Question For The Experts

[Alaska Satin]

What's that?

Rabbit starvation is also known as protein poisoning. Human bodies cannot function properly without adequate quantities of fat and carbohydrates.

The human body is inefficient at turning pure protein into usable energy: if you're only eating protein, you would need more than 400 grams of protein a day to supply your energy needs. (Domestic rabbit has approximately 20.1 grams of protein per 100g of meat, so you'd need to eat 2,000g of meat a day. If a 4lb rabbit yields 2lbs, or 900g, of meat, you'd need to eat over 2 rabbits a day and nothing else.)

However, when your body converts protein to glucose for use as fuel, the gluconeogenesis happens in your liver rather than your digestive tract, and produces, as a by-product, high levels of ammonia and urea, which enter the bloodstream. At certain levels, beyond what your body can clear, these become toxic, hence the associated symptoms of intense fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, low blood pressure and depressed heart rate, and eventually death. The person also develops intense hunger for fats and carbs, but if those are not available, eating more meat will just make the situation even worse.

It's usually easy to find sources of food other than meat - plants and oils (nuts, fish, etc,) are not hard to come by in most situations - so only in extreme survival situations does rabbit starvation become issue. But once the process is in motion and the person is feeling the devastating effects of protein poisoning, it gets harder to search for other food sources (or do anything else, for that matter).

Thank God we live in North America in the 21st Century, where we will almost certainly never have to deal with this!

 

[Julie Stade]

Rabbit meat is supposedly so lean that you can starve to death eating it every day. This was probably potentially true if you were eating wild rabbits in the dead of winter when they were also starving and you were burning tens of thousands of calories a day keeping warm and working physically hard. It would be difficult to envision a situation today in which this would have any bearing on our dietary needs.

It has nothing to do with the rabbits being starving themselves; it has to do with the extremely low levels of cholesterol naturally found in rabbit meat. If someone would try to live only on rabbit meat as a source of fatty acids, then death would occur. But in practicality, no one does this, so it really doesn't occur. If someone did want to make rabbit meat his primary source of protein/fat, he could simply bacon wrap the rabbit to solve the issue. ;-)

 

[Julie Stade]

Rabbit starvation is also known as protein poisoning. Human bodies cannot function properly without adequate quantities of fat and carbohydrates.

The human body is inefficient at turning pure protein into usable energy: if you're only eating protein, you would need more than 400 grams of protein a day to supply your energy needs. (Domestic rabbit has approximately 20.1 grams of protein per 100g of meat, so you'd need to eat 2,000g of meat a day. If a 4lb rabbit yields 2lbs, or 900g, of meat, you'd need to eat over 2 rabbits a day and nothing else.)

However, when your body converts protein to glucose for use as fuel, the gluconeogenesis happens in your liver rather than your digestive tract, and produces, as a by-product, high levels of ammonia and urea, which enter the bloodstream. At certain levels, beyond what your body can clear, these become toxic, hence the associated symptoms of intense fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, low blood pressure and depressed heart rate, and eventually death. The person also develops intense hunger for fats and carbs, but if those are not available, eating more meat will just make the situation even worse.

It's usually easy to find sources of food other than meat - plants and oils (nuts, fish, etc,) are not hard to come by in most situations - so only in extreme survival situations does rabbit starvation become issue. But once the process is in motion and the person is feeling the devastating effects of protein poisoning, it gets harder to search for other food sources (or do anything else, for that matter).

Thank God we live in North America in the 21st Century, where we will almost certainly never have to deal with this!

Actually, there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate for humans, only essential amino acids from protein and fatty acids from fat. It's that second component which rabbit meat is short on.

 

[Dimplz]

What's that?

The story goes that a long time ago, a group of hunters and fur trappers had all died even though they had been living on rabbit and squirrels. They had an overdose of meat protiens, and it caused protien poisoning and resulted in them starving to death.

They did not eat anything else during the winter and it cost them their lives.

However, when others hear about this story, they do not consider that protien poisoning can happen with any meat if that source is also starving, and it is the only thing on the menue. We need a balance of protiens and fats to stay healthy.

