Hi guys so glad to have found this place. I got some meat rabbits for self reliance and and to reduce my dependence on supermarkets and been raising them for a few years (as pets actually ) but unbelievably I still have not tried to butcher any for eating. This winter I want to focus on really breeding them for meat. And I also hope to get any ideas on housing them to make it more efficient and easier to clean cages through winter. Thanks guys!
Hi from oakfield maine
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We had a couple meat rabbits before and they never did make it into the frying pan. Cute and fuzzy overwhelmed us. However, now we're doing excessively cute and fuzzy with angoras and a few of them have become meals. Once you get more than a few, it's easier since they're not all pets by that time.
As for wintertime housing, would it be possible to keep them in really deep straw - several feet thick - and then in the spring use that as mulch/compost in the garden? They'd be able to burrow into the straw to stay warm and add fertilizer over the winter time. If it got messy, add more straw on top and then shove it all out in the spring? It'd save on hutch cleaning during the winter.
However, all this is sheer theory on my side, we don't do winter here so there's probably things I haven't considered.
As for wintertime housing, would it be possible to keep them in really deep straw - several feet thick - and then in the spring use that as mulch/compost in the garden? They'd be able to burrow into the straw to stay warm and add fertilizer over the winter time. If it got messy, add more straw on top and then shove it all out in the spring? It'd save on hutch cleaning during the winter.
However, all this is sheer theory on my side, we don't do winter here so there's probably things I haven't considered.
I am a fan of wire floors 3-4 feet off the ground over chickens. The chickens stir things up and keep smells down. In winter (western washington only has a little more winter than hawaii) buns are happy as long as they are dry. I throw them cardboard boxes during the most cold months, and swap them out when they are too chewed. Amazon brings me all my rabbit enrichment, and the boxes get mulched with everything else to go in the garden. We get a month or two of freezing, but not much snow. by having wire cages and no manure build up in the cages, we avoid wet stinking rabbits on wet stinking litter during winter, making "cage cleaning" as simple as a quick raking.
Love that idea for summer housing.
Thank you I think that will work out great for northern maine winters. I would only have to clean up in the spring! And maybe the warmth can keep water crocks from freezing.
About the water crocks - I put 12V/10W silicon heating tabs under them, and wire them to an adjustable power supply, here most of the winter adjusting them to 2-3W is enough. I sandwiched them between wood and aluminium sheet metal fr durability, gluing them directly to crocks with smoth bottom would work too. Only issue is to keep the cables away from rabbit teeth 
Deep bedding sure is a way to do it, quite convinient too, and it does produce some warmth, but with the outdoor setups here I would say it gets less the colder it gets, since breaking down the bedding slows down. Sure depends on how it isa done, but I wouldn't rely on that.
Deep bedding sure is a way to do it, quite convinient too, and it does produce some warmth, but with the outdoor setups here I would say it gets less the colder it gets, since breaking down the bedding slows down. Sure depends on how it isa done, but I wouldn't rely on that.
I use the deep litter method for chickens, but don't care for it for the rabbits. Even in Alaska we get several periods each winter, and often in the fall and spring, where temperatures warm up enough to thaw things out, and thawing deep litter is a wet mess of ammonia stink if it is disturbed (for instance, scratching chickens and digging rabbits). If you raise rabbits in a big colony it probably works out, but since I breed for show I need to know who's doing what, when and with whom, so mine are in cages.
Way back when, I had some hutches with solid floors, and those were a nightmare of urine glaciers in the corners, with straw and shavings combining with the poo and pee to make literal bricks. Getting them clean was both difficult and extremely unpleasant, because much of the winter they were frozen solid so quickly that it was impossible to clean them every day (also impractical with our lifestyle). I'm pretty sure it wasn't healthy for the rabbits either; I didn't actually have any sick rabbits, but the bottoms of their feet and hindquarters were pretty sticky and yellowed. I like my rabbits clean and pretty.
