New Zealand Doe Molting

This New Zealand doe was re-bred to the New Zealand buck 6 weeks after she gave birth to her first litter. We brought her to the buck's cage and the buck performed his deed and then we took her out and put her back in the cage together with her kits. The baby rabbits could still get some milk from their mother for a week before she dries up after which the kits will be separated from her. One week later, I noticed that the doe was shedding its hair especially around her belly and the back part of her waistline.This got me alarmed because she was already re-bred and so I went online and read about this subject. I found out that it is called molting. That molting is normal for rabbits and they shed their old hairs by grooming themselves and then new hairs will grow back in time. So that pacified my fears a little bit but I was still worried because I never had this with the other rabbits before. Maybe because the other rabbits are colored whereas this New Zealand is white so when the colored rabbits did their molting, it was not as bad as and as noticeable as with this NZ doe. Anyway, I  continued to observe this hair shedding until I noticed that her litter were losing some hairs on their faces as well!

These are pictures of the first litter of the New Zealand doe.

Male New Zealand Rabbits

 Now I was really alarmed! So I went online again to read more about this and I wrote down some medication that was recommended on the websites to treat the baby rabbits. Then I went to the pet shop where I buy my supplies for my rabbitry and the guy who owns the shop told me that he does not carry the medications in my list. However, he said that he did some rabbit farming before and he knew what I needed so he gave me an ointment that I could apply to the infected area on the baby rabbit's faces twice a week. When I got back home, we immediately separated the baby rabbits from their mother. We put the males together and the females together in separate cages and while we were doing this, I was treating their faces with the ointment at the same time. What we usually do is to take out the doe and just leave the baby rabbits in their original cage. However, since we have this condition with the baby rabbits losing hairs on their faces, I decided to just leave the doe in the cage and transfer the baby rabbits in their new cages while segregating them at the same time to contain the spread of whatever it is that has afflicted them. After treating the infected ones for two weeks, the hair on their faces grew back and everything went back to normal.

Female New Zealand Rabbits