I have no trees. I can't butcher anything in view of anyone. I thought I'll just break their necks in the area between door and kitchen then process them. Everyone says it's easy and then they won't bleed while flapping all over. I broomsticked the previous set and ended up pulling heads off. I still find spots of blood randomly in the bathroom. Things went crack, chickens went limp, I threw them in a pile by the end of the counter but when I came back minutes later there were chickens running around the kitchen and not just in death throes. I finally ended the zombie chickens by stepping on their head and pulling their feet. It was nearly the full length my arms can go but it was enough control to kill without ripping heads off.
What about a nail gun?
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katiebear
Well-known member
Maybe try hanging it in the shower? I am in a rural are so no worries with anyone bothering us...My neighbor uses the old hatchet method. This just works for me. When I was a kid my step mom and her mom popped the head off a chicken by swinging it, the resulting blood bath was more than I could handle. I needed to find a better (for me) method.
Susie570
Well-known member
Yeah, when I was a kid, I was traumatized by being chased around by a headless chicken. The adults thought it was hilarious, but it gave me nightmares for weeks. 
They used a hatchet. It was messy.
They used a hatchet. It was messy.
For those of you that use pellet guns what fps have you found to work best? Do you use a pellet hand gun or a long gun style? I have a pellet gun that shoots 1000 fps and I'm afraid that might be a little dangerous when trying to kill a rabbit that you are holding. Would it be in my best interest to get a hand gun pellet gun? Thanks! opcorn:
opcorn:
MamaSheepdog
Well-known member
Sooner":qdnieq8q said:I'm afraid that might be a little dangerous when trying to kill a rabbit that you are holding. Would it be in my best interest to get a hand gun pellet gun? Thanks!
When using a long gun, most people put the rabbit on the ground. You can keep them in one place by putting them in a milk crate, cardboard box, wire "surround", or just by a patch of tasty weeds.
I have found that placing the barrel of the gun on the spine just below the skull and aiming toward the mouth will cause the rabbit to keel over with very minimal death throes if any.
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My son's is ~750fps and works well.Sooner":2w1t5qkf said:
It's a long gun.Sooner":2w1t5qkf said:
I would definitely not hold a rabbit or have someone else hold a rabbit while firing a pellet. Too many things to go wrong.Sooner":2w1t5qkf said:
I think MaggieJ uses a hand pellet gun and likes it much better than the long gun, finding it easier to aim.Sooner":2w1t5qkf said:
We have done ours in a milk crate with hay and tasty weeds or simply on the ground. The wire surround would probably be safer than just putting them down in the yard.MamaSheepdog":2w1t5qkf said:
You have very compliant rabbits. Mine usually do a bunch of kicking, sometimes even leaping into the air -- and you can tell they are dead. Front legs and head are completely limp, as they should be. I even had my arm opened up by a dead rabbit that I was trying to keep from going under a fig tree once. :xMamaSheepdog":2w1t5qkf said:
I've used both. The handgun style is a bit easier to aim but if you already have a long pellet gun, Sooner, I would stick with that and just contain the rabbit as MamaSheepdog and Miss M suggested. There really isn't that much difference.
Ole Mule
Well-known member
I just stretch and bend the neck it snaps and there is instant death. Not hard to do once you get the technique down.
3mina
Well-known member
Ole Mule":2msj2et4 said:
Unless your hands are shot as mine are. Manual cervical dislocation was my preferred method 20 odd years ago but since I got old (when did that happen?! :shock: ) and started grooming, which wrecks your hands, it just isn't possible for me. I'm not arthritic yet either (so looking forward to that not!)
I'm completely in love with my Ballista though. I can process a bit more than I could when I was broomsticking since I'm not straining to dispatch at all and it's instantanteous.
I have 2 pellet rifles around 800fps. I just built a foldable square pen. Set in rabbit, maybe have to walk around the pen a little bit to line things up if the rabbit is a more energetic one, and push the end of the rifle against the skull. The rabbit usually just drops flat under the pressure and pull the trigger. With practice the ones that won't stop moving are not an issue either. Mine never jumped up. They just kicked their back feet so they went in circles while the blood came out. It would manage to cover a fair area because of that but the rabbits didn't. Of course now I can't do that cause our rabbits are in town so I use the garden hoe handle as my "broomstick".
Hm, I used a crossbow with a special dart featuring a 3/4" broad, square, sharp blade. Nailed a piece of bread on the lawn, and shot them through the neck. Never knew what happend, and no need to bleed them since this dart did cut right through anything.
