Is it worth it to breed and have someone else dispatch?

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ButtonsPalace

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So, over the past couple years, I have bred a ton of rabbits and been selling them for $5 a piece to a girl who butchers and sells the meat. I don't have the space, nor am I in a good location to process, we live right off a main highway and I had been processing in the carport but it's a struggle to hang sheets up so you have a semi private area, now my boyfriends car is sitting there while we wait until we have the money to fix it so I really just don't have space. I could do it in the backyard but this means butchering in front of all the animals and I can't imagine they wouldn't get in the way if nothing else.

So my solution to my problem is there's a man I know of that I could bring my rabbits to and pay him to butcher my rabbits. My question is at that point is it even worth it? I mean I would be getting the meat back and I would ask if I could keep all the organs and such as well as I have use for every part of the rabbit. That being said, I have recently been buying hay with my mom (I pay her before she buys hay for her horses and she gets a few extra bales for me and I get 3-4 as I need them, she's been getting Orchard grass hay, which I've been told is high in protein and I would think would cut back on both my feed bill and hay bill as it'll last much longer. I can ask how much the guy charges if it would help. I'm just kinda theoretically asking as I'm just trying to get some ideas as to how I could breed/butcher in the small/awkward space I'm in right now, preferably without traumatizing bypassers. I haven't bred in a while and I've been thinking about this a lot and I thought some opinions from others who've been in my spot would really help me decide which path is the best path for me :)

TLDR: I live in a crappy area where I can't process without either animals being right up in my space or being right off the road, would it be worth it to pay someone to butcher? Or should I just continue selling for $5 a piece or quit breeding until I have more space? :bunnyhop:
 
Oh I'm not. That's why I've stopped breeding for the meantime. Which she did also give me tons of freezer burned meat for my dogs, so I guess that makes up for it only being $5 a rabbit
 
How many rabbits do you process at a time? If the numbers are small, you could probably do it in your kitchen--provided you've closed off the space so your dogs and cats can't "help" you with the job. I've dispatched rabbits in the mudroom with a pellet gun, bled them out in the sink and done the rest on the counter. Not ideal, but we had a few that needed dispatching in the middle of winter and doing it outdoors was not appealing.
 
I was planning on small to medium numbers. No more than 10 a day would be preferred. So I would probably breed a doe every other week to make up for small litters. Our bedroom is the "mudroom" we have a large, plastic, tub sink.. So I would need tons and tons of bleach if I did that right? To clean the sink obviously XD If I hung up two hooks from the ceiling I could probably make something work. I don't think my boyfriend would be thrilled so I'll just have to do it while he's at work which is also doable. My cat isn't allowed in my bedroom (He got two chances, one he ate my fish and 2nd he pee'd in my drawer) my dog can go upstairs with MIL and her dogs. We have a grass area beside our room, outside the fence so I could cull there, let them have their death throws, bring them inside to bleed out, right?
 
I butcher in my kitchen and dispatch on my dining room table.

Long handled lopers are my dispatch tool of choice, the jaws open up wide enough to go comfortable round the rabbits neck as it sits on the table and with a single motion bringing the handles together the rabbit is dead.

I hold the loper handles until the rabbit stops thrashing about.

Because rabbit skin is tough the lopers only cut the neck bones right through and not the skin so there is almost never any blood and if there is, it is not much.

Then I do everything else in the kitchen sink. Many are the cabinets that I have drilled to thread cords through for holding the rabbit up for skinning, right now there is a decorative wood thing over the sink so the leg cords hang from there all the time. It works great for chickens too but those I hang alive over the sink and use the lopers to dispatch them there.

If your area is clean enough for you to feel happy cooking and eating what is cooked, you level of hygiene is fine, don't be afraid of your rabbits once dead, they are a very safe meat to process. Simply soap and water is enough to clean everything once done, or bleach and water, or hydrogen peroxide. I use soap and water myself, just like I wash my dishes with.

$5 a rabbit sounds very low, if you are losing money on the deal or are unhappy with it, stop doing it and try something different.

This bit is slightly off the topic but seriously, NEVER give anyone a say in what you are doing. If YOU want to do it, DO IT!!! Be it butchering in your kitchen or skydiving or walking across the world, just DO IT! People who love you will understand, if they give you a hard time, toss em to the curb because otherwise, they will drag you down.
 
I don't think lopers are in my future haha, I feel like I either lack physical strength or I don't really know, I just feel like I don't go through with the motions properly and it would make it way too easy for me to talk myself out of processing. He's a city kid, and he really supports what I do, his only request has been that I don't process in front of him, I have plastic shelf units that would be perfect for skinning too. I think I'll use bleach water just for the simple fact that it's a multi-purpose sink, so I would be bleaching both before and after.

Thank you all for the advice. Hopefully soon I can get another job and start my spring garden (Which I need to make a post about because I've never started my own garden, only helped others tend to theirs and I can't seem to get anything to grow past a certain point) after my spring garden I plan to start breeding rabbits. I've got big plans for this year and it's actually looking like I might get to do some of them :)
 
ButtonsPalace":2d3zrf3o said:
start my spring garden (Which I need to make a post about because I've never started my own garden, only helped others tend to theirs and I can't seem to get anything to grow past a certain point)
Rabbit manure is an *excellent* garden helper. It's helped me graduate from a black thumb up to a brown thumb so far (and then the goats found a way out of the pasture ... now that they are contained, who knows?)
 
Oh man, goats and chickens have been my biggest problem with gardening, when I own my own property (currently live with boyfriend and his parents) I will either not have goats and chickens or have them far far away from my garden lol.

I do have a huge pile of rabbit poop mixed with hay that's turned into a sort of mud XD I use it to patch up holes when the colony rabbits start digging in areas I would rather them not, it dries up and they usually leave it alone for a bit again.
 
Got rid of the goats and the chickens live in lockdown all the time now. Vegetables are waaaaaay to hard to grow to let the chickens destroy them.
 
They aren't my chickens or goats or they would've been gone years ago haha. I want ducks, maybe a few goats, definitely pigs if I can find land with woods. I'm working on finding some decent fencing to put around all my plants. Last year a chicken ate all my raspberries. She would let them get bright red and eat them. Once I put up a small fence I started eating raspberries and they were actually growing to be dark red.
 
I butcher them hanging on my back patio - dogs be damned …. really the dogs don't get in the way much and they love the scraps I throw them but they know not to touch anything I don't give them.

I don't know what other critters you have around …. but I'd just do it. Hang the carcass shoulder high and everything else on a table. Hides go in a bucket of cold water and I take the carcass inside one at a time to wash & package for freezing .... If the critters get into what's left , its no loss.

My 4lb Maltese is always under the carcass and usually covered in blood after …. its kinda comical.
 
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