Raising Rabbits for Preppers

As part of your preparedness plan or in your quest for off grid living, raising rabbits is an essential member of your livestock community. High in protein and easy to raise.

Meat rabbits are one of the easiest meat sources to get involved with for many reasons. They are nearly silent (except for a few shrieks while mating), are easy to care for and don’t usually require a lot of input from you once they give birth (unlike chickens). And if you are concerned about privacy, it’s quite easy to raise rabbits without any of your neighbors ever knowing they exist. The same can rarely be said about other small livestock like chickens, geese, sheep or goats. And rabbits take up a fraction of the space of other livestock. In fact, six pounds of rabbit meat can be produced with the same amount of clean water and feed as one pound of beef! And you don’t have to slaughter your breeding rabbit in order to get the meals onto the table, either, meaning the cycle will just keep on going.

By the way, rabbit meat is immensely high in protein, low in fat and is low in calories too. Rabbit meat is so lean and healthy that some doctors actually recommend eating it as part of a special diet for losing weight. With every 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of rabbit meat you eat, you will be consuming 187 calories, 27 grams of protein and 8 grams of fat. Compare that to lean beef, which has 275 calories, 25 grams protein and 20 grams fat per 100 grams.

Another wonderful thing about raising meat rabbits is that it is very easy to scale your production up or down. Say you want to pick up a couple of breeding rabbits now to start slowly learning how everything works, find good breeding pairs and just make sure you have control of things. It’s always better to be prepared than lost in the dark, right? But if things turn for the worse, you can easily use some of the rabbits you produce down the road for breeding stock and increase the number of rabbits in your herd, thereby increasing the amount of meat you’re producing for your own needs or to use for selling and bartering.

And it’s not only the meat you can sell/barter once you start raising rabbits. There are plenty of by products which result from rabbits that can help you turn a profit or otherwise get what you need. Rabbits from your herd (both young and older) can be marketed pets or breeding stock, you can use/sell/trade solid rabbit waste as fertilizer (or toss your rabbit droppings into worm bins and create the best fertilizer on the planet), with a bit of extra effort you can preserve the pelts of the mature rabbits (5 months old or older) for projects and more. As you can see, raising rabbits comes with a far more extensive potential for profit than you might first think – and at the very least, you should be able to cover the costs of running your rabbitry without too much extra hassle.

So as you can see, learning to raise meat rabbits is a skill that can greatly improve your quality of life, both now and in the future. It will be especially helpful should situations arise that require you to depend on your own resources.

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Photo. Irina Nature and Wildlife

Source: EzineArticles.com