Erinlea is a minilop rabbit stud nestled in the heart of the beautiful Victorian Dandenong Ranges in Olinda, on the outskirts of the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. We are surrounded by tall mountain ash trees and numerous giant tree ferns. Welcome to our web site. My name is Vanita, and if someone had told me a couple of years ago I would own and breed rabbits I would have laughed. I would have thought those days were long in the past, as I kept busy raising our five children. Although my family members are not surprised, as I grew up on a farm on Kangaroo Island and cared for a menagerie of animals throughout my early years till I left home. From babyhood I always had babies of some description to nurture. From a young age I successfully cared for and bred show poultry for our local agriculture shows. The genetics I found fascinating and I enjoyed my breeding successes, and the sense of accomplishment. So when my own children wanted to start their own rabbit breeding program, I insisted we do it properly. I saw it as a wonderful opportunity to teach them some genetic farming skills and involve them in a hobby as a family. And so it happened that these adorable little creatures, won our hearts, and become such an important focus for our family. We never cease to become excited about the impending birth of a litter of kits. The excitement of checking our nestboxes is an experience you never tire of. The joy of watching these small little kits undergo such incredible growth, in such a short period of time, is truly one of God's beautiful miracles of life. And as a family, being part of that nurturing process, is truely rewarding. Whether this is your first visit to our site, and perhaps your currently looking for a pet minilop bunny. Maybe you often pop in to enjoy and check our nestboxes. Whichever it may be, we hope you find our site pleasurable and informative. So once again, welcome, and please feel free to leave a comment in our guest book, and share our site with others. Here at Erinlea we hope to breed only the best minilop rabbits from some of the best breed lines. We specialise in breeding show quality minilops with placid and friendly natures. Of course we will always have minilops to sell to the general public as they make such wonderful pets. We appreciate loving, responsible, families buying our bunnies. They help us, as they adopt our extra babies into their own families, and financially help us to continue the genetic work we are doing. Our rabbits are raised with lots of love, and are an integral part of our large family. Our five children range in age from 2 to 13 years of age. Our bunnies are our only pets and are regularly handled and loved from a young age by our children and myself. They are also exposed to alot of noise. We are a registered minilop rabbit stud with the The Victorian Rabbit Association Inc. We are also members of both the Gippsland Rabbit Fanciers Assoc. Inc. and the South Eastern Rabbit Club. We regularly show our rabbits as we strongly believe this is the best way to preserve, and better the breed, which we are dedicated in doing. Our minilops have extensive pedigrees with some breeding lines that can be traced back to some of the original minilop imports into Australia. We are registered and able to ring young kits suitable for showing. We are currently working on several special genetic projects. Our minilop chocolate breeding program is still in its early stages. Chocolate coloured minilops are still really a working progress here in Australia, and we want to contribute to the refining of them as they are such a lovely colour. We were fortunate to obtain some excellent breeding stock from other studs that had similar breeding programs that were closing down. We are not in any hurry to produce chocolate kits, but are currently manipulating the gene pool back to our placid, better type rabbits here. The end result should be high quality, showable, chocolates that can hold their own at any show. We are probably two years away from reaching that goal. When we first started this stud I instantly fell in love with pictures of seal point and blue point minilops. Unfortunately we don't see any of these colourings at our shows which tells me that someone needed to take up the challenge. And once again as a colouring, they are an appealing beautiful minilop rabbit. So as I was looking for our stock from all around Australia, I was gearing the genetics to throw these colourings. It paid off as we have produced some lovely blue point minilop bucks we are looking forward to showing in the coming year. Once again this project is still in it's early days. Showing this new generation will certainly indicate to us how well we are doing with this breeding program. But we have progressed much quicker than I first thought.
The other love of ours is the minilop butterfly patterning. Not often seen at shows as it is so difficult to get right. So far we have a few good minilop kits that we hope will add some variety to the show ring. Butterfly patterned minilops are a popular request from the general public as pets, and it would be a pity if they were not represented well at our local rabbit shows. Our aim here at Erinlea being to better the type and preserve and improve the patterning. We have produced our first chocolate carrier minilops, who's patterns are a smidge on their noses, off being perfect. We hope to see some chocolate, lilac and blue butterfly patterned minilops soon here at Erinlea. We do have a less obvious project we are working on. We are fortunate to have obtained some minilop breeding lines that are of excellent type with exceptional placid personalities. I have small children and know how important it is to have minilops that young children can comfortably handle and are very tolerant. Also the minilop breed is fast becoming a popular modern day pet. The public of all ages want a small bunny that is willing to sit or lay in your arms like a baby for long periods of time, while perhaps you relax in front of the TV after a long days work. I call them the lap bunny line. It is generally unnatural for a bunny to want to lie on its back and be cradled like a baby, as most rabbits will feel vulnerable. But we do have breeding lines here that do that, and we are working on improving them. We have firmly established that this personality trait is definitely genetic, so we are not only working at preserving it, but wish to propagate it to all our colour lines. By popular demand we do offer a minilop rabbit boarding service for $8 a day, but at this point we only have it available to minilop rabbits that were bred here. It is lovely to see how our kits have grown up, and a good opportunity to obtain data for our breeding programs. The only requirement is that they are in good health and are currently housed in a pen protected from mosquitoes. As you can appreciate, if an infected rabbit with a virus caught via a mosquitoe bite should visit us, we could risk the health of all our stock. So it is very important that our customers are honest in this regard, as symtoms can take days to appear after biten. All our babies leave here litter pan trained and we hope they have continued these good habits to lessen our workload. Prior notice and booking well ahead of time is absolutely essential to make sure we have sufficient pen space.
Please check our website regularly as we do update frequently. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at
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. You can contact me via email at
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You may also phone 03 - 97512987
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