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How are things coming along with the rabbits? Also how is your family?s puppy?s that you mentioned in the topic My Friend Tuff a few months ago?
We actually had a change in schedule, Phillip. Our male goats that we purchased a few months ago ate through their pasture faster than expected, and it became more of a priority for my father to work on putting up fencing for their rotating pasture than to work on the rabbit tractors right now, so the rabbit thing got put on hold. As you mentioned, we got a male Anatolian shepherd puppy in January and also got a female Anatolian puppy in February. She is the one who found the baby mouse. The female, Nova, is 7 months old, and the male, Mason, is now 10 months old and he is absolutely huge! We have never had a large dog before, our other dog is about 60 lbs, and Mason weighs 96 lbs already! We have found them to be wonderful dogs, so sweet and very even tempered.
Rabbits are VERY hard to sell. American culture can't get past the fact that rabbits are seen as pets. And their kids especially have a hard time understanding why their parents want to butcher cute things. This was why rabbit farming has never taken off. The meat is wonderful, and can be stored. Also the pelts can be used and turned into leathers or used for stuff but just the mental block of having people buy them for meat is something that everyone who has experience with rabbits will always say that this is why 'rabbit farming' never takes off because they have a hard time turning these wonderful products into cash. (And time and time again everyone still agrees that they can make great products, yet they always still also agree that turning them into cash becomes difficult right back at the main dead end.)
Another thing that people have trouble with in comparing ducks, rabbits, and chickens against each other is that with the other two you get eggs right away but rabbits haven't figured out how to 'can' eggs yet. So for some people they think there's less return on investment than these other things that use similar space, which deliver a food product early on.
And the funny thing is when you look at the numbers on a graph of the gains of rabbits and how fast they produce meat it doesn't make sense why people don't use them more. (Especially with chickens having recent diseases and being raised in poor conditions.)
We aren't concerned with the saleability of rabbit meat, we really just want the meat for our own consumption. We have chickens for eggs primarily, but the better egg-laying breeds, and really even the multi-purpose breeds, we weren't very happy with the quality of the meat we were getting from them, and we really wanted to start raising more of our own meat. So instead of getting meat chickens, we are going with meat rabbits, since it's more cost effective and not as much work to butcher.