Raising Meat Rabbits

***If you plan on raising meat rabbits then you may be interested on how you can save about 50% on feed costs by using our concentrate pellet rather than buying locally milled feed in 50 pound bags.

I started raising meat rabbits years ago at home because I wanted a healthier source of sustainable meat.  I first raised chickens but found that to be a big mistake!  Turns out that raising rabbits for meat is

• a lot less work
• a lot less mess
• a lot less noise
• a whole lot cheaper to raise
• way healthier!

A major benefit of raising rabbits for meat comes from the fact that I could breed and raise meat rabbits year around because they aren’t seasonal breeders like chickens.

Also, I could dress a meat rabbit in about a tenth of the time that it took me to dress a chicken for dinner.  I learned how to de-bone the meat in minutes so I could cook up the tenderloin or “filet mignon” as an all-white super tender, moist, mild, and lean fajita meat.  The rest of the meat I would smoke with fresh first-year twigs from a sugar maple tree and then make a super lean all-white homemade sausage with fresh herbs (savory, sage, oregano, and basil) with a little added whole sugar cane and sea salt.  Sad to say I just can’t eat pork anymore! Who would have known that such a healthy meat would be so easy to raise?

After a while I began to realize that raising rabbits for meat wasn’t so easy.  My Does were inconsistent in their production and the baby bunnies often suffered from diarrhea and died.  Sometimes I would come home to find that I lost yet another Doe or that my breeding Bucks had lost interest in breeding.

Every rabbit breeder I spoke with had the same problems I was dealing with.  However, they all carried with them different myths that they felt strongly might be the answer. I got tired of all the hearsay and when I graduated with a B.S. in Biology I started researching in the published scientific literature for the truth.

I found out that the secrets to successfully raising rabbits for meat were only recently being studied.  In fact it was only this last few years that a real understanding of how to raise meat rabbits has been published.  I am now very familiar will all the published research that will help you be successful in breeding and raising meat rabbits.  I have put together a free rabbit mini-course that “translates” the science into an easily readable format just for you!

I plan to add my favorite home-made recipes to this page as well a link to a hidden page, complete with pictures, that outlines how to dress and de-bone your home raised meat rabbits ( I hope you enjoy the meat rabbit sausage recipe!).