Sloppy Hoppy

 As I have mentioned before, I have canned a lot of rabbit. With the bones, quart jars are more or less needed, and the odd-shaped pieces of meat mean the quart jars won't have as much meat in them as they would if they were packed with boneless chicken breast chunks, but the process overall works well.

Then one has to figure out what to do with the canned rabbit.  It can be used any way you would use canned chicken, and another option is to use it in place of ground beef--they obviously are not the same, but one idea I got from a few podcasts was to make sloppy hoppy--i.e., sloppy Joes using rabbit meat instead of ground beef.  I looked and found some Crock Pot recipes, which I then adapted.

 

1 quart canned rabbit (usually about 1-1.5 lb of meat)

1 can tomato sauce (or tomato paste; see below)

2 Tb dried chopped onion, rehydrated

1 tsp. powdered garlic

2 Tb mustard

1/4 c brown sugar (or Whey Low for low-carb)

2 Tb white vinegar

2 Tb water (if tomato paste used; omit if using tomato sauce)

1 tsp Worchestershire sauce

1/2 tsp salt

My first attempt used tomato paste, because I thought the sauce would be too watery.  I would judge that to be a swing and a miss.  It ended up being edible, but it was obviously dry and it over-cooked and burned a little at the top edge in the Crock Pot (cooking time is about 4 hours on medium, which I have done, or 2-3 on high, which I have not tried).  The second effort with tomato sauce turned out well.

It's worth keeping in mind going forward.

 

 

 

The Great Freeze of 2022

 The Christmas weekend Siberian Express dropped morning lows to single digits where I am (6 and 8 on two different mornings, plus daytime highs in the 20s for a couple of days).  My animal housing is not particularly robust against cold.  The chicken tractor design  that I used (based on Justin Rhodes' plans) is open in the front, and my rabbit hutch is very open: again, the emphasis in the design is on keeping them cool, not warm.

If it routinely got this cold--particularly with wind--I'd have the rabbits in an open shed, probably, where tarps could easily be draped across the front to block the wind.  And the chickens would probably have a coop they could be closed up in.

As it was, all of the animals made it through okay.  Everyone's water froze repeatedly.

On the coldest day, even the water I put out mid-morning froze by afternoon.  So I kept swapping out crocks for the rabbits and waterers for the chickens.  After the first couple of days, the highs started going back above freezing again and the daytime water wouldn't freeze.

None of the animals exhibited any distress; all behaved pretty normally.  No frostbite on the rabbits' ears, although the roosters had a touch of frostbite on their combs (note the last two spikes in the picture below).

I was able to keep the house habitable with the wood stove, but it struggled to warm it up the first morning (the storm blew in early morning on a Friday, and Saturday morning was the six-degree low). The house was in the upper 40s Saturday morning, and the stove took most of the day to get it warmed up into the normal range.  Fortunately, I was able to be home to tend it. 

I'm glad it's not routinely like this.

First New Zealand Litter

I got the breeding stock off someone on Craigslist, with no further information.   The first breeding didn't take, but the second one did:

They grow quickly.  The picture below was less than a week later:

And a few weeks later they were weaned and on their own...

They're older now, about 12 weeks, and at harvest weight.  The picture below shows a lot of them alerting to a noise off to the right.

They grow up so fast...

Canning Rabbit Meat

The first litter of rabbits have now been processed.  Some of the meat has been frozen; some has been eaten fresh, and I have canned some of it.

I have never canned bone-in meat before.  All of my prior experiences have been with boneless beef or chicken.

My first attempt worked out okay, more or less.  The instructions for all meats are pretty similar.  Boneless are processed for 75 minutes for pints, 90 minutes for quarts.  Bone-in meat is processed 65 minutes for pints and 75 minutes for quarts.

I had two rabbits to can. They were in the refrigerator, so I decided to go ahead and use the boneless time.  Two rabbits, roughly four pounds, went into three jars.

For raw pack, no liquid is added, so what you see in the picture cooked out of the meat.  A couple of days after processing, I opened one up to see how it turned out.  The meat was fine.  As with all canned meat, it was somewhat over-cooked and a little on the dry side, although it wasn't objectionable at all (rabbit meat is thoroughly cooked when it reaches a temperature of 165 degrees Farenheit, so heating it up to 240 degrees is definitely overdoing it from a taste standpoint--but it's the only realistic way to get it done).  The main problem was the bones: they more or less crumbled.  That made deboning a little tricky.  I'm pretty sure that's due to the extra processing time that I built in.  Next time I'll do the 75.  Overall, though, this is definitely a viable way to preserve the meat.

First Litter

I have two pairs of rabbits: two TAMUKs and two New Zealand Reds.  The TAMUKs are more heat-tolerant, developed at Texas A&M Kingsville, and have several breeds in their lineage, including New Zealands.  The TAMUK doe's first litter has arrived:

The litter had eight, but one fell through the sidewall of the cage to the ground and died.  Four weeks later, they have grown.

