Hobby Farms: Rabbits

Small-Scale Rabbit Keeping

Chris McLaughlin

• Publisher: CompanionHouse Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781937049751
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Allevamento di animali

Rabbit raisers will keep their rabbitries hopping and happy with the advice found in Rabbits, a Hobby Farm book. Rabbit breeder and exhibitor Chris McLaughlin offers years of experience and guidance on the many aspects of raising rabbits on a hobby farm, a livestock choice she considers perfect due to the limited space rabbits need to thrive. Whether the reader is raising rabbits for pets, fiber, or meat, there is much solid information and useful advice to be found in the pages of Rabbits. From the natural and cultural history of rabbits to selecting and purchasing of the right rabbits for a small farm, this book is both practical and enlightening. Individual chapters focusing on housing and feeding, behavior and handling, health care, and breeding and raising young make this an indispensable choice for all rabbit keepers. Handsomely designed with color photographs throughout, Rabbits also offers sidebars of helpful tips, fun anecdotes, and quotes from hobby farmers that prove entertaining and edifying. The final chapter of the book, "Making Money with Rabbits” discusses how to turn the rabbit-raising business profitable through producing show and pet rabbits, wool/fiber rabbits, rabbit manure, and rabbit meat. Resources include a glossary of terms and a catalog of associations, books, periodicals, and websites. Fully indexed.

CHAPTER ONE

Meet the Domestic Rabbit

As you may have guessed, rabbits didn’t start out as pets. In fact, the term domestic in the general sense of the word doesn’t refer to being a pet at all. When animals are domesticated, they’re kept and cared for by people for any number of purposes, be it for fur, meat, fancy (show), or—yes—companionship as family pets. The domestic rabbits we see in the United States today are a direct result of European settlers’ shipping Belgian Hares (they were actually rabbits, not hares) to America in the early 1900s for breeders and collectors. Later, in 1913, New Zealand Red rabbits were brought to America by sailors who kept them on board as small and easy-to-care-for meat animals. Since that time, many more rabbit breeds have been imported from countries worldwide. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Rabbit Ranking

In the animal kingdom, the class Mammalia holds a vast number of orders and suborders. Animals are classified according to their traits and habits to make it easier to observe and study them. Rabbits belong to the order Lagomorpha. This name comes from the Latin words lagos, meaning “hare,” and morphe, meaning “form.” The order has only two families: Leporidae (rabbits and hares) and Ochotonidae (pikas).

Rabbit History 101

According to geologists, rabbits have been hopping about the planet for 30 to 40 million years. It’s said that the Phoenicians kept caged rabbits as far back as 3,000 years ago, and the Romans followed suit shortly thereafter. Eventually, people in southwestern Europe, on land that’s now considered part of Spain and Portugal, saw the wisdom in raising rabbits for meat (instead of hunting them), and so began the heritage of the domestic rabbit. Of course, these rabbits weren’t anything close to resembling pets. Rather, they were an extremely convenient, easily transported meat source.

Hare’s Looking at You, Kid

Rabbits, with their curious, kind, and fast-footed habits, have captured the imagination to the point where we’ve placed them in the center of mainstream media by way of folklore, literature, advertisements, and entertainment. Check out some of the most famous rabbits in the world:

•	Bugs Bunny—With his world-renowned and charming phrase, “What’s Up, Doc?,” Bugs Bunny is perhaps the most famous rabbit anywhere. He was created in 1940 by Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (which, in 1944, became Warner Bros.).
•	Harvey—This was James Stewart’s 6-foot, 3½-inch tall, invisible rabbit friend in the 1950 movie Harvey.
•	Energizer Bunny—The pink bunny with a drum that just keeps going, and going, and going showed up as the spokesbunny for Energizer batteries in 1989.
•	Roger Rabbit—He was Gary Wolf’s main character from the 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, and he was later transformed into a cartoon character in the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
•	Peter Rabbit—Peter is the adventurous bunny in Beatrix Potter’s children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which was first privately printed in 1901.
•	Peter Cottontail—This Peter lived in the 1914 children’s book The Adventures of Peter Cottontail by Thornton Burgess.
•	The White Rabbit—Alice follows the white rabbit down the hole in Lewis Carroll’s (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In this same book, Alice visits with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter.
•	Velveteen Rabbit—In Margery Williams’ 1922 children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit, this is the toy rabbit that becomes real thanks to the love of a child.
•	Br’er (Brer) Rabbit—This tricky rabbit is linked to both African and Cherokee cultures but was adapted by Walt Disney in the animated feature Song of the South.
•	The Trix Rabbit—Remembered by baby boomers for the tagline of “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!,” the General Mills cereal-box mascot was created in 1959 by Joe Harris.
•	Thumper—He was a deer’s best friend in the 1942 Walt Disney classic animated movie Bambi.
•	“Rabbit”—He is the gardening enthusiast from the children’s stories of Winnie the Pooh, written by A. A. Milne in 1926.
•	Bunnicula—He is the vegetable-juice-sucking character from the 1979 children’s book written by Deborah and James Howe, Bunnicula.
•	Uncle Wiggly—He starred in the original 1910 children’s book Uncle Wiggly by Howard Roger Garis.
•	Hazel, Fiver, and Blackberry— The entire cast of 1978 animated film Watership Down was made up of rabbits.
•	Leo—He is the main character in Stephen Cosgrove’s 1977 children’s book Leo the Lop, part of the Serendipity Series.
•	The Hare—This is the guy who took too much for granted as he snoozed and lost the race to the tortoise in Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare.

As people migrated from land to land by ship, rabbits either escaped at port or were released from their cages. These rabbits made themselves at home wherever they landed, which created wild populations of Oryctolagus cuniculus throughout Europe. Around the sixth century AD, French Catholic monks began raising rabbits for meat. Keeping rabbits within the monastery walls led to breeding them for various uses, sizes, and colors. These monks are still credited today with the first true domestication of the rabbit in Europe.

Although European settlers introduced the Belgian Hare to America in the early 1900s, we know that Lop and Angora rabbits were already prevalent in the United States by the mid 1800s. In 1910, thirteen people formed the new National Pet Stock Association of America—an organization that would later become the American Rabbit Breeders Association (ARBA), which now boasts an estimated 30,000 members and recognizes nearly fifty different rabbit breeds. Today, rabbits are fourth only to dogs, cats, and birds as pets in the American household.

The wild rabbits you see, like this one, are descendents from European rabbits.

The Rabbit Today

Depending on where you make your home, rabbits may be kept as companions or family pets and live indoors or outdoors in an enclosure. In fact, some people become so closely bonded to their furry friend that their rabbit is given its own bedroom in the house! Other rabbit fanciers raise their rabbits in a “rabbitry” (a rabbit-specific area or enclosure where rabbits are raised and cared for) as a hobby for showing. Angora rabbit breeds are raised for both show and fiber (fur) because they produce wool that can be spun for knitting. Rabbits are small, easy to care for, and provide healthy meat, which also makes them a smart choice for breeding and raising for food. The savvy rabbit-raiser will research the individual rabbit breeds and choose one that catches his or her interest as well as incorporates one or two of the uses mentioned above. With their comparatively small size, gentleness, and versatility, it’s clear why rabbits are one of the most popular hobby-farm animals today.

The hare may be your rabbits’ cousin, but they’re easy enough to tell apart.

Splitting Hares

Rabbit species are often confused with one another. These furry, hopping creatures all look very similar, but our domestic rabbit species isn’t nearly the same as the American wild rabbits (called cottontails or brush rabbits). In fact, they’re cousins, at best.

The rabbits that we call pets and companions here in the United States have all been domesticated from the European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus. These European rabbits live in family colonies and create an underground system of warrens or burrows, which they use to hide from predators and to give birth. Cottontails are of the genus Sylvilagus and lead a different lifestyle than that of their cousins. They live above ground and give birth above ground in depressions in the earth. Cottontails will, however, use burrows that were created by other animals or brush piles as temporary protection against predators.

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