Biosecurity is awareness of various viruses and diseases which can be brought into your rabbitry. The mainland has that virus now, Hemmouragic - uh, I forget the name, but it's a bad one. We don't have wild rabbits on the island so I don't have to worry about them bringing in diseases. But we did foster that one baby bunny who's mom had died. I'd thought it had been eaten by the neighbor's dog but it had mysteriously died. Had I known that, I wouldn't have let the baby bunny near the herd, but I'd not been thinking of a poor little orphan bunny carrying diseases. We went for a full year with no babies born despite lots of matings because of syphilis. In the bunny world they call it 'vent disease'. Fortunately, penicillin can fix it and after giving every rabbit here (I think it was somewhere around 24 to 30 at the time) a shot of penicillin once a week for five weeks we started seeing baby bunnies again. The litter sizes were still small because of damage done by the disease but the offspring didn't have it and we're now back to normal again.
Since we have wool bunnies, so sometimes someone will bring a bunny over for shearing. That's now done (if we do it at all) in a separate area from the rest of the herd. Also, since they are wool bunnies, they become pets and folks don't want to really eat them. If there's one that comes back because the owner can't keep up with the coat or they move off island or something, then that bunny will go into quarantine for at least a month until it gets near the herd. They're also inspected for any ill health, parasites, etc.
I had "seven rooster soup" a year or two ago when too many of the chicks started crowing. A lot of it got frozen but something had to be done with all those roosters. Someone here in town asked me if roosters tasted like chicken when I mentioned the soup to them.
I wasn't quite sure what to tell them, that level of ignorance is appalling.
Some of the angora fiber is spun by me, but that's usually the yarn I keep for myself. The yarn that gets sold is spun up by these lovely people in Pennsylvania, Gurdy Run Woolen Mill. They mix the fluff I send them with fine Merino and silk and spin it up and send it back on cones. Then I run it through the skeiner here and put labels on it and sell it at the shop. I need to scalp all the tortoiseshell bunnies, I'm out of the 'Beach Bunny' color of Hula Bunny yarn. The yarn doesn't have any dye, just the color of the bunny makes the color of the yarn so there's 'Moonlit Dance' from the blacks and blues which is a silvery gray yarn. 'Beach Bunny' is a light warm tawny tan color and 'Coconut Dream' is a creamy white color. I've got a fawn doe who is probably going to meet up with either the fawn or tort buck to get more blondes around here since I try to keep a color balance in the herd to match yarn sales.
This is the yarn page on the bunnies website:
available english angora bunnies although I'm gonna redo it pretty soon since it needs some updating now that I can code a bit better.
To make money with rabbits, having access to sell products at retail rates is really helpful. A lot of the yarn gets sold to tourists.
We also have a pedigreed breed (English angora) that nobody else had on the island so selling babies has been really profitable, too. There's beginning to be some other folks breeding them now, I'm hoping they will succeed so the genetic pool will get a little wider. Around here, the restaurants would want to buy rabbits, but I've not gone into finding out the details about that yet and pretty much have my hands full with the fuzzy bunnies. Folks keep bunnies for a whole lot of different reasons.
