Dance like no one's watching

My dad went to the pet shop at Simei today to look for pine shavings. He wanted to line the nesting box with pine shavings to prevent the babies from rolling about so much ‘cos he suspects the thin baby was suffocated to death when it rolled under the nesting wool last night.

At the pet shop, he met this young gal called “Vivi” who breeds rabbits. She was really sweet and offered to come to my place to show us how we could get the babies to suckle from Horlicks. So i picked her up after work and came home.

We tried a few ways. First i carried Horlicks on her back and Vivi placed the baby on her chest… but Horlicks protested violent so we had to abort this method. Next, we tried to get Horlicks to sniff her babies & then place them in a tray in front of her…. Horlicks sniffed them then ran off. Plan B – failure. The 3rd attempt finally work. Horlicks ran around the garden till she got tired & laid down to rest against a wall. Vivi located Horlicks’ nipples & place the baby against it while i coaxed Horlicks to continue lying down with biscuit treats.

Wow… u should’ve seen the baby’s reaction when it was placed near the mother’s body. It sprung awake & rushed to try to suck the nipple. Some natural instinct kind of thing i suppose. Using this method, we managed to feed the smaller pinker rabbit (henceforth known as Baby002 – temporarily named according to birth order) till poor Horlicks ran out of milk.

Then we had to rest her a bit before feeding Baby001 (aka the miracle baby from this morning) a little. Horlicks was v.cooperative too. Vivi let her sniff 001 & Horlicks flipped onto her side, as though she really knew what we were trying to do. So we quickly placed 001 at her nipple & thankfully 001 managed to drink some milk too. But i think 001 was too hungry & it sucked too hard (i could hear the sound) and might have bit Horlicks too so Horlicks couldn’t tahan that long. Prob. about 2 mins and Horlicks stood up again.

Nevertheless, i’m glad we found a way to feed the babies. Nothing beats a mother’s milk. (Did u know that a baby mother’s milk is super high in calories? And that newborn baby needs no more than 5cc a day!) The dilemma i have now is how do i know when they’re full enough? (Overfeeding also can die… feed too little also can die…). Sigh… haven’t figured that one out yet.

Anyway, here are some photos of Baby001 & 002. 🙂

The one on top, the pinker one is Baby002. The greyish baby is 002, the miracle baby.

Same… 002’s the one on top. 🙂

001’s on the right.