But it was awfully difficult to aim. they really don't like someone standing behind them, even distracted. So I started to use my .22 pistol with subsonic loads, holding them between the knees and shooting them through neck/skull.
Leaves a mess, and after learning wich movements are normal for a dead rabbit I'm bopping them with my army knive now, well, at least fryers I dont like that much anyway, the others still get the gun, it's an emotional thing. Outcome and quality of the killing are the same, but I prefere if there's no lead involved.
I guess a nailgun must be aimed very precisly since it doesnt have the speed to cause enough collateral damage, unless you can make a nail similar to my dart. No idea if that machines could be used with something like that.
But it was awfully difficult to aim. they really don't like someone standing behind them, even distracted. So I started to use my .22 pistol with subsonic loads, holding them between the knees and shooting them through neck/skull.
Leaves a mess, and after learning wich movements are normal for a dead rabbit I'm bopping them with my army knive now, well, at least fryers I dont like that much anyway, the others still get the gun, it's an emotional thing. Outcome and quality of the killing are the same, but I prefere if there's no lead involved.
I guess a nailgun must be aimed very precisly since it doesnt have the speed to cause enough collateral damage, unless you can make a nail similar to my dart. No idea if that machines could be used with something like that.
funnies50
Well-known member
Oh mah gahsh. This topic is freaking me out. :walkplank:
Aren't nail guns kinda...loud? And I'm not all that sure a nail would kill a bunny right away. :shock:
Aren't nail guns kinda...loud? And I'm not all that sure a nail would kill a bunny right away. :shock:
katiebear
Well-known member
funnies50":120ufhi2 said:
The topic may be distasteful to some...but those of us who raise meat rabbits need to discuss dispatch methods. We need to be sure that the dispatch is quick and pain free as possible. .we do not want to cause any pain or distress to the animal..we treat out animals with respect and yes,even love..as you mature you will find that it is so much better to learn from others mistakes...you don't have to make so many yourself that way.
You will find a lot of this kind of discussion in the meat rabbit topic.
katiebear":1l8x4jrz said:
Agreed.
The more out-in-the-open these types of topics are...The more people can be sure they are doing the right thing for their animals.
Most people who raise small livestock are very concerned about quality of life all the way up to the end, and can benefit from seeing others thoughts on the best (and worst) ways to accomplish that end.
I have a nail gun. I have a .22 revolver.
Nail gun uses .22 blanks and makes a lot of noise and I can't imagine how you'd use it effectively. There are safety features on a nail gun that would make using it to dispatch an animal rather difficult.
Revolver can use .22 CB Caps - they are much more quiet and can be delivered accurately.
All that being said, I use a Rabbit Wringer. Purchased from the man himself. Cost less than the revolver did. Maybe about the same as a decent nail gun.
Folks that raise rabbits are nothing if not innovative. That being said, maybe the solution is to go back to the way I did it 40 years ago - quick blow behind the ears with a pipe.
And thus my family's favorite warning: "I'm gonna get the pipe!" (Yeah, I know, pretty frightening. Those were the days.)
Nail gun uses .22 blanks and makes a lot of noise and I can't imagine how you'd use it effectively. There are safety features on a nail gun that would make using it to dispatch an animal rather difficult.
Revolver can use .22 CB Caps - they are much more quiet and can be delivered accurately.
All that being said, I use a Rabbit Wringer. Purchased from the man himself. Cost less than the revolver did. Maybe about the same as a decent nail gun.
Folks that raise rabbits are nothing if not innovative. That being said, maybe the solution is to go back to the way I did it 40 years ago - quick blow behind the ears with a pipe.
And thus my family's favorite warning: "I'm gonna get the pipe!" (Yeah, I know, pretty frightening. Those were the days.)
My husband has learned to preform cervical dislocation with just his hands.
It's by far my favorite method to date.
Faster, noiseless, and seems more comfortable for the rabbits than broom-sticking.
It took broom-sticking 100's of rabbits before he was confident enough to try it without that bar.
It's by far my favorite method to date.
Faster, noiseless, and seems more comfortable for the rabbits than broom-sticking.
It took broom-sticking 100's of rabbits before he was confident enough to try it without that bar.
