Recent content by rabbet

We inherited a farm cat at one house. He crawled out of the box I put him in to take him to his new home and jumped out of the truck at 80 kmh. Showed up the next day back at home none the worse for wear. I figured he'd need to be put down. At any rate where I live the winter weather can and...

Yeah that's my thought too. At 4:1 feed conversion on pellets each rabbit would cost me $11 and that's just absurd, for a creature that manages to get along quite well everywhere it's left alone in the wild.

Thanks for your answer -- it is very helpful. My goal is to breed the pellets out of the rabbits over the long term with economical feed conversion being crucial and kept within the balance of time vs adg. What I hope to end up with is a medium size rabbit with medium size litters that can...

The standard conversion seems to be 3.5:1. Is that calculated off of pellets or hay, or both? Thanks

Take a look at their mucous membranes to see if they are browny-blue. Nitrates have a history of killing (human) babies from manure nitrates leaching into well water on the prairies in Canada. They die of a sudden severe anemia.

Greens -- including lettuce -- are typically fertilized heavily in order to produce. It does not matter if the fertility comes from natural or synthetic sources and the nitrate content is not subject to restrictions, meaning the nitrate content of your organic kale may far, far exceed that of a...

Salt looks for equilibrium so dry salting a rabbit will result in a drier, tougher rabbit. Brining a rabbit, if the brine is not too strong (say around seawater or a bit less salty) should result in more moisture in the meat because the meat, having less salt to begin with, will attract the salt...

Try taking some of the bad hay and chopping it fine then mixing it with the potted soil of a houseplant. Aminopyralid is a herbicide that's increasingly problematic in the U.K. and North America, where it's used to mask bad hay and land management practices and is increasingly prevalent in hay...

Thanks for the input. How many generations can I expect to see results in assuming new bucks? Would line breeding be a better or worse idea? My thinking is that most rabbits in my area are bred to pellets and I'd like to breed them off of that diet.

Yeah I saw that mention. Soy and faba seem to be fine but regular phaseolus more or less toxic when raw.

In selecting kits for vigor after a grow out, how does a person differentiate between an animal that is vigorous vs an animal that aggressively pushes aside its siblings, or does one use aggression as a proxy for vigor?

Thanks for the comments. What's happened is my regular supplier of rabbit meat has quit and I need something to process the vegetable scraps. Feed here can be very cheap. It's grain and hay country and it's also only green four months a year so fresh foods don't work. I as a rule do not like...

Hello from Canada. I'm new to raising rabbits and am looking to explore and develop meat animals that can handle our extremes (very cold and very hot prairie) while living off of locally produced forages and grains. Our family likes to eat rabbit and we have a lot of grass and grains so we're...