Are rabbits pets or meat?

 Pets or meat? When it comes to raising rabbits, it could be either or both.

Occasionally throughout my 26-year marriage to Sandy we debated whether rabbits were for meat or pets. Both of us had rabbits as kids. Sandy and her sister had pet rabbits. My family raised them for meat and to show in 4-H. I ate an awful lot of rabbit meat growing up in Colorado. At one point we had more than 200 in our rabbitry.

Feeding, breeding, and butchering bunnies was just a way of life for me. Twice a day my brothers and I went out and made sure they had food and water and every weekend we used shovels to clean out the rabbitry and fertilize the garden. As needed, usually a couple times a month, we would reduce the population and fill the freezer.

Believe me, it’s a lot easier to increase the population than to depopulate it because rabbits breed, well … like rabbits. Most does (females) can breed immediately after giving birth. With a 30-day gestation period, they can have up to 11-12 litters a year with each litter ranging in size from 1-12 kits (babies). That pace is rough on the doe and isn’t healthy for her.

My preference is to wait until she weans her kits and they’re moved out before breeding her again. That takes two months or more. I usually get 4-5 litters a year out of each doe, and they average eight to 10 kits a litter. When you have about 30 does, that makes for a lot of little ones. It also makes for some very happy bucks (males), but that’s another story for another day.

Whenever the topic of raising rabbits came up, I would accuse Sandy of suffering from Thumper Syndrome. Thumper, the cute character from “Bambi,” made rabbits seem too adorable to eat. Bugs Bunny didn’t help either – that wascawwy wabbit!

I still remember when we got our first rabbits. We got a pair of New Zealand whites that I named Old Dan and Little Ann after the dogs in “Where the Red Fern Grows.” My fifth grade teacher was reading the book to us at the time. Eventually we added Californians, Dutch, satins and other breeds.

When I entered Boy Scouts, rabbit raising was the first merit badge that I earned. I also showed red satins as my 4-H project at the Boulder County Fair. For what it was worth, I sure racked up plenty of participation ribbons over the years.

We got rid of all of our farm animals while I was in high school. It took 42 years and a move to rural Brazos County to get back into farming on a small scale. We started with chickens and added ducks and geese. Last fall we were given three sibling New Zealand white rabbits to start our rabbitry. There were two bucks and a doe.

At the suggestion of my daughter, Heather, we named them Harry, Ron, and Hermione after the characters in the Harry Potter books. We then purchased two TAMUK rabbits. The breed was specially produced at Texas A&M University-Kingsville to be meat producers and to be able to withstand the hot Texas summers.

We named the doe Mousey because she looked like a large, gray mouse. The buck, who is mostly white with very large, dark ears, dark feet, and a line on his nose that looks like a mustache, has two names. Sandy calls him Mr. Belvedere. I call him Mr. Velvet Ears.

Not long ago we purchased two Californian does. Going with the Californian theme, I named one Cali. Keeping with the Harry Potter theme, Sandy named the other Luna.

Since we had too many bucks, one of the New Zealands had to go. I butchered one but couldn’t tell you which one. We decided that since Ron marries Hermione at the end of the Harry Potter series that we would keep that name. Poor Harry wound up in the frying pan – Sandy’s first time to cook and eat rabbit.

A couple weeks ago Hermione gave birth to six kits. Mr. Velvet Ears is the proud pappa of four black and two gray kits. On Tuesday night he became a father again as Mousey gave birth. As of this writing I have not had a good enough look to see how many.

What this means is we are now in the rabbit meat production business (and maybe pelts, too). So what changed Sandy’s mind? She saw how much rabbit meat was selling for at the Brazos County Farmers Market. She now gets the benefit of helping raise cute little bunnies and I get the job of converting them into meat. It looks like we both won our argument.