My Rabbits, or "On Raising One's Own Meat, With Some Discussion of the Attendant Pleasures and Dilemmas"

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A brief update, because I haven't been keeping up on this as well as I might have. 

 

All of the little "princess" bunnies shown above have now been sold. Four of them went to Nova Scotia with me at the end of June, to buyers there, and the fifth was taken home by a local family this past week. One of the princess' brothers has also been spoken for, and will travel to NS with me at the end of this month. Since then we've weaned Hazel's litter, so we have a dozen new 4-week weanlings now in their own cage. They're a cuddly bunch as well, and terribly cute (I think they're at their most engaging at 4-6 weeks). 
 

Yesterday both Hester and Ivy gave us new litters, which we'll count this afternoon. Ivy's last litter gave us 7 kits, IIRC, and Hester's ill-fated first litter was 15 kits (of which none survived). This time she seems to have a better grip on how things are supposed to go, and of course in July the risk of the kits becoming hypothermic is much lower than it was in February or March.

 

We've just moved a third batch of young chicks out to the main chicken run, where we have them sequestered inside their own little cage until they're big enough to not need the brooder any more (it's a heating plate that serves mama hen's role of giving them a warm place to sleep). We also have one hen (Miss Prissy, a Leghorn) who's broody and sitting on a clutch of eggs, which we're permitting just 'cause it appeals to my GF to see if she can successfully hatch them for us. There's also a clutch of quail eggs in our incubator, which are due to start hatching out today (we're seeing some of the eggs wiggle, but nobody's poked their little beak out yet to have a look around). 

 

On the other side of the whole "circle of life" scenario, our older white hen Flossie just...died one day, of old age as far as we can tell. We'd deliberately taken an older hen (her) to socialize the younger pullets, so this is not entirely a surprise. She'd served her purpose well, and was "boss hen" of our little flock in its early days, and we have a steady progression of ages so the socialization will continue. 

 

We've also harvested one of the surplus roosters, just last night. It was originally going to be both of the Wyandotte roosters, but one of them wasn't buying my "nonchalant" act for a second and wouldn't let me get within 10 feet of him. I'll get him in the next day or two with either a hook or a net. The hook is a sort of long, skinny shepherd's-crook arrangement of wire (I've improvised mine from a coat hanger) that slips around the chicken's leg, but which won't let the foot slip through. 

We're still going back and forth on the fate of our hybrid rooster, Chico. I posted upthread that we'd likely be keeping him, but my GF's been going back and forth on it. My stepdaughter is very fond of him, because he's attached to her and comes to her hand. They'll sit on the back deck sometimes, and she'll chat with him and he'll chuckle and cluck back at her. I rather like him myself (chickens do have personalities, though it takes a while to get a feel for them). Here you can see him following me to the rabbit pen an hour ago, rather like a dog (screencap from our security system): 

 

 

I think stepdaughter and I will probably carry the day. As for the two Wyandotte roosters I won't miss them at all, they're both just jerks. One of them (I think, but don't know for sure, it's the one who's already plucked and in my fridge) attacked my GF pretty regularly. It's probably her red hair, which I suspect made her look like a REALLY BIG WYANDOTTE in his eyes. 

We also have a cage of surplus male quail to be dealt with in the next few days, and a handful of bunnies from the first couple of litters. So it's going to be a busy week, above and beyond my actual "work, work" (ie, my writing workload). 

 

GF found a farm not terribly far from here where they slaughter and clean rabbits, chickens etc for a fairly reasonable $5/ea, which is not worth the drive for small quantities but absolutely will be late this summer/early autumn when we have 60-ish chickens to be dispatched. Still figuring out the logistics of getting 5 dozen chickens into the back of my Subaru, mind you...

[Ddanno]

I love these posts, particularly the details in how caring and loving you are for your livestock (even if some of the roosters are barstewards). Thank you

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A quick late-day update: Ivy gave us a litter of 10 kits, and Hester popped out 13. 

So far we're at 6 quail and counting, so we'll see what the morning brings (it typically takes a solid 24 hours or so after the first one hatches before we know how many will make it). 