Like @eco2pia, I favor wire bottomed cages suspended above the ground. I don't let the chickens in there - they have their own space and I don't care for walking around in chicken poo - but I only need to do a barn clean-out once or twice a year. It doesn't get nasty, really, since there is nothing disturbing it, and it just layers itself (poo, pee, shavings, straw, dropped rabbit pellets), kind of like lasagna gardening; in fact, by the time I shovel it out, the bottom half of it is already premium gardening soil. I usually shovel in spring and fall, and I actually enjoy the work, which is made even more attractive by the fact that I shovel it all into empty feed bags and have a waiting list of people who want to buy it. (That's another reason I keep the chickens out - pure rabbit waste doesn't need to be composted, but add chicken waste and people can't just dump it on their gardens.) Barn clean-out actually keeps my hobby in the black financially during the fall slow-down when nobody's buying rabbits.
As far as water during the winter, when it starts to freeze we switch from bottles to bowls/crocks. A long time ago I had a greenhouse full of chicks and rabbits burn down due to a malfunctioning heat lamp, so I now steer clear of electric heat in my barn and just deal with frozen crocks. I try to have double the number of crocks as cages, and the plan is to give them a bowl of warm water in the morning, then switch it out with another bowl of warm water in the evening. I say "the plan" because it is the job of one of the kids, so it doesn't always happen that way. In between times, if (when) the water in the crock freezes, the rabbits can and do lick the ice in the bowl. My daughter sometimes takes a bucket of warm water (not hot, as that can break the frozen bowls) with her to the barn, and drops the crocks into that to release the ice, then returns the bowl to the cage with warm water in it. If we have enough crocks, when I'm doing the job I just collect the ice-filled bowls in a bucket and fill other, warm ones I've brought from the house with warm water from a jug. I leave the bucket of frozen ones in the utility room to thaw for the next round of crock-swapping.
A really great trick my clever husband came up with years ago is to freeze blocks of ice in empty plastic or silicone containers, which has gone a long way to keeping the rabbits healthy and hydrated. I use yogurt or cottage cheese tubs, or my favorite, silicone bread pans, which are easier to release the ice from. I add a little bit of carrot shavings or apple cores to the container so that they freeze into the middle of the block. We pop the ice blocks out of the containers and put one in each cage, where the rabbits chew on them and play with them, trimming their teeth and getting hydrated and a little treat at the same time. We give them these ice blocks in addition to the water in the AM and PM.
Way back when, I had some hutches with solid floors, and those were a nightmare of urine glaciers in the corners, with straw and shavings combining with the poo and pee to make literal bricks. Getting them clean was both difficult and extremely unpleasant, because much of the winter they were frozen solid so quickly that it was impossible to clean them every day (also impractical with our lifestyle). I'm pretty sure it wasn't healthy for the rabbits either; I didn't actually have any sick rabbits, but the bottoms of their feet and hindquarters were pretty sticky and yellowed. I like my rabbits clean and pretty.
Like @eco2pia, I favor wire bottomed cages suspended above the ground. I don't let the chickens in there - they have their own space and I don't care for walking around in chicken poo - but I only need to do a barn clean-out once or twice a year. It doesn't get nasty, really, since there is nothing disturbing it, and it just layers itself (poo, pee, shavings, straw, dropped rabbit pellets), kind of like lasagna gardening; in fact, by the time I shovel it out, the bottom half of it is already premium gardening soil. I usually shovel in spring and fall, and I actually enjoy the work, which is made even more attractive by the fact that I shovel it all into empty feed bags and have a waiting list of people who want to buy it. (That's another reason I keep the chickens out - pure rabbit waste doesn't need to be composted, but add chicken waste and people can't just dump it on their gardens.) Barn clean-out actually keeps my hobby in the black financially during the fall slow-down when nobody's buying rabbits.
As far as water during the winter, when it starts to freeze we switch from bottles to bowls/crocks. A long time ago I had a greenhouse full of chicks and rabbits burn down due to a malfunctioning heat lamp, so I now steer clear of electric heat in my barn and just deal with frozen crocks. I try to have double the number of crocks as cages, and the plan is to give them a bowl of warm water in the morning, then switch it out with another bowl of warm water in the evening. I say "the plan" because it is the job of one of the kids, so it doesn't always happen that way. In between times, if (when) the water in the crock freezes, the rabbits can and do lick the ice in the bowl. My daughter sometimes takes a bucket of warm water (not hot, as that can break the frozen bowls) with her to the barn, and drops the crocks into that to release the ice, then returns the bowl to the cage with warm water in it. If we have enough crocks, when I'm doing the job I just collect the ice-filled bowls in a bucket and fill other, warm ones I've brought from the house with warm water from a jug. I leave the bucket of frozen ones in the utility room to thaw for the next round of crock-swapping.