TAMUKs can have any color, and mixed-color litters are not uncommon.  The buck is sort of off-white.

Pretty soon they'll be moving to a grow-out cage of their own.  Things are going very well.

 

A Treat for the Bunnies

It's only about two months past when I should've pruned my fruit trees and the muscadines, so it's time to get going on that task.  Ahem.  At any rate, this year I have a potential use for the small branches taken out in pruning: rabbits like them.

 Although my New Zealand doe doesn't look terribly impressed with the offering, she did eventually gnaw it pretty thoroughly.  Shown below are a couple of freshly-cut sticks with one that has been debarked.

I do spray my fruit trees with a variety of things, but this season all they've gotten is one dose of copper (they're due for another), and I've gotten about three inches of rain since I sprayed the first time.  So I figured it probably wouldn't hurt them to give them a treat. I have also given them some dandelion leaves, which they like (I don't spray the grass at all).

Other than that, they're still on hay and pellets.  It seems to be working well.

Hay, Bunny!

 As is generally recommended, my rabbits are getting pellets and hay.  Although websites usually mention Timothy hay as the most preferred, that's pretty pricey (Tractor Supply sells a 50-pound bale for $23.99 as of this writing).  Bermuda and alfalfa hay are more available.  The link above suggests that rabbits don't like Bermuda grass as much, but the nutrition profile of Bermuda and Timothy are essentially identical (see Table 1 of the linked PDF). One note is that alfalfa hay has more calcium and is usually contraindicated for rabbits in most articles I've read (e.g., this one). This is not a problem; alfalfa costs more.  On Craigslist, alfalfa bales are usually about twice the price of Bermuda, which are the only two readily-available options other than the prepackaged and expen$ive route from a Tractor Supply or similar store.

When I got rabbits, the only hay I had on hand was some Bermuda bales from the previous winter--I park the chicken tractors in late November and don't move them again until March.  I tossed some in the cages and the rabbits immediately began nibbling at it.  They may prefer Timothy to Bermuda, but they seem to go for Bermuda with enthusiasm nonetheless.

I'm not sure exactly how much they actually eat vs. lose through the wire bottoms of their cages.  Some people have built little hay racks in their cages, but I just dump a bunch on the floor of the cage.  Sometimes there's still some left the next day; sometimes not.  Some of the rabbits seem to get into playing with it:

In the foreground is the red New Zeland buck; the TAMUK buck is in the background.  The one in front often burrows into the hay as soon as I put it in his cage--but he eats it, too.  Tossing his hay around though is bound to make more fall through. Alas.  He has gained weight very well, and rapidly, so he's getting enough to eat one way or another.

More on the Rabbit Hutch

 The re-engineered rabbit hutch is working decently well.  More overhang on the sides would be potentially helpful, but overall it's working worlds better than Hutch 1.0 did.  However, once I put rabbits in, I realized they pick a corner of the cage as their latrine spot, and one of the rabbits ends up routinely urinating on the horizontal cage supports.

I should've realized this would be a problem.  It would've been much easier to address before installing the rabbits.  Alas.  However, it was addressable ex post, too.  I pulled all four cages off:

...and painted the 2x4s the cages rest on with high-gloss white paint:

I only did one coat... I should do another.  You can also see that I painted the insides of the cross braces and the vertical supports, too--I had heard, but had to experience first hand, that bucks spray urine everywhere.  So far, the two boys seem to be coexisting reasonably well, but there was a chance they'd end up spraying more than just the wood under their cages--so it all got painted.  It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than raw wood.

Predator Abatement for the Rabbits

 As I have mentioned before, I have an abundance of predators in the neighborhood. In addition to foxes and raccoons, I have once or twice caught bobcats on trail cameras, though never near the chicken tractors.  Rabbits are also pretty low on the food chain, and I have found signs of predation in my back yard (piles of fur, and once, a severed rabbit head).

The cages are pretty strong, especially the bottoms.  All sides are 14 gauge wire.  And the cages fit pretty tightly in the hutch and can be secured with wire.  Because of the location of the hutch, it's not really practical to put electrified netting or rope around the perimeter, meaning physical barriers will have to work (I suppose I'll revisit this if I come out to smashed cages and dead rabbits some morning).

The main point of vulnerability is the top of the cages.

I don't think anything could get in, but having a fox pacing on top of the rabbits probably wouldn't make for a very pleasant situation.  Eventually I will have water lines running along the top edge of the cages, as well, although that's paused for now because of winter.

My solution is to put some fencing along the top edge of the roof frame:

The distance from the frame to the top of the cages is about 24 inches, so the top row of the 28-inch fencing was clipped off and pieces straightened as before with the cages.  With the thinner-gauge wire, straightening it was relatively easy, and it was easily hung from hooks.

I'm using a couple of carabiners to hold the wire to the top of the cages along the sides.  I don't think this needs to be as seamless as would be needed if it were on the ground--anything trying to get on top of the cages will be jumping, and hitting a small gap won't be easy.  So for now, this looks good.