 

[Alaska Satin]

Rabbit meat is supposedly so lean that you can starve to death eating it every day. This was probably potentially true if you were eating wild rabbits in the dead of winter when they were also starving and you were burning tens of thousands of calories a day keeping warm and working physically hard. It would be difficult to envision a situation today in which this would have any bearing on our dietary needs.

It has nothing to do with the rabbits being starving themselves; it has to do with the extremely low levels of cholesterol naturally found in rabbit meat. If someone would try to live only on rabbit meat as a source of fatty acids, then death would occur. But in practicality, no one does this, so it really doesn't occur. If someone did want to make rabbit meat his primary source of protein/fat, he could simply bacon wrap the rabbit to solve the issue. ;-)

I think @eco2pia's comment might have been referring to the fact that unless they are starving themselves, rabbits do have fat on them. Those of us that raise meat rabbits can vouch for the fact that all healthy domestic rabbits carry some fat, and some domestic rabbits have lots of fat.

The USDA Food Composition Database FoodData Central does not offer information on domestic rabbit meat, but for wild rabbit meat it indicates a total of 3.51g of fat per 100g.

Sources vary somewhat, but Rabbit Nutrition - Eat This Much suggests that in 100g of domestic rabbit meat there is 8.4g of fat (2.5g saturated, 2.3g monounsaturated and 1.6g polyunsaturated).

While rabbit meat is lower in cholesterol than chicken, and has about half the cholesterol levels found in beef (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290214524), 100g of wild rabbit contains 123mg of cholesterol (from FoodData Central). With the RDA for cholesterol being 200-300mg, that would not seem to be the key factor in rabbit starvation. Interestingly, meat from wild rabbits has almost double the amount of cholesterol of domesticated rabbit meat (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290214524).

Some nutritionists and survivalists have suggested that if forced by necessity to live temporarily on a rabbit-only diet, it would be wise to eat not just the meat but the all the fat, skin and fat-storing bone marrow, which might be enough to keep protein poisoning at bay (unless it was a harsh winter and the wild rabbits were starving as well, thus having no fat at all, as suggested by @eco2pia ). If you eat an otherwise healthy diet, you can certainly make rabbit your primary source of protein without wrapping it in bacon. But as @Dimplz noted, rabbit starvation is mostly discussed in terms of a survival situation.

 

[tambayo]

Basically if you can only raise rabbit for your food, you need to get them fat. Something usually not done due to health issues for the rabbit, it is not the ususal way and the flavour is supposed to be bad.
I just go on the basis that everything is better with (some) butter/ghee.

 

[Rabbit Warren Man]

Here is my two cents . . .not an expert, but have looked in to this issue. Why is rabbit not main stream like chicken?

Here is what I have learned.

1. Scaling up gets harder to manage without automated systems.
2. Labor involved in care and regular maintenance gets very time consuming the more rabbits there are.
3. Space for each rabbit is needed. If you packed breeder rabbits together the way chicken farms do the egg layers, it would be disasterous. The doe need space, and are territorial, so cramped conditions would result in fighting to the death. Plus, males are needed to get more rabbits. Hens lay eggs without a male present.
4. There is no longer a market for furs, so the biggest by product of meat rabbits is no longer a hot commodity. Synthetics and furs made from plant fibers have replaced a lot of animal products.
5. The Rabbit Starvation myth keeps people from looking at rabbit as a source of healthy meat.
6. House Pet Society people are terrible about shaming anyone who choose to raise an animal for meat when they consider it a pet.
7. Ignorance and society's programing leads people to believe eating meat is bad for us, and we should eat bugs and plants insead.

There it is. That is my input on this.

here is an example of large scale rabbit farming.
The reason there is little larger scale rabbit farms in North America is that there are No slaughter houses or few that will take them. Also to many people see them as pets rather than food.

 

[Therese]

Here is my two cents . . .not an expert, but have looked in to this issue. Why is rabbit not main stream like chicken?

Here is what I have learned.

1. Scaling up gets harder to manage without automated systems.
2. Labor involved in care and regular maintenance gets very time consuming the more rabbits there are.
3. Space for each rabbit is needed. If you packed breeder rabbits together the way chicken farms do the egg layers, it would be disasterous. The doe need space, and are territorial, so cramped conditions would result in fighting to the death. Plus, males are needed to get more rabbits. Hens lay eggs without a male present.
4. There is no longer a market for furs, so the biggest by product of meat rabbits is no longer a hot commodity. Synthetics and furs made from plant fibers have replaced a lot of animal products.
5. The Rabbit Starvation myth keeps people from looking at rabbit as a source of healthy meat.
6. House Pet Society people are terrible about shaming anyone who choose to raise an animal for meat when they consider it a pet.
7. Ignorance and society's programing leads people to believe eating meat is bad for us, and we should eat bugs and plants insead.

