Record keeping is an extremely important part of every rabbitry. We use a combination of cage tags and computer software to monitor what has happened, what needs to happen and what will be happening in our rabbitry.

Our rabbitry is a total family effort. The daily care of the rabbits is the main responsibility of our three daughters, ages 15, 12, & 8. They take care of the feeding, watering, grooming & nail clipping. Mom oversees the cleaning of the cages and trays, and gets help from the girls. She also makes the decisions on cage assignment, and monitors all the new born kits. I take care of the financial end, recommend breedings to the girls, keep track of show records, and give the ok on new rabbit purchases.

Since none of us actually does everything for the rabbitry, it is important that we can get the information that we need without any difficulty should someone else be gone or ill. Cage tags have been a great way for us to identify rabbits, kits and due dates. All of our cage tags are color coded using a printed frame around the tag.

• Blue- bucks
• Pink- does
• Purple- kits info
• Green- Take to Show
• Yellow- For Sale

The blue and pink tags include the rabbits name, ear#, date of birth, sire & dam. The purple tag includes the breeding date, nest box date, due date and wean date. We place the green tags on the week of a show, this way on show morning, all we have to do is pull the rabbits with the tags. Of course, the yellow tags help us quickly identify which rabbits we are selling.

Each of our tags is first laminated. Then we place a business card size magnet on the back. The tags are then placed on a metal cage tag holder on each cage. This works great for shows, as the tags can be removed from the cage and placed on the card holder on the carrying cages, making identification easy during some of the crunch times at the show.

We also have blank laminated tags. These tags are great for writing miscellaneous notes, feeding info, etc. We find these most useful if we are going to be gone for more than a day, and plan to have someone else watch the rabbitry and care for the rabbits. Always write on them in permanent marker, otherwise if they get wet the writing will easily wash off.

Cage tags, along with record keeping software has enabled us to keep our rabbitry running smoothly.