Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] Rabbits

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Rabbits
  • Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2005 21:37:41 EDT


> I have a question about breeding rabbits. Is it ok to breed the sister
> with the brother of the same litter? What about father and daughter. Boy
> I haven't been a homesteader long enough because I am feeling like I am
> fostering insest and molestation. LOL! Anyway, is it bad for the
> offspring? We are raising them for meat and fur.
>

Melody, we've been raising and eating rabbits for years. Like you, we are
only in it for the food and fur, not for the 'no basis in reality' show
rabbit
schtick.

In general you can breed a rabbit to its offspring and to its
grand-offspring. But farther than that promotes weakness and predisposistion
to disease.
That is, if you bred a rabbit to its sire or dame and then bred THAT rabbit
to
the same rabbit (its grandsire) you are not going to encounter many problems.

But if you breed the original rabbit to next generation of that line, that's
when you will see some problems surfacing. You could safely breed a rabbit
to
its own great-grand-bunny so long as it wasn't the sire or dame of every
generation between. Can't think of a simpler way to put that, sorry if it is
hard
to follow. Breeding siblings has seemed to produce poor results the first
time and I'd avoid it.

Now let me see who I can get riled up with this following: Melody, if you
are raising animals strictly for utilitarian purposes, take all advice you
get (even, if not especially, the above) with not just a grain of salt, but a
small Siberian salt mine. People get into a particular animal, or even a
particular breed of animal, and they work it to death and get lost in all
sorts of
inconsequential details. Before I first raised rabbits (more than 30 years
ago), I read the book by the (then) rabbit expert Anna Kanabel. If I had
taken
her adivce seriously without talking to a lot of people raising rabbits, I'd
have quit right there. Hold you little finger the wrong way and all of your
rabbits would die or change into 'possums or some such. For example her
advice
was that you HAD to buy proprietery rabbit pellets or you could in no wise
have
rabbit meat to eat. But if you were obstinate and foolish enough to want to
mill your own feed, she gave athe formula which sent something like:

Grade A Number 1 barley, cleaned, at least 60 lbs to the bushel
Current harvest Number 1 oats, double cleaned, heavy grade ... etc.

It reminded me of those old DelMonte commericals where the spokesperson is
wandering through a bean field and picks a bean and holds it up saying "You'd
probably buy this bean, but DelMonte wouldn't want it ... we only use the
best
of the best of the best." I always imagined the DelMonte people going
through
ten acres of beans and saying, "Well, we got twelve beans we could use out of
that field, let's see what we can find in the next one." Kanabel's dire
warning was to not think you could raise rabbits by just giving them some
greens
and a little grain. Expience has proven such advice (and most is along those
lines) to have little to do with reality. We have fed rabbits on weeds,
scraps,
garden waste, and little or nothing else and put pounds and pounds of rabbit
meat on the table. Just this evening the girls were bringing up a bucket of
yellow dock leaves for the rabbits which I was grubbing out of the garden
beds.
Yellow dock and plantain and certain other 'weeds' are high protein food for
rabbits.

Where I'm drifting to in this is - when you are looking for adivice on
homestead animals, find someone (or some source) who is raising that animal,
but it
isn't their "thing", it isn' what floats their boat. When that animal IS
someone's thing, they take a great deal of pleasure in the remotest and
oddest
bits of minutiae that either make no difference whatever or else are only
germane
because of general over-management to begin with. Goat people are the
funniest in this regard. If goats are the only thing someone is doing, it
must be
great fun to drift off on rare trace minerals and acting like a caprine OB
when
kidding time comes. But when a homestead derives its goods from a wide
variety of endeavors, one simply hasn't the time or attention to play those
games.

James




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page