Broccoli Bunny Breakfast
Our broccoli is pretty much harvested now. About every second or third day, I pull a broccoli plant out of the garden and take it to the rabbit colony. They really like that!
I do this either early in the morning or late in the evening. During the day it's just too hot for them to want to eat.
In the group photo, the dirty one is one of the senior does. They stay kind of dirty from digging burrows and going in burrows to nurse their kits. The rest of the rabbits stay pretty clean. They're getting, uh, kinda big.
Labels: rabbits
posted by Leslie @ 9:56 AM
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7 Comments:
Whats horrifying is that you chose new zealand rabbits. They were bred on purpose to be gentle pet friendly and intelligent rabbits. The research industry hijacked for their own ends, but thankfully thats not as prevalent now as before.
The majority of house rabbits tend to be new zealand whites or their mixes. I just can't imagine how you raise such precious animals only to butcher them. Chicken, Pork, Beef, Fish, Lamb...they aren't good enough?
I know I sound full of myself and judgmental, but its only because of the years Ive spent at shelter and rescues raising and treating rabbits.
You seem to treat and raise them with care and understanding, I just dont see how you could view them as livestock.
Hi, anon! I didn't know NZW were bred to be pets. I was under the impression that the smaller rabbits were utilized more by the pet industry - though I confess I have *not* researched this at all.
I do know that NZW, along with Californians, are currently preferred by the commercial rabbit meat industry because of their meat to bone ratio, rapid fill out rate, and white pelts. Seems "the industry" likes pelts they can dye to any color, rather than naturally colored pelts. Go figure.
I think if I'd worked in a shelter rehabilitating abused rabbits and adopting them out to suitable homes I'd have sentiments similar to your own.
In the end, viewing a particular animal as livestock is primarily a cultural thing. If we commonly kept lambs as pets the way we do rabbits, we'd have a very hard time eating them. There's not much cuter than a baby lamb.
Other cultures eat things such as dog that we Americans consider abhorrent. Yet at the end of the day it's all protein in the form of meat.
We raise chickens and rabbits rather than the other livestock you mentioned because we are new to raising animals for our own consumption and wanted to start with small, easily managed animals.
We are a small family and don't really need a beef or pig. We may get a couple of pigs one day (love ham, bacon, sausage, and pork roasts) but we're not ready for that yet.
I confess your first couple of comments did make me feel as if I were under attack, but your persistence in coming back and your comments today make me realize you aren't simply being hateful and judgmental. It seems more that you are looking at things from a very different vantage point and bewildered by what we do. That's cool.
I appreciate your comments. I really do.
My dad was talking about if we have rabbits outside that we should keep them in a hutch rather then let then run around in a fenced in area, I dunno if your way works good or if the other way works better, I Just wanna keeps rabbits for breeding and hopefully if I get the right rabbits for show.
You send them to butcher but do you truly know whether or not there fur is used for a good place? I think what your doing is fine, but you have to be strong (mentally) to sell them for the butcher.
Hi Anon,
Both hutches and colonies have their advantages and disadvantages. More people raise in hutches than in colonies. The benefits to colonies is better exercise, lots of socialization, easier to feed and water, and less worries about temperature extremes.
The drawbacks are the rabbits are not as tame, it's harder to keep up with who is a better mom and who produces more/better offspring, and disease can spread rapidly.
If you are wanting to show your rabbits, you should go with hutches. Colony rabbits' coats are not nice enough for showing.
We don't sell our rabbits to a butcher; we butcher them ourselves. We butcher too young for the pelts to be worth much. Sometimes we give one to the dogs to play with. Other than that they get tossed with the rest of the scrap (head, intestines, etc).
Thanks, That helped me a lot. That helped me think which should be better for us. I came from being a urbenite to WV with my mom and dad, and I seam to like this better.
Urbanite to WV! You're playing my song!!!
I forgot another advantage to hutches: you can control the breeding. That way you can control your population growth, more or less. On the other hand, in a colony you don't have to take the doe to the buck and be all involved in the breeding yourself.
Your reply to the anon was given with a great deal of care and understanding. But at the end of the day, life is life and predatory animals eat other animals.
Had they been raised in the wild, most of them would die slow lingering deaths while being eaten alive by something higher on the food chain with a lot less care and understanding.
In exchange for you being the predator that eventually consumes them, they get a life nature could not possibly offer. No stress. Ample food. Relatively free range existence, constant care and affection and a quick death.
That is a substantially better deal than nature offers anything that low on the food chain.
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