I'm guessing I haven't mentioned that we are knee deep in an experiment in urban animal husbandry. Last July I got another crazy idea.
To begin, we've had trouble affording the kind of grass fed meat I would prefer. Not just for health reasons, but also to continue to support the kind of ethical farming I feel so strongly about. If we all are voting with our dollars, it upset me to put back the free range chicken and buy the factory raised because I just couldn't spend 20$ on it. So with that simmering in the back of my mind, I came across an article in Urban Farm magazine about raising meat rabbits. One thing led to another and I came to the place I do so often; if other people can do it, why not me? So I did some looking and found a man raising New Zealand rabbits not far from us and off we went to pick them out.
I chose 2 does and a buck, a little hesitant still, but the seller assured me that if I didn't like it or it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, I could just butcher all of them and my problems would be over. Hmmm...you can see why I might still be hesitant. Having never butchered an animal in my life, much less dispatching them myself, I did have some concerns. But, what one person can do, blah blah. My lovely husband took this all very much in stride, built me a large rabbit hutch without ever cracking a book about what they actually needed in terms of housing, and off we went. If you don't know us in life, we're well suited to each other in this regard. We just march ahead after varying amounts of research, safe in the knowledge that we've done other things similar so this will likely be fine.
They grew up as animals do, and by the time fall rolled around, they were full grown meat rabbits, weighing in the ballpark of 8 or 10 pounds and getting pretty irritated with each other about being all together. The females, or does, like deer, will not tolerate each other or their ardent male when they are fully grown, and will actually harm or kill each other.
The other thing that surprised me was that they are fairly destructive about moving things around in their cage. When it got cold, I rustled up these square kitty litter buckets and put them in there with the idea that they might like to sleep in them. Instead they usually flipped them over or sat on the top of it. When I tried to make it cozier in there by putting some straw in the bucket, they promptly made that their outhouse. Perhaps that's the reason why people like them as house pets; they are rather fastidious and prefer to make a single spot their potty corner. Clearly the folks who manufacture and sell the bedding in the pet stores meant for rabbits don't understand said bunnies are only looking for a spot to pee in.
Regardless, I learned my lesson and started zip tying everything down. My other concern by this time was that they were going to have babies when they were all still together. So we got them separated after some trial and error about how to do that. Having said that, it was a day late and dollar short because both of them had their first small litters on the bottoms of their cages without building any kind of nest for them. By this time, it was getting cold and all the babies died.
It goes without saying that I felt pretty crappy about my skills as a farmer by this time and by default, as a person. My husband and I got into an argument about spending time on their care and it struck me that maybe my husband wasn't as into this as I thought. I'm sure some of you are shaking your heads at my ignorance, but the truth is, being a farmer, vegetables or animals, gives me such a deep feeling of contentment, that is simply didn't occur to me that my long suffering partner might not care for this in the same way I did.
After some heated debate and an hour or so apart, I realized that this was my problem to deal with. I decided that I had bit off more than I could chew and that it was time to just butcher the bunnies and end the project. I laid awake most of that night trying to decide how best to dispatch the rabbits. Having never done that, it was important that I did it quickly and humanely. A bop on the head? Sudden jerk of the neck? I just didn't know which would be the best and spent a very anxious night. The next morning I called my dad, him having grown up on a farm, and asked for his help. I told him the situation and he said I could bring them out the following weekend, as he lives about 90 minutes from us, and he would help me.
The next weekend I put them all in a cage together, got the car and kids ready to go, and loaded them up to take them out to my dad's. I noted that my happy buck, Doug the Bunny, was fervently 'loving' his lady bunnies, but since we were going to butcher them anyway, it hardly mattered. But we hit a roadblock when I called my dad. He said he had hurt his leg and that he wouldn't be up to butchering help today. Well, crap.
I resolved the issue in part that night by ordering proper cages for them at a reasonable price with free 2nd day shipping. Internet shopping to the rescue! I still wasn't sure I was going to keep them, but I knew they couldn't be kept the way we had been. Housing them in a more convenient way was at least a temporary option and solved a couple of weather related issues as well because we had winter coming and the bunnies needed a dry place to live out of the wind.
So they stayed and I'll continue the update soon in my next post, "A Bloody Bunny in My Pocket."
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