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Kat's avatar

I am really, really enjoying my rabbit raising project and I am so glad you are too. One of the big reasons why is precisely as you said - it seems relatively easy to meet their requirements for a very pleasant existence.

9 out of 10 people I meet respond the same as the locals you mention, who "comment that they couldn’t bring themselves to butcher domesticated animals, because they “pity” them." I raise chickens as well and most people never say such a thing in response to the birds. But the rabbits because they are "cute" bring out this hypocrisy in the extreme. I always respond with "Oh. Are you a vegetarian?" and they always say "No" but that they prefer to get their meat at the store. And I say something like "Oh, you prefer it when they are tortured first with horrible lives?" Lol It would be annoying if I didn't truly enjoy the silver lining of making people examine their embarrassing hypocrisy. But yes there is definite taboo about rabbit meat here. And people dont seem to understand its a domesticated meat source. They think it will be "game-y" with stringy, sparse meat...

I anticipate that the ease of care, relatively low and economical energy inputs for feed, small space requirements and valuable utility as fertilizer producers is going to make rabbit meat popular in the coming years as the polycrisis continues. I think it's smart to be getting ahead of the game now!

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Abhi Agarwal's avatar

Really excited to hear more! We have a lot of wild rabbits - I'm excited to see how this goes as I've always been intrigued by keeping rabbits. I'd love to learn about your chicken coop work as well

I got really good results with sweet potatoes by soaking it in a slurry of forest soil + water (just massage it to release the organisms into the water). I soaked the leaves for 15 minutes - I got nearly double the yield by soaking it.

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