GI can slow, and a problem can arise called GI Stasis. 

GI Stasis can occur whenever the intestines come to a complete standstill. This can be caused by not enough roughage in the diet, a hairball, or something else clogging the intestines. Sometimes it's not enough exercise, stress, dehydration, or pain from another underlying illness. or even sometimes it's genetic. I've heard the Dwarf Hotot rabbit is very susceptible to GI Stasis for some reason. 

GI Stasis is a serious problem. It's not very common, but it is very dangerous. When the intestines come to a complete stop for over 24 hours with no care, the rabbit can die. 

"An intestinal slowdown can cause ingested hair and food to lodge anywhere along the GI tract, creating a potential blockage. Also, because the cecum is not emptying quickly enough, harmful bacteria such as Clostridium species (related to the ones that cause botulism and tetanus) can proliferate, their numbers overwhelming those of the normal, beneficial bacteria and fungi in the cecum. Once this overgrowth occurs, gas emitted by the bacteria can cause extreme pain. Some Clostridium species also produce potentially deadly toxins. It is the liver's job to detoxify these poisons, at a high cost to that all-important organ. Damage to the liver can be a serious--even life-threatening--side effect of GI stasis." ~http://www.bio.miami.edu/hare/ileus.html

Symptoms of GI Stasis include little or no poop pellets, poop covered in mucus, loss of appetite, lethargy, and pain (being hunched in a ball, loudly grinding teeth). 

GI Stasis can be cured. Different things work for different rabbits, but I suggest bringing your rabbit to a vet immediately after detecting any sign that your rabbit may have GI Stasis. 

Visit the site I referenced above, for lots more info on GI Stasis.

UPDATE #1: Saige's baby, Peaches (or Momo), is 2 weeks old today! What a little cutie s/he is! We are just in love with this little one. So far, I have plans to keep her if she's a doe. If a buck, he'll be for sale (unless he's nicer than Wicket). 

UPDATE #2: Rosie has been bred! I bred her to Lance, instead of Jet, this time. I've been wanting a litter out of her and Lance for a long time and I hope they have a nice healthy big litter. Her first litter was with Lance and only had 4 DOAs. Hopefully this time, now that Rosie has carried and raised a live litter, and just weaned her previous one recently, she'll be ready to carry a litter from Lance. He's is glad to be back in business - I kept telling him he couldn't breed anymore but I changed my mind :)

UPDATE #3: So far I have high hopes that Wicket can be my new herd buck! He's so promising already and still very young. I hope he keeps developing in the right direction. He just started his baby coat molt so I'm excited to see what he looks like when he comes out of it. Obviously he's still a baby so he can't breed until the end of September. Once he can be bred I'll probably breed him to everybody LOL. Rosie, Saige, possibly Butterfly.... ;)

UPDATE #4: Butterfly is going to be bred in September or October after 2-3 shows, when she reaches 6 months old. I have no idea who I'm going to breed her to yet - either Jet or Wicket.

UPDATE #5: So far Zuzu is still available. But, unless we find a home better for her than mine, I'm going to be keeping her. I will not be breeding her though. She will be staying as a pet only, because I think she really deserves it. 

UPDATE #6: We have a show coming up! Wicket and Butterfly will be debuting at the Monroe July 11th show. Even though they are both going through their "uglies" and molting their baby coats, they have such amazing body type that I think they will do well. 

UPDATE #7: As of right now, HHR's Rabbit Sanctuary, my boarding program, is completely full. I can't board anymore rabbits for the time being until next Wednesday or Thursday. If you want me to board your rabbit, start planning and booking your rabbit's stay now! This summer is going to be very busy, so it's best to book your rabbit's stay ahead of time.