Rabbit-8 to 14 Cents a Pound

(Page 3 of 5)

March/April 1970
 
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You also feed them one of the prepared rabbit pellet foods or whole grain - they don't seem to like any grain that's ground up too fine. You can ask the man you buy your rabbits from for directions as to what he's found the best methods of feeding.

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How Fast Do Rabbits Multiply?

Everybody has a story about how fast rabbits multiply. I remember a friend of mine who had a small family and worried about this when getting his rabbits. In fact, he decided that he'd start with the minimum a single doe and a single buck. He was a salesman and everytime I'd see him I'd ask, "Well, how many rabbits have you now." The first month it was just two. The second month it was two. The third month it was still two. About this time my friend began to worry about his rabbits not multiplying. And when, at the end of the fourth month, he still had only two, I began to get a little suspicious. Sure enough, he didn't have a doe and a buck - he had two bucks!

Determining the sex of a rabbit is easy. Get the man you buy your rabbits from to show you.

I find that two does and a buck produce 40 or 50 rabbits a year to eat. At three pounds or more that is all our family needs.

You breed about every 90 days. Gestation only takes 30 to 32 days. The young nurse for five or six weeks, learning to eat as they go along. At six or seven weeks you put the young fryers in another hutch or two and eat them between then and ten or twelve weeks. Or you process the whole tender crop at 8 or 9 weeks and quick-freeze all except the one you want for dinner then.

You can eat them as fryers until they're seven or eight months old-full grown. But by that time they've eaten a great deal of fairly high priced food and therefore aren't so much of a bargain, cost-wise. Better separate the young bucks from the does at 3 months.

You can kill off old rabbits at the end of a couple or even three years and make a stew out of them. The skin from a mature rabbit is worth considerably more than from "fryers."

You can "inbreed" with no harm. Just keep a young doe or two out of a litter and breed her to your same buck when she's about 7 to 9 months' old. You can stagger your breeding times, having one fresh litter coming in every 6 weeks from one doe or the other. But if you adopt this system, you can't exchange the young between the does. Every 3 or 4 years buy or trade for a new buck.

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