Chapter 8 ~ Rabbit Ranching

If countless years of fishing trips had any result, beside the obvious and immediate enjoyment of a vacation, it was that Carmon developed a great love for central Utah.  His fantasy was to leave his high-pressure job for the slower pace of a small Utah town.  Unfortunately, part of what made those little towns slower-paced was the fact that there were literally no jobs there.  That little detail didn’t stop Carmon’s dreams.  Thus began the many year fascination with rabbit ranching.

He’d first learned about rabbit ranching from an advertisement in one of his many outdoors magazines.  You know the type of ad – buy two minks and grow your own coats kind of thing.  He sent away by mail order for a breeding pair of New Zealand Giants, which, true to their name, were very large, white rabbits raised almost exclusively for meat.  He got official registration papers, a book of directions for their care, an ear tattooing kit (you actually stamped purple numbers into the rabbits pink inner ear, a somewhat barbaric idea to my mind).  He built a row of hutches out behind the house in an old shed area out of sight of the house and the neighbors.  Because summer time in the Southwest produces killer heat, Carmon built nest boxes far under the ground and attached them to the above-the-ground hutches by wooden runs.  The runs had tiny slats nailed to the bottom to provide traction for the rabbits’ feet.  Hilton doesn’t provide any better accommodations!

As rabbits do, ours multiplied until we had close to a dozen cages.  Carmon had augmented his breeding Giants with other rabbits he bought locally, although he was careful to keep the purebreds separate from the Heinz variety. 

I learned a lot about baby rabbits during this time.  For one thing, they are born blind and hairless.  I found out that had they been born with hair, they wouldn’t have been rabbits at all, but hares, a fact that fascinated me for some reason.  I also learned that the females sometimes eat their first litter, a fact that distressed me for obvious reason.  Finally, I learned, that you don’t want to hold one if it is about to piddle on your clothing or, worse yet, on the furniture.  No amount of Febreeze – had we even had Febreeze all those years ago – could have eliminated that odor.

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I took a pair if rabbits to school when I was student teaching.  Carmon built two portable cages.  The female was white and the male black.  They had already bred (I wasn't teaching that much biology in fourth grade!) I had set up a science center and we allowed the students to predict the color of the babies based on genetic theories we had studied.  I had jars of beans of various colors, each representing a color component so that they could look at all of the possible combinations that could arise.  Unfortunately, we had a similar experience going on with an incubator of fertilized chicken's eggs.  What the children predicted was that the rabbits had laid the eggs!  City kids!

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Ranching rabbits never became a profitable venture and most of the rabbits ended up on our table. As with other ventures of Carmon’s, I refused to have anything to do with the killing and cleaning part. I did, however, do the cooking after spending a lot of time and effort psyching myself up for it.

As I mentioned earlier, the rabbits reproduced like rabbits and soon we had more than we could ever hope to eat.  We shared the meat with neighbors.  Some babies were given away as pets. But the toughest sale for me to understand was yet to come.

 

Carmon brought a fellow home one night after work.  I’d never seen the man before, but they were talking like they were best buds.  Carmon took him out back to see the rabbit ranch and the latest babies.  He frequently did that, so I didn’t think much of it.  A short while later, they came back in and the man was holding a small cardboard box.  Inside the box were six baby rabbits, still blind and hairless. 

After the man left, I asked Carmon what was happening.  Why was he selling that young litter instead of some of the older babies who were ready to be weaned?  Those babies were so little; they would die without their mother.  We’d raised a litter of puppies on bottles a few years before and it was beyond difficult and demanding.  What on earth would this man do with six almost embryonic rabbits? That’s when Carmon told me:  the man raised snakes.

Carmon sold baby rabbits to the man one more time and actually took them to the man’s house and watched a feeding.  When he came home, I asked him how it went.  He didn’t say much, but went to bed early that night.  He never sold baby rabbits to the man again.

© Gebara Education, 2001. No portion of this book may be copied by any method without the express written permission of the author

Picture of old Utah farm house from www.ifimages.com

Picture of ear tatoo from www.thenaturetrail.com

Picture of New Zealand Giant from www.survivalhomestead.com

Picture of black and tan rabbits from www.free-extras.com

Picture of baby rabbits from www.torontowildlifecenter.com