Does anyone have pics of an over-fat butchered mature rabbit?

Phrick said:

Internal pics, I mean. I butchered 2 mature ~18mo bucks yesterday - holy frick it was hard to get their skins off!! They never LOOKED fat externally, sired litters OK all that stuff. They were butchered purely for space reasons; I had planned to try to sell them, but I have 2 litters that NEED to get separated from their mommas, the babies are starting to barber the moms and the weather is still too hot to use the outdoor growout cage so I butchered the bucks so I could separate the mommas to their own cages.

These are the oldest rabbits I've butchered by far, and they had what seems like a lot of internal fat, but I have no comparison to gauge if they were over-fat or if it was pretty normal. They're American Chinchillas, and the live weights were 8.47 and 9.85; finished weights 5.49 and 5.65. They weren't fasted or anything before butcher. I'm trying to decide if I was overfeeding and should cut back for the others. Mostly everyone gets a pellet ration and timothy/alfalfa hay cubes (nursing does get a bigger ration until the babies are out of the nest box then I fill their feeders to the toop & let them all free-feed but that's the only time the get more than their ration)

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Alaska Satin said:

In our herd, a certain amount of internal fat (though not so much that it obscures the organs) indicates a healthy rabbit. They seem to have a different health profile than humans! My daughter, who does the butchering and keeps close track of these things, says that healthy rabbits have guts lined with fat, while little or almost no internal fat = malnourished, and heavy fat outside the body cavity, e.g. lots across the shoulders and around the hindquarters = overweight. I'm sorry I don't have photos... annoyed with myself! I'll check to see if my daughter has any, and post them if she does.

The only photo I have that might be helpful is this one, which shows a fairly reasonable amount of shoulder fat (arrows), although this 3-year-old buck (talk about a struggle to skin!!!) had developed fatty lipomas and hyper-vascularization, so all of that veining is not normal:
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You can usually tell if a live rabbit is overweight by feeling its shoulders. The skin should be taught and firm. Fat rabbits have loose skin/fat across their neck and shoulders - some call it "chuffy," which is a weird word but strangely seems to fit.

Older meat rabbits, especially bucks, are really hard to skin (relatively speaking - they don't compare to a big animal, of course). Even at 8-12 months of age, rabbit bucks hold onto those hides tenaciously! My daughter and I have both had to put our whole weight into getting the hides off the carcasses of bucks > 6 months old. The other side of the coin, though, is they are wonderful to tan - fleshing and breaking them, while a workout, is much easier to do without tearing the hide.

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