If you’re raising meat rabbits, I’m sure you want to get your optimal use out of each doe in order to provide food for your family. Which poses the question . . . “How Many Rabbit Litters Can You Have In A Year?”

So How Many?

It takes looking at a calendar, but if you start breeding at the beginning of the year, there is the one month gestation each time the doe is bred. And then an aggressive breeding schedule consists of re-breeding the doe 2 weeks after she’s kindled. This means she’ll give birth again right when her current litter is weaning. Keep this cycle going all year, and you will end up with 7 almost 8 rabbit litters out of one doe. A doe on average has 8 kits in a litter, which means you’d have as many as 56-64 kits from one doe each year!

Ethics

Now it comes down to whether or not you are wanting to put the animal through such an intensive schedule. We personally take the rabbit into consideration and don’t think it’s fair to put them through that much drain. We start breeding in the spring when “spring fever” is in the air, and aim for 4 litters before stopping in the fall. Sometimes we get there, other times not quite. So we re-breed our rabbits after each current litter is 4 weeks old. That gives our does a couple of weeks between litters to rest. And then they have about 5-6 months of winter to rest as well. On the plus side it also means that we get a rest too from processing all those rabbits.

But what about rabbits in the wild? Despite the saying “breed like rabbits”, it’s not true to that extreme. On average, wild rabbits have 3-4 litters per year. There are natural phenomena that control when they breed like temperature and lighting. Rabbits only like to breed when there is 12+ hours of daylight. Whereas people use artificial lighting to combat this. Also, male rabbits in a lot of cases go infertile when temperatures reach about 80-85°F. Some people get around this by keeping their rabbits in a temperature controlled environment. So, it’s not natural to have 7 or so litters in a year.

In Closing

There you have it. It’s amazing the potential for how much food such a small animal can provide. It’s just finding what works for you family. Even at the rate we breed, we get an overwhelming amount of rabbits we have to make the time to process. Work work work!

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