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Okay, wanted to update this. Our most recent butchering day (yesterday), my husband dispatched the first rabbit (my son does most of them). I noticed as he fired that the aim was not toward the mouth, but more toward where the neck joins the head. The rabbit fell over dead and barely moved at all. Bunny-Wan Kenobi said that he had noticed that this seemed to be the case whenever his aim was like that instead of toward the mouth, so he intentionally did so for every rabbit yesterday. They all went pretty much the same. I think only one did any respectable amount of kicking (and still not that much), and they were all lights-out immediately.Miss M":dmuijjzm said:
Yeah, it's not a fun topic. But it's a necessary topic for those of us who raise meat rabbits, and this is one of only a very few places online where we can discuss it. Like the others have said, we want the best for our rabbits... even in dispatching them. So we share ideas and information on how to do it as quickly and painlessly as possible.funnies50":dmuijjzm said:
I think they're loud because of the sound of the nail going into wood, more than the force propelling the nail, but I could be wrong. Your second concern would be my main concern. I don't know what the failure rate would be with a nail gun.funnies50":dmuijjzm said:
Thank you for taking this as well as you did, Funnies50. We've only had a couple of pet rabbit people who have REALLY freaked out when they've stumbled into a meat rabbit thread like this one, thankfully. We've got lots of people who raise rabbits for all different purposes, and we all help each other here.
If you avoid the Meat Rabbits forum (which is where this is), then you will avoid all of the graphic stuff pertaining to meat rabbits. You will still find stuff pertaining to meat rabbits all over the forum, but all the graphic stuff is here. All of the graphic medical stuff is in Management and Troubleshooting > Injuries, Illnesses, and Parasites.
funnies50
Well-known member
Um...yeah! :lol: I honestly have no problem with raising rabbits for food - just that the way somma you guys do it is so...so... :x
Still, gotta do whatcha gotta do, I guess.
Still, gotta do whatcha gotta do, I guess.
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Okay, cool!funnies50":1uoy9niw said:
Yeah... a lot of it has to do with the fact that people are so disconnected from their food these days. Their meat comes in styrofoam packages at the grocery store, and a lot of them don't even realize that it came from a living animal that died so that the meat could be sold for food.funnies50":1uoy9niw said:just that the way somma you guys do it is so...so... :x
Still, gotta do whatcha gotta do, I guess.
This was a real statement someone made to a call-in column called "Speakout" in a local paper somewhere. I actually did go searching for it and found the paper and the column... and statements others had made in response to this one. The column for this particular day was... um... missing. I imagine there was a bit of an uproar about it and they removed it from their online archives. :lol: I went looking for it because some people were thinking it had to be fake -- something somebody created in Photoshop or something. Nope. I found replies. I should have taken screenshots, but I didn't think about it at the time.
There are a lot of people like this person, unfortunately. Society has moved away from having a handful of chickens, a family cow, and a kitchen garden, raising a pig every year to slaughter in the fall. They've moved away from it so thoroughly, that it has been several generations since there were very many families who did such things. They've moved away from it so thoroughly, that they've made laws, ordinances, and homeowners' association rules that make it almost impossible for people to start doing such things again.
Before the last 50 years or so, though, knowledge of how to butcher your own livestock was commonplace and passed on to the next generation. Now you have a lot of people who want to raise and butcher their own livestock, and nobody to teach them how. So we come on here and figure it out together. Thankfully, we do have a few no-nonsense oldtimers who help us out, too.
That's why discussions like this are so common on RabbitTalk. There are more and more people who are seeing that raising their own livestock may be the only way they can reliably and affordably feed their families. But they have no one to learn from, and they live in places where you can have only X number of animals, you cannot raise livestock, you cannot butcher in your backyard, you cannot build certain sorts of outbuildings, you cannot fire a pellet gun, etc. etc. etc. And you end up with people who have stealth chicken coops and stealth rabbitries in the city, figuring out ways of hiding their evil farming activities from their nosy neighbors. We had a stealth rabbitry in the city for a while.... right next door to a lady who was on the board of a dog rescue group, whose daughter was on the board of the local humane society.... yeah, that was stressful.
*Looks around* How did I get here? :shock: :hmm:
Oh, well, whatever I was doing, I think I'm done. :lol:
funnies50
Well-known member
Wow. Who knew people could get so worked up over things... :shock:
And I totally understand the stress you had with a 'pet only' person next door! :lol:
Thanks, Miss M.
And I totally understand the stress you had with a 'pet only' person next door! :lol:
Thanks, Miss M.
