40

Cristina and I are finding that we don't have the sales for pet stock or meat stock in the Mini lops. We can sell the French lops and the Satins for meat no problem because of their size. The Netherland dwarfs easily sell for pets.

The mini lops we normally just donate to the local raptor centre, but with the Mini lops being so prolific and for every 5 does we have bred we have ended up with over 40+ babies with those 5 litters for the most part. We are not complaining about that at all, but, when you have 30+ babies to cull and the raptor centre is full, and your freezer is full, and you can't sell them as pets(everyone wants Holland lops) what do you do? We've luckily found someone up Island that will take our 20+ culls this weekend and butcher them for dog food. Which works great for us, but the next time we have another 20+ babies and everything is full what should we do?

We are going to cut back to 40 Mini lops. We have lots of show and breeding sales, but as you all know you don't have a litter of 8 with 8 top show prospects at least not usually. We have enough breeding/show sales until next spring with a big waiting list.

If we cut down to 40 Mini lops we can save a little bit on our feed bill as well which is about $200 a month(just on feed!) not including hay, treat mix, or shavings.

So by the fall we plan to be down to 40 Mini lops which is still lots and we should be able to do that! look at Nicole Velotta's awesome Mini lops(Velotta's Rabbitry) with I think she has under 15 holes. Maybe it was under 12. Something like that! And her quality has only improved since she cut back so much.

Mini lops will still be our largest breed, as the other breeds only have 18 holes for French lops, 12 for Satins, and 15 for Netherland dwarfs. The other 15 holes from the Mini lops that we are cutting back on will probably go towards the Netherland dwarfs and Red Satins.