Causes of new born deaths

Let's face it the chances of a rabbit cannibalizing her young are slim to none. Touching newborn babies will not make a doe decide that she needs to eat her kits domesticated or other wise. A rabbit that accidentally over cleans a kit and takes off a limb will not get a "taste" for blood and cannibalize her next litter. All does eat their placentas (okay so not all, I a time or two have stuck my hand into a nest box expecting to pull out of baby and end up pulling out the gooey mass of a placenta) and a placenta is tissues and all that lovely gory goo that kits get their nutrition from so you could also say every doe is a cannibal as they ingest tissue of their own. When a doe has a litter, she's going to ingest blood no matter whose doe, or what her temperament. If a doe is cannibalizes her young chances are it was caused by an underlying issue whether she was OCD about cleaning her new kits, or has some sort of mental retardation. A doe is not going to up and decide that she is going to eat her kits because a human touched them. There is also not set age or size where if a doe does decide to become a cannibal that kits are safe. I have a doe who has always been a bit freaky who killed off her litter one by one and ate the kits and they were nearly 3 weeks old.


One of the main causes of death in new born kits is from the doe stepping on them. Whether it's accidentally while they are trying to nurse, or something startles them and they jump in the nest box. Most cases the kit will look perfectly fine.


There is also were the doe does not get her milk in and even though she tries to nurse them they'll all just die off, this is usually due to a lack of hormones and is not a good trait to continue breeding.


With dwarf breeds you often times get peanuts in your litter also known as double dwarf. This is where a kit inherits a dwarf gene from both parents. This is a lethal combo and there has only been a couple cases where a peanut has lived past 1 month old. Most die before they're a week old. You can tell a peanut right off the bat, they are smaller then the other kits with a bulbous head underdeveloped hindquarter and minuscule triangular ears. As the other kits grow the peanut does not and the difference in size becomes more noticeable.


Does do not kill off any weak or deformed babies nature does. A doe does not differentiate between a perfectly healthy baby and one that has club feet, or might possibly be a fader in a week or two. If the kit cannot compete for milk with it's siblings then it does not get enough milk to sustain itself and live. It is a simple form of survival of the fittest. People have come to believe that the only reason that they find dead babies that are deformed or ill is because the doe knew there was something wrong with them and killed them. If this were true there would be no "special" bunnies in the world.


Faders or failure to thrive. These are kits who reach three to six weeks and then just "fade" away despite eating and drinking like a normal kit. No one is quite certain what causes faders.


These are some reasons why kits die.