We raise
rabbits both for meat and manure for the gardens (and they eat vegetable scraps). Although I embraced
the practicality of this, the practice of being so practical has been
hard! After all, both my sisters have raised rabbits as pets and we
all shared one as kids (named Thumper, of course).
In fact,
I wonder if the reason that Americans and the English seem more
squeamish about raising/serving rabbits for dinner than the French and
Italians is because we all grew up with Beatrix Potter's bunnies and
Disney's intrepid Thumper in “Bambi.”
Below is information about my experience with them,as pets and as fodder, labeled by category for easy skimming.
Demeanor
of rabbits as pets:
As pets,
rabbits are curious, social beings. (We used to take Thumper on
walks, with a chihuahua leash). When our current rabbits hear me
entering the shed to top off their water and food, they jump around
and then come to the doors. Even the babies come forward and two
have fallen out when I opened it! Although the rabbit raising books
I bought say that rabbits are content in a crowded warren, I rather
wish these had bigger hutches and more place to play, because they
alternate periods of great activity, with long siestas. Because they
are diggers, we can't put them in the chicken run, once the ground
has thawed. We also can't put the adult males and females together,
or males and males, if we had them) because they will fight.
Rabbit
pets can be house trained – my aunt did this. They are very clean
animals, like cats, and silent. I see a lot of advantages to having
rabbits as pets. The only difficulty if they are uncaged some or all
of the time is that they are chewers and diggers by instinct, so
household wires and furniture could be vulnerable to their natural
predilictions, and fences might not keep a neighbor's dog out or your
rabbits in.
Our
experience raising them:
Besides
the advantages of rabbits as pets, they are also currently marketed
as “the sustainable meat” because rabbits breed like, well,
rabbits, and therefore are in no danger of disappearing. Female
(does) have no annual estrus cycle. They can get pregnant all year
round. A single doe can bear four litters, up to 8 kits each, or 32
babies per year. A male (buck) with several females could sire
hundreds in that time. Since we are trying to live a sustainable,
self-sufficient lifestyle, we said yes when a friend suggested that
we raise rabbits for food and gave us a breeding pair of Flemish
Giants and two adolescents.
As the
name indicates, these are large. The ideal adult weight is 15
pounds, so they are larger than most house cats! Our does are
grey/blue with white patches behind the shoulders. The buck is brown.
Did you know that you can often tell rabbit gender by eyelashes?
It isn't foolproof, but in our breed, at least, females have them.
Males, don't!
Because
of their size, Flemish Giants require larger hutches than many
breeds, but since we were building a new structure from scratch that
was not hard to accommodate. We had a contractor build us a
multi-functional building as follows: an 8x16 greenhouse facing
south, sharing its north wall with an 8 x 16 storage shed (for out of
season items). Five rabbit hutches stick out along the north wall of
this building like a range of bay windows (see second building photo below). Two of them have a
connecting door – that's where the mother and her active 5 week old
kits are now. When they are old enough, we'll put the males in one
hutch and the females in the other.
SW corner of greenhouse and shed |
Construction:
Rabbit hutches and rain barrel |
Food and chew toys:
We buy
huge bags of rabbits pet food from a feed store, supplemented by
snacks. As you would expect, they like carrots and other crunchy
vegetables. They also like oatmeal, apples, raisins, and plain popcorn,
but not pineapples. The lactating doe also appreciates dry milk.
Once the landscape starts to green up, I gather ferns, birch leaves,
grasses - any greens. They LOVE dandelions most of all. Rabbits are, by nature, chewers (their teeth keep
growing, like some other rodents), so they love to gnaw slim birch and
spruce branches, straw and hay, and chew toys, like cardboard toilet
paper rolls or even paper (to shred). They nibble my hand and jacket
when I reach in to clean out debris or offer food. After two seasons, however, I have decided not to offer paper in the future. The bits and pieces clog up the wire, get wet, and then collect food/water/excrement. Not pleasant for me or for otherwise neat and clean animals. Instead, I increased the number of branches they could gnaw and leaves they could tear or eat. (Paper put in the nesting box for a pregnant doe was different. She never pooped in there, even when she didn't conceive).
Breeding:
Adolescents
are ready to breed around 5-6 months (but the males can get feisty around females before that time, even thought they can't do anything, so you need to separate them sooner). For insemination, we deliver
the female to the male's hutch for a few minutes at a time. (Vice
versa and she will likely hurt him to defend her territory.) The
first few times we did this, the buck did not know what to do. He
acted like a junior high school boy with a playmate – running
around, jumping over her, bumping her. The next time, he tried
humping her nose, shoulder, side – everywhere. She finally bit his
ear to get him to lay off! Well at some point, around April 1, he
figured it out, because on May 1, five kits were born.
We had
read (Storey's Raising Rabbits,
available at Amazon) that you can tell when the doe is close
to delivering because she will start carrying straw around in her
mouth. But everybody - male, female, adult, young, liked to nibble straw. We also
read that she will start to tear up paper to soften a nest. But they
always tore up paper. Finally we saw her tearing out her own fur to
line the nest. Aha! That was new. On May 1, we saw some blood on
the paper and could see that her nest was topped with a layer of fur
like a pie crust on a pie, and the crust was gently moving up and
down, with the breath and movement of the little babies underneath!
For ten days we weren't sure how many there were - we were too
cautious to peek beneath the fur - but every once in a while as they
moved around, they left an aperture, and we could see intertwined,
hairless pink creatures about the size of an adult's thumb.