There it is. That is my input on this.

Bugs are people too! Shouldn't they have rights? (It always baffles me that mammals should be over-protected, but other living things are expendable....)

And, plants have feelings, my friend!

Hope you know I am kidding! You know, it is hard to know what insanity is anymore, since sanity is not the norm! Common sense has become one of the rarest and most despised commodities around.

If people believed in the God Who created us and everything we see, we would have a better understanding of purpose and could act with wisdom and balance in our interactions with things! If we don't believe in that Creator, we shouldn't be surprised....at disorder and chaos in everything!

God bless you!

 

[RabbitDad]

Bugs are people too! Shouldn't they have rights? (It always baffles me that mammals should be over-protected, but other living things are expendable....)

And, plants have feelings, my friend!

Hope you know I am kidding! You know, it is hard to know what insanity is anymore, since sanity is not the norm! Common sense has become one of the rarest and most despised commodities around.

If people believed in the God Who created us and everything we see, we would have a better understanding of purpose and could act with wisdom and balance in our interactions with things! If we don't believe in that Creator, we shouldn't be surprised....at disorder and chaos in everything!

God bless you!

While reading that I could hear the song by Peter, Paul & Mary playing softly in the background...
"The ants are my friends, they're blowin' in the wind..."

 

[Rabbit19]

One problem here in Australia, is the two diseases (and their variants) that they released to kill wild rabbits make it very hard to grow domestic ones.
One has to keep them completely free of mosquitos, and of course any actually contact with wild rabbits.
I don't suppose that would be so hard for factory farms, but for any hobby farmers its a big problem. Also, it at least a couple of states, it is a illegal to keep them at all.
I don't know if these are real factors or not though...

 

[RabbitDad]

One problem here in Australia, is the two diseases (and their variants) that they released to kill wild rabbits make it very hard to grow domestic ones.
One has to keep them completely free of mosquitos, and of course any actually contact with wild rabbits.
I don't suppose that would be so hard for factory farms, but for any hobby farmers its a big problem. Also, it at least a couple of states, it is a illegal to keep them at all.
I don't know if these are real factors or not though...

Personally I think introducing any virus into nature is an incredibly bad idea.

 

[Rabbit19]

Personally I think introducing any virus into nature is an incredibly bad idea.

I don't know really, its something I have very mixed feelings about. I would much prefer that they hadn't, as far as keeping pet or meat rabbits, but at the same time they had to do something about it, after they were introduced in the first place. And it has worked, you know. I think it was one of the more successful 'introducing one thing to kill off another'

 

[kusanar314]

One problem here in Australia, is the two diseases (and their variants) that they released to kill wild rabbits make it very hard to grow domestic ones.
One has to keep them completely free of mosquitos, and of course any actually contact with wild rabbits.
I don't suppose that would be so hard for factory farms, but for any hobby farmers its a big problem. Also, it at least a couple of states, it is a illegal to keep them at all.
I don't know if these are real factors or not though...

The issue is that they weren't wild rabbits, or at least they were introduced (I'm betting they were domesticated rabbits that were turned loose). Australia doesn't have wild rabbits naturally.

Personally I think introducing any virus into nature is an incredibly bad idea.

It's a virus that only kills rabbits, there are no native rabbits in Australia, the goal was to kill all of them.

 

[hotzcatz]

IMHO, a virus to kill off a species is a bad idea. As we all have recently learned, it's pretty hard to contain a virus just to one spot. But, hopefully they have a better idea of what it will do since they know a whole lot more about it than I do.

