I Came Home and My Chickens Were Freaking Out
I came home from shopping and my chickens were freaking out. That should have been my first clue.
One of the rabbits was thumping like crazy, which usually means something is wrong. So I went to check.
And it definitely wasn’t what I expected to find.
My “Oh, Crap” Moment
I never planned on baby rabbits. In fact, when this all started, I didn’t even know I had a pregnant rabbit.
We had taken in a feral doe just three days earlier so she wouldn’t be exterminated. She was one of several dumped rabbits living on a property where they were eating a neighbor’s horse’s hay, and the owner was completely fed up. I thought I was helping one rabbit survive. I didn’t know I had just volunteered for a full-blown emergency nursery.
The chickens were having their melt down, because one of the other rabbits, the one we later realized was the father, was thumping like crazy. So I went to check and found three little newborn bunnies with no nest box, no warm nest, and no protection. They were just floundering in the cold.
That was my “oh, crap” moment.
One baby was on top of a wooden hide box. One was on the cold cage floor. One had fallen off the box and was hanging through the side wire of the cage. They were moving, so I knew they were alive, but barely. I don’t even remember the exact order of what I did next. I just remember sprinting back to the house to grab whatever I could to help them.
I Went Crazy Trying to Save Them
Their mother was young, stressed, and probably traumatized from being captured. She wouldn’t feed them. So now I had three freezing newborn rabbits, no real plan, and a whole lot of pressure.
I went crazy trying to save those baby rabbits.
The people who should have been most capable of helping me either couldn’t help or wouldn’t help, and the advice online wasn’t nearly as helpful as I thought it would be. Some of it was flat wrong. I was trying to figure out what to feed them before they starved, and when you’re in that kind of situation, bad advice isn’t just annoying. It can kill something.
At one point, they weren’t gaining weight, so I added a touch of heavy cream for extra calories. That was a disaster. They all got diarrhea really bad. They recovered, but they still weren’t gaining, and I was exhausted, scared, and running out of ideas.
Then Pinky died.
That was the lowest point for me. I cried and felt completely defeated. I had tried so hard, and it still wasn’t enough to save all of them. But I still had two left, and they still needed me, so I kept going.
The Turning Point
At that point I stopped looking for some magical answer from somebody else and started really digging in. I researched what rabbit milk was actually made of because I didn’t want to hurt them by guessing wrong.
I did the math, looked at what would make sense nutritionally, and realized I needed more fat and protein than the raw goat milk alone was giving them. That’s when I had the idea to add powdered goat milk to the fresh raw goat milk.
That was the turning point.
They went from looking like tiny little button mushrooms with legs to feisty, greedy little milk suckers. That was when I knew I finally had something that was helping instead of hurting.
This is what that looked like in real life:
Once They Made It, the Story Wasn’t Over
Even after they made it through the bottle stage and into adulthood, the story wasn’t over. I thought if I could just get them past the newborn phase, maybe things would calm down. That’s not exactly how it went.
These rabbits have put me through more medical scares than I ever expected. Their mom, Cookie Doe, needed an emergency spay. Their father died of E.C. before we could even figure out what was wrong. All three of them were exposed. Two out of the three have had symptomatic episodes.
Captain Carrot ended up with a hernia so rare that I had to drive three hours to one of the top veterinary schools and hospitals to have a teacher of veterinary medicine do the surgery. They wanted to film it for teaching.
I thought that hernia was a death sentence.
They “Say Things”
Captain Carrot did not die and instead spent two weeks recovering in a cone. My daughter had to hand-feed him because he couldn’t reach his food, and one of the strangest and funniest things I’ve ever seen was watching him go through his whole grooming routine without grooming himself at all. He was still trying to do his cleaning duty, even though the cone made it literally impossible. He just groomed the inside of the cone.
That’s the kind of thing rabbits do. They have habits, routines, and very strong opinions about how things are supposed to go. Captain Carrot still drinks water with his head tilted sideways ever since he had to do it that way while he wore the cone.
Rabbits adapt, but they also remember. They “say things” to you by staring at you, pointing like a dog and hopping around in a routine way. And they totally use Jedi mind tricks. Honestly, they’ve trained me more than I’ve trained them.
Why This Website Exists
Once the babies were truly out of the woods and had transitioned to solid food, I had a very clear thought. I never want another rabbit rescuer to go through what I did.
That’s why I started this website.
I wanted to give people what I didn’t have. I wanted them to get answers quicker, with less stress, and with some actual hope.
Hand-raised baby rabbits have a high mortality rate, and when you’re in the middle of that, hope matters.
Clear information matters.
Knowing somebody else fought through it and learned something useful matters.
The Bugglets Today
My bottle babies, my Bugglets, turned 9 years old on March 17, 2026.
At this late stage of their lives, they still run around the house all day. Cookie Doe will get daily medicine every morning for the rest of her life. Captain Carrot still gets regular bladder massages now and then because his hernia repair didn’t fully hold and a small part of his bladder still sits outside the stomach wall. The work is regular. I constantly clean litter boxes and sweep hay.
And they’re still completely worth it.
I fought for them. I stressed for them, and God knows I’ve spent enough money on them. They made it to old age. I have succeeded.
Nine years old is a ripe old age for a bunny, and anything after that is icing on the cake. I’m satisfied I did all I could.
They brought a kind of joy to my life I never would’ve experienced otherwise. They also taught me how to pay attention, catch problems early, fight for something every step of the way, and keep figuring things out when there’s no easy answer.
That lesson didn’t stop with rabbits.
It became part of how I approach everything.
And if you’re wondering why they’re called Bugglets, it’s because they looked like little bugs that acted like piglets.