A really great trick my clever husband came up with years ago is to freeze blocks of ice in empty plastic or silicone containers, which has gone a long way to keeping the rabbits healthy and hydrated. I use yogurt or cottage cheese tubs, or my favorite, silicone bread pans, which are easier to release the ice from. I add a little bit of carrot shavings or apple cores to the container so that they freeze into the middle of the block. We pop the ice blocks out of the containers and put one in each cage, where the rabbits chew on them and play with them, trimming their teeth and getting hydrated and a little treat at the same time. We give them these ice blocks in addition to the water in the AM and PM.
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The frozen treat blocks would be great for a hot summer treat, wouldn't they? They'd thaw a lot quicker, tho.
Building easy to clean hutches is always a great goal. FWIW, the next time hutches are built around here, they will be single layer instead of the stacked two stories that we have now. The tin roof between the two layers doesn't have enough slope to get everything to slide off so it always needs special cleaning. Wire bottomed three feet off the ground with at least wire enclosing the bottom to keep chickens from scratching it all over is probably what will be built next. They're not my chickens so it's easier to fence off the areas than to try to capture and fence them in. I do need a rooster trap, though, to catch and deal with them.
How much shelter do they need for the winter? Probably quite a bit in Maine?
Building easy to clean hutches is always a great goal. FWIW, the next time hutches are built around here, they will be single layer instead of the stacked two stories that we have now. The tin roof between the two layers doesn't have enough slope to get everything to slide off so it always needs special cleaning. Wire bottomed three feet off the ground with at least wire enclosing the bottom to keep chickens from scratching it all over is probably what will be built next. They're not my chickens so it's easier to fence off the areas than to try to capture and fence them in. I do need a rooster trap, though, to catch and deal with them.
How much shelter do they need for the winter? Probably quite a bit in Maine?
Our winters here are about 7 months long. So I need to have 7 months of hay stored up for my goats and dairy cow. I keep my rabbits inside a portion of the barn, that my husband built out of scrap metal and pallets. I insulated the pallets walls with hay i stuffed between the wood slats of pallets . I still would like to make it a little warmer for them so iam thinking of maybe putting a small plywood box inside the cage for further protection from the cold and so my rabbits can have a place to come off the wire floors ?
Thank you it’s been a wealth of info already
Hi! I raise for meat too and keep trying to find the easiest methods for keeping them. This is only my opinion, but I firmly believe that meat rabbits should be keep in wire cages for cleanliness and less worry about parasites and disease. My buns are in a nice tight shed for winter and I make sure all the meaties are in freezer camp before hard winter gets here. The less frozen urine the better! I put wooden boxes, like nest boxes, in each cage that I stuff with straw so they can burrow in and keep warm. I keep a large bucket of fresh water in the shed with an immersion heater in the bottom. That way I can just dip in to the warm water and switch out their frozen water cups with a fresh cup containing warm water. By the way, that immersion heater is on a heavy duty extension cord with a built-in circuit breaker.
We are going to build a larger building for the rabbits in the spring and turn the current one into a garden shed. The new building will have VERY deep litter and be large enough to house the rabbits and some chickens. I got this idea from watching a Joel Salatin video where he did that and apparently, if the litter is deep enough the chickens keep it all turned over and basically create a compost layer which he cleans out and replaces once a year. He demonstrated by actually digging his hand down into the area under a rabbit cage and pulled out a handful of compost that he said had no odor at all, other than a nice dirt smell. I like that idea and hope it works out.
Good luck with your buns!
Thank you very much for all the wonderful ideas. Iam so glad there’s a place like this . Sometimes you kinda get stuck and it’s great to hear how others do it. Thanks