As for bringing in any religious mythos, basically the way things are set up - I'm not blaming anything or anyone in particular for setting it up, you can choose your creator of choice - but the basic set up is that life eats life. We can't survive by eating rocks, everything we eat is either still alive or was alive at one time. Far as I can figure, we're kinda a collective anyway, made up of microbes and such, not sure how they factor into the whole foodchain. Used to be folks got buried when they died and became worm food and the cycle continued, but now there's a lot of cremation so not sure how that is all gonna work out in the long run. Although, in the really long run everything falls into the sun which is basically a collective cremation, but fortunately that will be awhile. Now, back to rabbits. Typing late at night can go seriously sideways.

Generally, I think one of the main reasons chicken is farmed a lot more than rabbits is that they are more prolific. If you have a hen who lays an egg more or less every day, that's roughly 30 offspring per month per hen. Get ten hens, gather eggs, there's about 300 of them at the end of the month. You can put several hundred in an incubator all at the same time. Then you have three hundred chicks (maybe only two hundred and fifty if they don't all hatch) and three or four months later they can all be processed for food. They can be kept in a group, fed all in one big feeder, etc. Massively less people power involved.

If you have ten rabbits, say each doe averages a litter of ten, at the end of the month that's only a hundred offspring. Each doe will need a nesting space. At about eight or nine weeks all the grow outs can be put into one big space and then they can be processed all at the same time. Not sure where, though, is there a big processing plant for rabbits like there is for chickens?

In any case, you get three times as many chickens as you do rabbits from the same number of mothers.

 

[Cindy in SD]

Most people I know are horrified at eating rabbit.... but sometimes they get used to the idea a little bit.

My DH started out insisting he would not eat rabbits. Yes, he hunted them as a kid, but that was for fun. Now he's like, "When are you gonna start butchering those rabbits?" People get used to new ideas slowly, but the rate of adaptation speeds up with the onset of hunger pangs.

 

[Cindy in SD]

IMHO, a virus to kill off a species is a bad idea. As we all have recently learned, it's pretty hard to contain a virus just to one spot. But, hopefully they have a better idea of what it will do since they know a whole lot more about it than I do.

As for bringing in any religious mythos, basically the way things are set up - I'm not blaming anything or anyone in particular for setting it up, you can choose your creator of choice - but the basic set up is that life eats life. We can't survive by eating rocks, everything we eat is either still alive or was alive at one time. Far as I can figure, we're kinda a collective anyway, made up of microbes and such, not sure how they factor into the whole foodchain. Used to be folks got buried when they died and became worm food and the cycle continued, but now there's a lot of cremation so not sure how that is all gonna work out in the long run. Although, in the really long run everything falls into the sun which is basically a collective cremation, but fortunately that will be awhile. Now, back to rabbits. Typing late at night can go seriously sideways.

Generally, I think one of the main reasons chicken is farmed a lot more than rabbits is that they are more prolific. If you have a hen who lays an egg more or less every day, that's roughly 30 offspring per month per hen. Get ten hens, gather eggs, there's about 300 of them at the end of the month. You can put several hundred in an incubator all at the same time. Then you have three hundred chicks (maybe only two hundred and fifty if they don't all hatch) and three or four months later they can all be processed for food. They can be kept in a group, fed all in one big feeder, etc. Massively less people power involved.

If you have ten rabbits, say each doe averages a litter of ten, at the end of the month that's only a hundred offspring. Each doe will need a nesting space. At about eight or nine weeks all the grow outs can be put into one big space and then they can be processed all at the same time. Not sure where, though, is there a big processing plant for rabbits like there is for chickens?

In any case, you get three times as many chickens as you do rabbits from the same number of mothers.

It's not actually that easy. Cornish Cross chickens are the product of artificially inseminated birds. The eggs were sourced from two separate flocks of hybrids (each of which is also created by way of artificial insemination). So, four... no, six separate flocks are maintained to produce these poor "frankenbirds."

In addition, you need the particular frankenbird suited to your locale, which I learned the hard way when I bought a variety unsuited to my 6,000 ft elevation. I lost half a dozen in one day b/c their poor little hearts couldn't keep up with their ballooning bodies on our thinner air. I've never raised them since. How awful! But this does give super-fast growing birds with exceptional tenderness (because really, they're just overgrown chicks.)

Real chickens must be harvested young or cooked low & slow & via moist cooking methods, but they are more flavorful. Whether a person appreciates the flavor is another factor. I think they're good, but most ppl are accustomed to bland, tender, fat/juicy meat that melts in their mouths.

