Rabbits, Records and Other Matters

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Such a schedule is easy to keep and should give you the best overall feed conversion ratio (most meat per pound of rations) consistent with the health of your does. You'll be breeding each female while she's still rearing young and getting five litters a year from every female. (Don't worry about overtaxing your rabbits' reproductive powers. Subjects at experiment stations have produced nine litters a year without harming themselves.)

Profitable commercial operations attain yearly litter weights of at least 140 pounds per working doe, so the homesteader's goal of 100 pounds each isn't unreasonable. That live weight will dress out to 50 pounds of good eating annually, or-if you keep two does eight pounds of meat a month. The 25 to 35 hides from the litters of each female will, in addition, provide more fur mittens than you can wear in a lifetime.

About costs: My bunnies are fed good-quality rabbit pellets and all, the greens-garden thinnings and weeds-they'll eat at a sitting. The buck costs me 200 a week to feed. I don't have numbers on the does yet, but I expect that the first several litters will set me back about 604 per dressed pound. Expensive? Yes and no. Commercial raisers can cut that figure to about 404 but the supermarket price of rabbit meat is $1.10 a pound. And, by staggering ;he breeding times of your does, you can harvest the litters directly to table without refrigeration. Try that with your beef! (Feed prices vary locally and over a period of time always seem to go up. Here In semi-rural North Carolina, a 25 pound bag of rabbit pellets currently sells for around $2.60.-MOTHER.)

Buying pellets does allow the homesteader to get started with rabbits easily, but is still the least preferred method of feeding bunnies in the long run. As part of our move toward self sufficiency, we'll want to raise our own rabbit feed and once we get into bunny nutrition and begin the organic growing of grains, alfalfa, and hay, we'll have completed the loop and created a closed system. At best, then, prepared rations are a temporary crutch and commercial statistics only a yardstick.

To conclude, let's look at the homestead rabbit operation with an ecologist's eye. By growing bunnies for your table you'll be eliminating refrigeration (power pollution), handling (an unnecessary link between you and your food), transportation (and a whole multitude of pollution sources along with it), packaging (solid waste disposal), and on and on and on. Isn't raising your own a kinder way to live on this planet than buying rabbit-or any other-meat at a supermarket?.

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