I was
worried about some dying because I read that attrition in first
litters tends to be high. We NEVER saw the doe nurse in the nesting
box. Apparently, mothers go in about twice a day. Those babies that
grab a nipple, live, and those that can't, perish. It's a tough world.
At about three weeks, they had fur. Two are orange, two are brown,
and one is an albino, complete with red eyes. The mother started
lifting a few at a time out of the nesting box to explore the larger
hutch and to be with her. Sometimes, even months later, I would see one or another
sitting up on her back. Other times, all five would huddle together
as they had in their nest box. When exploring, their little feet
preferred cardboard to the wire, so we covered most of the mesh base
for them.
To
nurse, the ambulatory babies had to go to the mother whenever she was
still for short periods, like eating or drinking. If she swung
around, several kits swung beneath her. At four weeks, we cleaned
out the nesting box and replaced it sideways. The mother would often
climb up on top to get away from the babies! So, up there I would
leave fresh produce that she could enjoy but that the nursing kits
were too young to eat. They are growing rapidly though, and at this
point, it looks like four are eating pellets and only the smallest
one remains nursing.
Manure
for the Garden:
Rabbit
manure is great for gardens for several reasons. Primarily, it is
not as “hot” (excess nitrogen) as chicken or horse manure, so it
does not have to age (decompose) before use. It can be scooped up
fresh. A second advantage is the intact structure. Referred to as pellets, it looks like
round “nuggets”, about the size of store bought blueberries.
They are easy to scoop up and parse out to various plants or
planters. Manure of this structure (moose pellets, too) doesn't
smell very much, so there is less of the “ick” factor in using
it. In fact, the water stored in an old malt barrel in my greenhouse
smells worse than the manure! We purposely built our rabbit hutches near our greenhouses and some upper gardens.
Since we
live in a spruce forest, the land we have cleared for gardens is
HIGHLY acidic and needs a lot of remediation to grow healthy
vegetables. The rabbit manure is much easier for me to manage than
our compost pile, consistently available, and saves me from buying
and transporting much fertilizer. I'm delighted to have it! I
just need a better system for catching it below the cages so I don't
have to lean under there with a shovel. After some observation and intermediate steps, we inserted an an angled sheet of
plywood, covered with visqueen (sp) leading down to a slim, plastic child's sled. This collects pellets (and hay and other detritus) from two of the hutches. I can easily shovel additions from the hutch "basements" not currently involved in this process, and easily pull the full sled to the greenhouse or adjacent gardens. Next year, guess what. Three sleds!
Butchering:
I admit
to having been a totally hypocritical meat eater because I have never
thought much about where meat comes from. Cities allow such a degree
of specialization that I just had to walk up to a counter to buy it
cut up, wrapped in plastic, and served in little yellow trays. I've
never been a hunter who understands the element of death involved in
my dinners. So it was distressing to see the blood on the snow the
first time Bryan butchered a rabbit. But, when he brought me the
meat, all cut up and cleaned, I could deal with it on “kitchen
auto-pilot.” However, I must admit, that meal was the first time I
cooked with clear images of the source animal we transported and fed
daily to reach my plate. Now that we are taking more responsibility for
raising our own food, I am becoming more respectful of the time,
effort and process required to feed me!
An
adolescent Flemish Giant (3-5 months) yields about 5 pounds of meat –
about the size of a large roasting or frying chicken. We generally brine it first and then, since rabbit meat is very lean, I cooked it in
the pressure cooker or in the smoker. To keep it moist, I baste it, drape it with bacon, or cook with lots of liquid. Various meals have included rabbit stew, curry, burritos, and BBQ. Rabbit meat has less
cholesterol than chicken, and is one of the more efficient animals
to raise for meat. Chickens are great, as 2 pounds of feed yield 1
pound of meat, but rabbits are pretty good at 4:1, lower than goats,
sheep, and much lower than cattle (10:1). People who have edible
greenery longer during the year than we do would encounter lower feeding
and heating costs than we have.
I
realize that I need to lose my squeamishness about eating rabbits if
we want to be able to feed ourselves here, particularly when other
food is unavailable and transportation is not feasible (during spring
Break Up and fall Freeze Up). Last year, Bryan never saw a single
bear or bull moose when he went hunting for them, and the fish runs
were meager. We are still heavily dependent on quarterly trips to
Costco. And while Alaska is full of edible wild plants all summer
long – summer isn't long, it is short. I don't imagine that there
are many vegetarians living any distance from supermarkets in the various lands of the midnight sun.
Raising these rabbits (and chickens in the prior article) for food
and other functions, like manure, is a practical choice, but
nonetheless, it involves many lessons that never occurred to me when
I lived in that Houston high-rise.
You might enjoy the latest book by John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry, about these and related topics.
You might enjoy the latest book by John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry, about these and related topics.
Kudos for this post. I really agree that rabbits are also great for a pet in our house because they can even behave more than a dog or a cat (just my opinion). We just need to be more responsible and do some research.
ReplyDeleteTrying to learn about rabbits to feed the family this summer at our cabin. Thanks for the information.
DeleteYour article very instersting. I feel helpful.
ReplyDeleteregards kelinci
Rabbits are not rodents. They are lagomorphs. Also you should never give them cardboard or paper to chew on, as these contain residual chemicals in them and can effect the health of the rabbit and the quality of the meat. Typically you will not see rabbits nursing their kits as they only do it 1-2 times daily. They seem as if they might be ignoring their kits but they are only following their natural instinct to protect their offspring from predation as they have a strong smell to predators and their kits do not.
ReplyDelete