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Here's something most of you won't have seen before: quail-chick physio. 

 

A clutch of eggs hatches out over a span of 24-30 hours, and occasionally the last ones to hatch are slightly deformed by their extra time in the shell. They can often be salvaged, if you gently stretch and straighten their little legs and feet 2 or 3 times/day while they're still tiny. For context, this little guy is roughly the height of a pecan in its shell, but skinnier. My GF has child-sized hands, which makes the chick look larger than it is. Its peers are a bit bigger, partly because they hatched up to a day earlier, and partly because their legs are straight; which means they expend less effort trekking from the brooder (a warming plate, simulating mama's body heat) to the food and water.

 

 

I've mentioned a time or two that my sweetheart is a ginger, but you'd probably have guessed that anyway from the freckles.

[Ddanno]

"Quail chicken physio" is probably the most adorable phrase I will hear this week 🥰

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A quick note to say that the two surplus roosters I harvested yesterday dressed out to just over 3.5 kg, or for those who think in pounds I had one at a little over 4 lbs and one at 3 lbs 10 oz. 

 

One of those was Chico, the hybrid I'd spoken of upthread. For a while it looked like he was going to survive on the strength of his engaging personality and become something of a pet, but he made the mistake of becoming aggressive with our grandson (who was quite fond of him, up to that point) and giving him a couple of pretty bad gouges on the face and arm. It's unfortunate, but it's in the nature of roosters. Stepdaughter and I were rooting for him, but he blotted his copybook pretty badly. 

You really need to handle and socialize roosters a lot when they're young, if you want them to be good around kids. The silkies are getting handled and petted enough that it shouldn't be an issue with them, which is good given that they're intended as pets. Chico and his compatriots were always intended for the freezer, but it took longer than anticipated to get them there (and gave us time to get inadvisably attached to one of them). Now that we're equipped for it, barring the chicken-plucking machine (which is expensive, but can be rented at a pretty reasonable $50/day), the next ones won't go past their time.

 

I do like the option of outsourcing the dirty work at a fairly reasonable $5/bird, too, when we do our main cull for the freezer. Plucking and dressing them takes a lot of time (mostly the plucking), and that's not something I generally have at my disposal. It raises the cost/bird as food, but that's offset by the dollar value of my/our time. Also, bear in mind that chicken prices here aren't as artificially low as they are in the US, so I some leeway before the home-raised birds become too costly. At regular price, a whole 3-3.5 lb chicken at the supermarket is usually $15-$20 in my neck of the woods (I don't buy 'em at full price, but that's the benchmark). 

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I've mentioned that we have largely gone away from using our grow-out cages on the lawn for our adolescent bunnies, because we'd had a problem with the coccidia parasite (adults survive it handily, but it's dangerous for the growing youngsters). We've modified one of the cages so it stays up off the ground, and have used it for our current litter of half-grown kits via Hazel (the "princesses" and their brothers were a slightly older litter from Hilda, and they mostly were sold as pets). 

 

This cage isn't made of all wire, like the ones I've built. My father-in-law constructed it with a wooden frame and chicken wire on all six sides. It's a good piece of equipment, though I plan to modify it this off-season to make it more practical. A little while ago, just after I returned from NS, a few of the bunnies were sorely tempted by the fresh clover growing just out of their reach, and pushed hard enough on the wire in their attempts at snacking that the wire (now rusted in a couple of places) gave way. We retrieved all but one escapee, and there was enough slack in the wire that I was able to re-staple it to the frame using a less-rusted area. 

 

Well, this morning when I went to feed them, I found that they'd repeated their efforts and there were no fewer than four of the little guys happily roaming the lawn and, in one case, patrolling the space between my garden beds (but not, thankfully, eating the garden itself). 

Now, I've mentioned in the past that handling our bunnies frequently has many benefits, up to and including the day of our final, fatal betrayal of their trust. This morning provided a really vigorous endorsement of that strategy, because when the little ones saw me coming with my bucket of water they all hopped happily right to my feet, and waited to be picked up and cuddled. I don't need to tell you, this scenario was vastly superior to chasing the little critters around with a net or some such.

