Farmed Rabbits

[inzane]

Hi,

My favourite book is "The Domestic Rabbit" by J.C. Sandford.

Rabbits are farmed extensively in France, Spain, Belgium and America.

Gary

Its amazing how fast knowledge dissappears. We live in an agricultural area and often go to the national/county shows and I've never seen anything on rabbits. We nearly lost all our bantams too, but luckily they are making a bit of a comeback, there is still presious little on the net, but you see them a lot more in the papers and at shows.

I spent the past 2 days trying to make a rabbit enclosure, 'mediteranean style', and have got the rabbits in there. Now we'll see whether they dig there burrows there or escape!!!!

I like these rabbits a lot more than I thought I would! They love having a bit of space, they are running around jumping like spring lambs. The enlosure is 2.5m by 5m. I put a little poly tunnel in for them after reading murrays link to the berkely farm and the symbiosis! well fingers crossed!

[echidna]

http://www.cd3wd.com/CD3WD_40/CD3WD/index.htm has several booklets on rabbit-keeping as well as other suitable small area livestock.

[MarkEinOz]

This might be of interest

http://www.csiro.au/science/CrusaderRabbits.html

[GaryD]

G'day Mark,

That's a great link......and some of the other links on the site are really good, too.

Gary

[MarkEinOz]

Yeah, very interesting indeed!

And I see the going rate for Crusader or Growtec brood does and bucks are around the $55 mark. Not bad considering the output of those beasties!

I will be acquiring some in the next 6 months so will be able to see what this is all about.

[GaryD]

Hi Mark,

.....and once you've sat down to your first delicious meal of farmed rabbit, you'll never look back.

I love living in Queensland but the ban on farmed rabbits defies logic. It smacks of politicians and bureaucrates catering to a vested interest.....something with which Queenslanders are not unfamiliar.

Gary

[MarkEinOz]

Cheers Gary,

Even more silly is that the big rabbitry operator Border Ranges (run by the same board members as Lenard's Poultry) at Kyogle NSW, have most of their distribution in Queensland!!!

Almost like Canadian bootleggers! LOL!

Yes I am looking forward to expanding my flock of critters very much. I still have to come to terms with the ethics of cage farming rabbits though. Vexes me somewhat.

[GaryD]

Hi Mark,

While commercial rabbitry operators use cages with mesh floors, there's no automatic requirement for you to do the same thing.

I'd probably opt for a rearing pen (say 1200mm by 1200mm) with a deep litter base......possibly filled with medium coco-peat.....with buck and doe cages of about half the size.

There are other rabbit-rearing models......like the dual compartment arrangement.....here. I particularly like the bit about the rabbits using the mesh enclousure as a latrine.....leaving the sleeping cave relatively clean.

Rabbit manure is a superb fertiliser ingredient.....particularly once it's been through a worm farm.

Gary

[Cucuteni]

Hey folks,

At the moment I'm in Powell River, BC house/dog/cat/rabbit sitting for friends. After much searching last winter online for info on gathering wild plants to use for rabbit forage, I started running into a man named F R Bell and his book "Greenfoods for Rabbits & Cavies" ordered thru"Fur & Feather". Due to the respect that others were mentioning him with and having read thru his little book, I've adopted him as my rabbit guru. There are heaps of conflicting info out there on what to feed and not to, like cabbage. I feed mine moderate amounts without problems. Others say it causes bloat &/or scours.

To make a long story shorter, this is my main bible on the subject. I discovered that there were already alot of good fodder plants in my back yard; dandelion, nipplewort, plantain, maple leaves, blossoms and nuts, fruit bush & tree trimmings, garden thinnings, carrot tops, kale, grasses and on and on. Which brings me to another little book I got a couple of weeks ago: "Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps" by Claude Goodchild and Alan Thompson. Again, British and it is a reprint of an old wartime era pamphlet first printed in 1941.

The last book review is "Rabbit lopaedia: A Complete Guide to Rabbit Care" from (yes, you guessed it) by Meg Brown and Virginia Richardson.

I have been buying good forage plants and/or relocating existing plants to a part of the yard adjacent to the hutches so I have things there at close hand. Alot of the plants are annual but reseed well, others are perennial, like achillea and comfrey, but most seem not at all fussy to grow. And the beneficials love them.

The friend whose rabbits I'm here for also feeds hers herbs like oregano. They like it and it will dry into a sort of hay they can keep nibbling on. My oregano in B'ham was literally seething with tiny insects a couple of weeks ago, most of which were likely beneficial in some respect. Regardless, diversity of a goal in itself. Here they also get black sunflower seeds, tho you could raise your own and the green food mentions they will enjoy leaves, stem, stalk and all.

[GaryD]

Hi Cucuteni,

A very useful post.

Rabbits can be fed a variety of foods. A former colleague of mine who lived in during WW2, used to tell me that just about everything was rationed at the time. Rabbit-keepers were provided with special access to either bran or pollard in acknowledgment of the contribution that they made to producing meat.

Like you, I've read about not feeding cabbage and lettuce to rabbits because of the likelihood of causing them to scour.....and eventually die.

When I was about nine years of age, I lived across the road from an Italian lady who kept rabbits and chooks in her backyard (and created the most wonderful food from them both) and she fed them any thing that was going..........stale bread, old carrots and particularly cabbage and cauliflower leaves which she got from the local greengrocer.

I think the important thing is to introduce new foods gradually so that the animal gets a chance to get used to the change.....rather than giving them strange foods in large quantities.

Gary