5 Hard Lessons About Breeding Rabbits
A few years ago we got our first satin rabbits from a rabbitry near Fort Worth. We built a gorgeous rabbit hutch and had big plans. Here are five reasons we got started breeding rabbits and what we learned.
Five reasons to start breeding rabbits:
As far as livestock goes, rabbits are a pretty inexpensive start up.
Raising rabbits can provide your family with a lot of meat for very little cost. You can easily provide you family with enough meat with just one doe and buck, and your feed cost is only around $40 a month.
If you build your pens and you’re set up correctly, rabbits can be very low maintenance and profitable.
Breeding and raising rabbits is an excellent teaching tool for children. It teaches biology, genetics, care, and can be very rewarding.
Rabbit manure makes great compost for your garden.
What We Learned:
Our pen/run design was not ideal. We made some mistakes, and our design was extremely attractive, but not easy to access and not cheap to build. We did succeed is making it very low maintenance to clean though and our redesign is much smarter.
After our first harvest, we learned that we are too soft hearted for meat rabbits! Our enterprise came to a screeching halt when we realized that we can’t watch them grow up and then butcher them. We are still working through this, and we have a resident who harvests them for us when we can’t sell them as pets, but this is not fun for anyone, so make sure you can stomach the full process BEFORE you get started. Selling a couple of pet bunnies a month covers the cost of caring for them and we are ok with that, but it isn’t the big money maker we intended.
a.The first rabbits that we got were too old. They had never been socialized so, try as we might, rather than being able to interact with them, they always ran from us. They still run from us now years later, despite being kind and trying to earn their trust, and this takes some of the fun out of caring for them. They are low maintenance to care for, but not as fun as we thought it would be!
b. We underestimated the competition in selling pet rabbits. Luckily ours are registered so we can sell them as show rabbits, pets and for breeding, but it is no small effort to get the word out to sell them.
We didn’t pick our rabbits. We had to wait a few months for our first rabbits because the rabbitry we chose was overwhelmed with orders for meat pens - it was show season and there were 4H and FFA people in line ahead of us. It was December. So when he called us in January and said he had two available, we jumped on them. We ended up with a beautiful blue doe and an adorable white buck. What we didn’t realize is that our buck is an albino, so he has all recessive genes. Every single litter we’ve ever had has been colored like mama. This means that the genetic experimentation we were excited to use as a teaching tool for our kids is not so educational. Recessive genes in Dad means they all look like Mama. Every. Single. One.
Rabbit manure is not so quick to use in your garden. Every piece of information says how great manure is for your plants and as a cold compost, you can just put it right on your garden, but unless you plan on watering with spray irrigation and weeding around a lot of poop, you can’t really do that! We have been experimenting with various ways to directly use the manure on our garden from teas to fermenting to drying it out and making powder, but for now it just goes into the compost pile with everything else! We don’t want nasty, stinky garden beds!
Would we do it again? Yes! The rabbits are a big attraction for our guests and having baby bunnies is still so much fun - they are adorable and fun to play with. We love to provide awesome pets to our customers, and we learned a ton. With some modifications to our designs, some changes to our approach and to our system, we are definitely learning how to raise rabbits smarter and better.