 

It came close on the heels of an endorsement from the lady in Nova Scotia who'd bought four of the "princesses" from me at the end of June. They were for her and a friend, and they're utterly in love. She's bought rabbits from other growers down in NS before, and ended up rehoming them, because they simply weren't human-friendly enough to fit in as pets. That was not at all an issue with ours, of course. She says she'll be buying from us exclusively in future, for herself and her friends, because ours are so sweet-natured. So that was nice. 

 

As I mentioned upthread I'm keeping a spreadsheet this year, to monitor our expenditures and income re the critters and the garden. It's a work in progress, and I keep tweaking it as I go, so that it reflects our income and expenses with some reasonable degree of accuracy. At present we're sitting at a modest -$470-odd year to date, with sales keeping us reasonably close to the break-even point. That's not entirely accurate, because the running total still includes what I've spent on my garden, and I want to split that off from the amounts involved in the rabbits and poultry. 

 

With the critters, I want to get a handle on how our expenses and sales balance each other out, without taking into account the "deemed market value" of the meat itself. It's all well and good to know that a frozen rabbit sells for +/- $10/lb, but I want to know what our actual costs are when year-end rolls around. At that point I'll have a cumulative total of our meat harvest for the year, give or take a few quail. Once I know how many pounds of rabbit and chicken we put in the freezer, and how many quail, I can do subtotals of my cost for each critter and work out what our actual cost was per pound of meat. We'll also look at the approximate market value for those same pounds of meat, and as long as they're close we'll call it a win (because of course ours will be higher-quality than what we'd usually get at the store). That "deemed value" reckoning will also apply to the eggs we get from the quail and hens, with supermarket cost running around $5/doz (I think) right now. Our actual cost for the eggs will be hard to figure, but I'll probably work it backward from the percentage of our flock that will become year-round tenants (a dozen or so, plus five or six silkies that are just pets) vs the number we're growing out for the freezer (40-ish). I'll know what our total costs are for the birds, and just declare that percentage of it to be our cost for eggs. 

With the garden harvest it's another whole story, of course, because we don't sell any of that as we do with the rabbits, birds, and eggs. In that instance I'm just recording our harvests as I make them (ie, 700g of green beans yesterday), and I'll work out a "deemed value" from the supermarket pricing. We should come out to a reasonably favorable position, because I focus less on commodity things like carrots/potatoes and more on those items that cost us more at the supermarket. Bunches of chard or kale, for example, typically run $3.99 for most of the year, so it doesn't take long for a freezer full of greens to add up to a lot of saved money. 

If our costs are outrunning our sales by >$500 at this point, I'm pretty happy with that. We'll have 40-odd chickens in the freezer at 3-4 pounds each, so that's 120-150 pounds. Current price in my neck of the woods is about $6.99/lb IIRC for chicken (when not on sale), and higher for boneless, skinless breasts, so we're easily looking at upwards of $700 in value there (not counting the premium one would ordinarily pay for locally-raised, not water-chilled, etc etc). Add in the dollar value of a couple of hundred pounds of rabbit at $10/lb, and the quail at... whatever figure I decide on, per quail... and we're probably coming out well ahead by year-end. 

One final note, which will amuse some of you. When we had our early-season litters my GF carefully picked and segregated a number of breeding trios, consisting of one buck and two unrelated does, which we offered up for sale to anyone wanting to raise their own rabbits. If we sold them all we'd do it again, and if not, well, we'd call that trio our next-generation set of breeders. We did, in fact, end up with one trio left over, consisting of a black doe, a brown doe, and a white buck. As I've mentioned, my GF tries to keep the names coherent within a given generation, and we're currently on names starting with H. So when I walked into the room, one day recently, she was contemplating H names for the buck. 

"Hector? Horace? Harvey?..." and she was startled when I burst out loudly "Harvey! Yes, perfect! The white buck *has* to be Harvey!" 

She was mystified, until I sent her this link.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042546/