Weaning & Graduation
Weaning closes out the nest-box stage of a litter — you set the date and the kits stop being the doe's problem. Graduation is the separate step that turns a kit into a full rabbit record in your herd, carrying its parents, breed, variety, date of birth, and recorded weights across with it. The two are independent: you can wean a whole litter and graduate only the two you are keeping.
Record weaning
Set date weaned on the litter. OmniBurrow already put a Wean kits reminder on your list for 42 days after kindling — adjustable in herd settings — along with Separate males at 56 days, which is the one that stops an accidental litter.
Weaning does not change the kits themselves. They stay as tracked kits or bucket counts on the litter until you graduate, sell, or process them.
Graduate a kit
- Web App
- Mobile App
Open the litter, find the kit in the Individual kit manager, and graduate it. Give it a name and, ideally, an ear tag.
Open the litter, find the kit in the Kits roster, and graduate it. Name it, add an ear tag, and save.
Only living kits can graduate. A kit that is already graduated, deceased, or culled is refused rather than duplicated.
What carries across
The new rabbit record is not a blank form. Graduation fills in:
| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Sire and dam | The litter's buck and doe |
| Breed | The doe's breed |
| Variety | The kit's recorded colour, matched to that breed's ARBA varieties |
| Date of birth | The litter's kindling date |
| Sex, notes | The kit's own |
| Genetics | The kit's genotype matrix |
| Weights | Any weights recorded against the kit move to the rabbit |
You supply the name and ear tag. Everything else is already known, which is the point.
Where the recorded colour matches exactly one of the breed's varieties, the rabbit gets that ARBA variety properly set. Where it does not match cleanly, the colour is kept as a custom variety instead of being guessed at — and a kit with no colour recorded graduates with the variety "Unknown" for you to fill in.
Graduating from a bucket
You do not need to promote a kit to a tracked record first. Graduate straight out of a phenotype bucket — the mobile app calls these variety groups — by picking the group and naming the animal. The bucket count drops by one and the rest of the group carries on as a count.
The variety resolution is the same, and it works offline: the reference catalog lives on the phone, so a kit graduated in the barn comes out with its ARBA variety already set.
On the phone with no signal, the kit is marked graduated immediately and the litter's live count drops right away, but the rabbit record itself is created when the change uploads. The app tells you so at the time. Everything else about the litter is correct in the meantime.
What happens to the litter
The litter is not consumed by graduating out of it. It keeps its dates, its total born, its dead count, its outcome, its remaining kits and buckets, and its place in your production analytics.
One number does move: live kits drops by one for each graduation, because that animal is now a rabbit in your herd rather than a kit in the box. The graduated kit stays on the roster marked Graduated and links to the rabbit it became, so the litter's history stays readable.
From there the new rabbit behaves like any other — weigh it, add it to a grow-out group, sell it, or keep it back for breeding.