Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> 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