04/27/2026
Update: After hearing from so many on this post, we have decided it is worth it to send the feed off for testing. We still have half a bag of it in a storage vault type container. I will update when we hear back. Please continue to share your experience, good or bad, with feed!
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I think it's finally time I got around to making a post about 2025 and the change we made in 2026 that seems to have ended a year long struggle.
For the past 3 years, we have almost exclusively fed the same rabbit feed, Blue Seal/ Home Fresh "Show Hutch Deluxe 17". We have always picked it up from our local TSC. Other than needing to feed so much of it to each rabbit, we never had issues. We told several other breeders over the years that we were happy with the feed. We know some breeders who are still using it and happy with it. So take from this what you will. I'm not an expert and I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be one. This is just *our* experience.
In the spring of 2025, Elle bred every single one of her senior does. She had 25 litters born, amounting to 115 kits! We commonly refer to this as her baby boom of 2025. Following that boom, she decided to take a break from breeding for the summer to let her does rest and give herself time to sort through the large amount of juniors she held back, since they were filling all her cages. Not a big deal, we have taken summers off before.
During the summer, we received two moldy bags of feed from our local TSC. Elle fed from one of the bags for two days before uncovering the giant chunk of mold. She lost two rabbits that week that we believe were due to the bad feed. We returned both bags. This was incidentally the last time our store had bags in stock. From that time forward, we had to order feed for pickup at a later date or pay for home delivery. We stuck it through because we believed in the feed. It was worth the minor inconvenience.
Fall came and Elle started attemping to breed again. Most of her does would not lift. Not a big deal, it happens sometimes. So we went back to checking the does daily to breed when they were looking "ready" (red to purple colored vulvas)...except most never got there. The few that did still were not optimistic breeders, but the bucks got some fall offs, so we figured all was well...
Except it wasn't. Most of the time, even when a doe lifted, no kits came. At first we blamed the summer heat, but by winter that excuse didn't hold up anymore. Heat fertility issues would have resolved after a few weeks/months. But this didn't.
From August 2025 until April 2026, Elle had only 4 litters born, totalling 14 kits. 5 of those were born prematurely on the wire by one doe. So in reality, she had just *9* kits born from 3 litters. We were going insane. Scratching our heads, trying to figure out what was going on. Why are the does uncooperative? Why are most of them missing their litters after breeding? Why are the litters that do make it so much smaller in number than her normal litters, even from repeat breedings where the does had 6+ kits multiple times and now were having 2 or 3.
The only conclusion we could come up with was the feed. We talked to a few other rabbitries. A couple who are using Blue Seal and having similar issues, and one who is using it and reporting no problems at all. We decided it was time to change feeds and just see if it helped because at this point, it's either figure something out or give up on rabbits entirely.
In January, Elle switched all her rabbits over to Heinold "Oren Reynolds" formula. She waited a bit before breeding to give it some time for the change to "work" and then started breeding her does. She has since had 5 litters born, totalling 24 kits. We did lose some of those kits as previously posted about, but that was very obviously unrelated.
You can make your own conclusions. We definitely are not a big enough rabbitry for anything to be considered concrete evidence scientifically speaking. But we are seeing kits again. We are seeing does lift, and only one doe that has lifted has missed her litter. The size of litters has gone back to the normal 5-6 that we expect to see. That's evidence enough for us. We'll see how the rest of 2026 plays out, but we are finally feeling some hope return.