At any rate, a great deal of unseen infrastructure must be devoted to the production of the ubiquitous fat, juicy chicken. The environmental impact is huge, esp for ppl who live near the vast chicken factories. It's even worse for the earstwhile farmer who got duped into signing on with Tyson. There's no coming back from that mess. Once they realize, they're too far in debt to ever regain their freedom. The whole thing is a crying shame.

You can't even use the waste for fertilizer b/c these birds are heavily medicated, vaccinated, etc. to keep them from dying in that awful environment. Yet we've become very dependent on that model of "agriculture."

 

[RabbitDad]

IMHO, a virus to kill off a species is a bad idea. As we all have recently learned, it's pretty hard to contain a virus just to one spot. But, hopefully they have a better idea of what it will do since they know a whole lot more about it than I do.

As for bringing in any religious mythos, basically the way things are set up - I'm not blaming anything or anyone in particular for setting it up, you can choose your creator of choice - but the basic set up is that life eats life. We can't survive by eating rocks, everything we eat is either still alive or was alive at one time. Far as I can figure, we're kinda a collective anyway, made up of microbes and such, not sure how they factor into the whole foodchain. Used to be folks got buried when they died and became worm food and the cycle continued, but now there's a lot of cremation so not sure how that is all gonna work out in the long run. Although, in the really long run everything falls into the sun which is basically a collective cremation, but fortunately that will be awhile. Now, back to rabbits. Typing late at night can go seriously sideways.

Generally, I think one of the main reasons chicken is farmed a lot more than rabbits is that they are more prolific. If you have a hen who lays an egg more or less every day, that's roughly 30 offspring per month per hen. Get ten hens, gather eggs, there's about 300 of them at the end of the month. You can put several hundred in an incubator all at the same time. Then you have three hundred chicks (maybe only two hundred and fifty if they don't all hatch) and three or four months later they can all be processed for food. They can be kept in a group, fed all in one big feeder, etc. Massively less people power involved.

If you have ten rabbits, say each doe averages a litter of ten, at the end of the month that's only a hundred offspring. Each doe will need a nesting space. At about eight or nine weeks all the grow outs can be put into one big space and then they can be processed all at the same time. Not sure where, though, is there a big processing plant for rabbits like there is for chickens?

In any case, you get three times as many chickens as you do rabbits from the same number of mothers.

I have to agree 100% on every point however... this is, after all, the Internet.
Supporting your thoughts with facts & logic, violates community standards thus not allowed.
I'm not a moderator here, just providing a polite warning to not attract unnecessary attention.
No rabbits were harmed while writing this.

 

[eco2pia]

I have to agree 100% on every point however... this is, after all, the Internet.
Supporting your thoughts with facts & logic, violates community standards thus not allowed.
I'm not a moderator here, just providing a polite warning to not attract unnecessary attention.
No rabbits were harmed while writing this.

Hmm.... Are you unhappy with the actions of the volunteer moderators, or the community standards for some reason...? Why would you say this...? Who is this even directed at...?

Oh, wait, I get it! You are lonely and you needed some attention!!

HI @RabbitDad!! Happy Wednesday!
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[RabbitDad]

Hmm.... Are you unhappy with the actions of the volunteer moderators, or the community standards for some reason...? Why would you say this...? Who is this even directed at...?

Oh, wait, I get it! You are lonely and you needed some attention!!

HI @RabbitDad!! Happy Wednesday!
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LOL! You hit the nail on the head!
The other 5% was my attempt at humor.

 

[Heartbased Homestead]

Rabbit meat is supposedly so lean that you can starve to death eating it every day. This was probably potentially true if you were eating wild rabbits in the dead of winter when they were also starving and you were burning tens of thousands of calories a day keeping warm and working physically hard. It would be difficult to envision a situation today in which this would have any bearing on our dietary needs.

Plus there is plentiful fat in the bone marrow, brain, and organs. If someone dies of starvation when these nutrients are clearly available, they must've been wasting these precious parts while slowly starving, which is not something humans (or any beings) do. There might have been one very logically-challenged person, or just plain squeamish about eating non-muscle meat (even somehow when starving), but I just can't fathom that level of self-annihilation. If these persons ever existed, maybe it's just nature's way that they passed on. If it wasn't rabbit starvation, it would've been something else.