Do It Yourself Rabbit Feed

While looking into growing/making our own rabbit food for meat rabbits, I was pleasantly surprised by this:

http://homesteadingtoday.com/showthread.php?t=211220

The whole homesteadingtoday.com forum is SUPER!

Meat Rabbits – How to YouTube Videos

I think I’ve mentioned somewhere on this blog about my husband and I considering meat rabbits as well as chicken.  If not here, I know i’ve talked about it on my other blog as we were planning on doing it at our country duplex before moving.  Rabbits are not considered ‘livestock’ so they won’t fall under typical city bans like that of chicken.  They are a very healthy, very lean, and very easy to raise yourself meat. 

The only reason we haven’t gotten them here yet is #1 I want better fencing around our yard to keep stray cats and other nusances out of our yard, and #2 we need hutches.  Once we get those two things taken care of, we will begin.  My husband doesn’t like the idea of butchering rabbits we’ve raised – I can understand because I had them for 13 years as pets.   I dont’ like the idea of butchering anything, but to be quite honest with as bad as things are going to get I’ve been talking to my husband about hunting with him so we can get double the bounty (to our limit) on whatever we’re hunting.  He’s been good with duck and rabbit, and I think I could accompany him and handle killing something that we are going to use as food.  Better yet, I really think I can kill our own rabbits now.  A long time ago when we first began thinking about meat rabbits someone suggested that instead of breaking the neck or knocking them on the head, use a .22 and shoot them.  Put them in a box so they can’t move (a narrow one only as long as they are) and shoot them in the head.  Brilliant!  No big chance of a unclean kill and my BIGGEST thing about meat animals is I dont want them to feel pain before they die.  This is one way in which that can be accomplished, and I don’t need to worry about not hitting the right way, or not yanking hard enough, and no bruising of the meat.

We would most likely get a pair of lop eared rabbits for my children, something they could love on and have as pals so that they didn’t try to love on, play with or cuddle our meat rabbits.  I don’t want their hearts to be broken when the rabbits start getting butchered and the easiest way I can think of to prevent that is to give them their own pet rabbits, so they understand that the rest are for eating.  Then again, there may be no easy way to prevent a broken heart, but I am going to do what I can.  i also feel it is important for our children to know where meat really comes from, and to have the skill and thought to be able to provide for themselves.

Anyway, to help prepare me a little more I found these on YouTube tonight (my first time really getting into YouTube!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpwhOE74TMA Butchering and Skinning Meat Rabbits

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3alV5xwwyE How to kill & prepare a rabbit part one (shows actual kill, may be graphic but if you’re planning on raising meat rabbits you’ll have to learn sometime!)