Anyone raise meat rabbits

[waksupi]

Back when we were teens, my brother and I raised rabbits for meat. Mostly anybunny would do, but the New Zealand Giant is a big bunny with lots of meat. We were selling most of them to our grandma and some of her friends, and eating them, too. Bunny is yummy! Not real high in fat, if you need to cut back on fat, but you can get deficiency diseases if bunny is too much of your diet because of the low fat. Fry them in lard, and avoid the problem, and they taste good!

The Inuits were aware of this, it was called rabbit starvation, and a lot of cheechakos died of it. The trick was to always eat all the innards, to make up for the missing vitamins in the meat.

[redneck1]

I suppose a person could look at rabbit as a healthy alternative .
Just not the way I cook them .

My favourite way is to break them down into 6 pieces marinate em in buttermilk then. bread and fry em up . .. I like them fried so much I usually don't do any other way . its just good eatin .

And I like to do them on a spit , giving them a nearly constant baste with melted butter . and go easy on the salt n pepper .

[gwpercle]

When my kids got older and found out that the " chicken" they were eating several times a month wasn't chicken from the grocery store but Rabbit from the cages in the back yard ... they wouldn't eat the "chicken" any more and made a fuss about their pets being eaten . I tried to convince them that the cats and dogs were our pets and rabbits were food ... but that explanation didn't go over well with them .

Since the cats and dog had names , they reasoned that by naming every rabbit in the cages that it would elevate them from food to pet status and thus protection from being consumed !

Then my wife liked their view and sided with them ... thus ended my rabbit raising career .
A few of the young "fryers" went into the freezer , we kept one , my daughters favorite , for a pet and the rest went to a new home .
I don't miss having them ... it's a lot of work .
Gary

[WebMonkey]

we raised rabbits for a couple years.

the meat to feed ratio was great but the waste management was a pain.
copious amounts of urine to move.

rabbits are the easiest, for me, to process.

i'll probably end up getting back into them, i still have the hutches.
i'll just need to figure out how to dissipate the urine better.

lastly, rabbit fever was known to many people groups.

the condition has 'rabbit' in the name but it refers to anyone consuming a protein only diet.

really no fear of that today unless you're in the bush in alaska eating only game animals.

schedule a trip to wal-mart/schnucks/hy-vee/country mart for most of us.
i mean you gotta have a big cast iron skillet full of fried potatoes, peppers, and oinions to go with the rabbit straps.
(big dollop of kph pork fat/butter to get things lubricated)
tall glass of full fat goat milk


mmmmmm

[.429&H110]

I cut ryegrass for feed and bedding. A layer of rye under the hutches caught the urine and I shredded it along with everything else. The chinese made gunpowder from rabbit urine, so I had to figure that out. Concentrated, fermented, the stinky stuff will make nitrate crystals. If you have nitrate, you can have blackpowder. Bunnies maybe someday will make reloads. They surely did make peonies.

[GregLaROCHE]

When I stopped raising rabbits around fifteen years ago, some people were using cages with a small cubby and the rest was a wire grate. The rabbits could easily walk around on it, but their droppings and urine fell through to a tray, that could easily be cleaned. It made sense to me that it would greatly reduce the time cleaning cages. I was considering trying it, but then the wife put her food down about my raising cute bunnies anymore. I don’t know if that method ever caught on, but seemed very logical to me.

[WRideout]

we raised rabbits for a couple years.



lastly, rabbit fever was known to many people groups.

the condition has 'rabbit' in the name but it refers to anyone consuming a protein only diet

Technically, rabbit fever is Tularemia, a bacterial infection first identified in Tulare County, California (I am a microbiologist by education.) A fair number of rabbit hunters get it while field dressing game, often through droplets that hit the eye.

Wayne

[MT Gianni]

Much of the fat in rabbits is behind the eyes. If you're in a survival situation you need to be eating the organs and brain as well. If you are eating rabbit in a non survival situation and are worried about a lack of fat buy ice cream.

[blackthorn]

I grew up on what I would call a subsistence farm in south-central Manitoba. We had all manner of fowl, dogs, cats, sheep, goats pigs, cattle, horses etc. and we had rabbits. Everything we raised was meat, except for the horses, dogs and cats, a hard lesson I learned about age 6 when my pet lamb was sent off to market. In 1996 I married my second wife and during hunting season I bagged a couple of bunnies. I cleaned them and brought them home to cook. New wife said "those look like skinned babies", and she will not, does not eat them, so, no rabbit for me anymore. She was city raised and I guess its all in your perspective.

[Krag 1901]

MY family raised rabbits in the 50's my dad sold them plus our eggs and chickens out of his 1935 Buick in the Veterans Housing complexes. My Granny raised New Zealand Whites for the University of Loma Linda for medical research. She gave one little two week old bunny to my then future wife who had to bottle feed it and carried it to and from work in a cardboard box. The rabbit learned to be house broken and was quite a pet. Yep put them in cages above a box and collect the droppings, compost them in the grass clippings and leaves from the yard and in four months you can raise any thing!

[GregLaROCHE]

Rabbits are indeed lean. That’s why my preferred way of eating them is grilled wrapped in bacon.