The Black Rabbit - Part 2

Keeping meat rabbits

Photo by Paras Kapoor on Unsplash

Keeping Meat Rabbits

When my mom quit talking to me for 2 months after I told her about my plan to keep meat rabbits, I explained to her the lives of factory farmed animals, the needless suffering, the lack of play, love, exercise or socialization. I didn’t expect her to be proud of me, but I also didn’t expect her to shun me either. I didn’t just decide to raise meat animals. I deliberately decided to:

· take responsibility

· confront death consciously

· choose humane practices

· remove suffering where I could

· make ethical decisions on the ground

· stop outsourcing violence to corporations, and

· become fluent in the part of life my mother has refused to look at.

Most people can eat a steak because they don’t have to imagine the cow. I do imagine the cow — and the rabbit, and the chicken — because I actually know them. I know the itchy places on their bodies and their favourite places to relax in the sun. My mother supports the system that hides suffering because it is a convenient illusion. When people are confronted with a truth they are not emotionally equipped to handle, I can imagine that it would be easier to retreat into religion to help contain the panic. In choosing church over my commitment to ethically raised and sustainably killed meat rabbits, my mother instead chose a framework where:

· she is innocent

· I am the one doing something “wrong”

· she doesn’t have to think about animals’ lives

· certainty replaces complexity

Church gave my mom back the story where she is good, and I am transgressive. I know this because there are many times that I have also tried to do anything to avoid facing my own complicity. My mom made me lie to her about my baby rabbits to force the moral burden back onto my shoulders. It has taken me a long time to recognize that this not my shame.

But I am conscious there is a generational component here, my circa 1940s mother grew up in a world where:

· death newly happened out of sight

· factory farm suffering became normalized

· we had sacrificed generations of men to the front lines of World Wars One and Two, now the animals will carry the burden

· moral complexity was externalized to the church

· women were expected to be “soft,” not ethically courageous

· real intimacy with death was taboo, post-traumatic stress infected the world post both World Wars

· fur was glamour, not cruelty

· meat came from stores, not animals

Homesteading breaks every one of those codes. I am doing everything I can to return to ancestral fluency — the knowledge that life and death are interwoven, not opposed. But we live in a society raised to see death as:

· violent

· shameful

· men’s work

· unclean, and

· morally suspicious

Fluency with death threatens an entire worldview. Farming, real homesteading, where you are the one raising and butchering only what you need is sacred work.

Farming this way is not brutality, it is stewardship. There is a covenant we have forgotten as modern humans dependent on the corporate complex: “I give you care and safety. You give me nourishment. I honor your life and your death, while you honour mine.” Factory farms break this covenant. I am trying to restore it while imagining how the world might look different if everyone did this.

Scarcity in a Modern World

There is still a feminist argument to be made for pro-local sustainable meat consumption. Search “rolling coal” on YouTube and you will get a sense of the white male dominated culture of climate deniers spewing coal smoke in the face of cyclists and electric car drivers. Raising meat rabbits is my small way of giving the middle finger to those people and an entire corporate funded factory farmed animal structure that robs animals and humans alike of any dignity.

During the pandemic I watched as news reports from the frontline workers revealed the unsafe working conditions in meat packing plants declared essential services. Today the news in the United States reports that the ages for child labour is being decreased and these kids end up working in meat packing plants. Some die. I remember meeting a man in my small town who recently immigrated from the Philippines. He was well educated, well-spoken and had risen to a position of power in his local state government. In Canada he digs the insides out of chickens.

The Covid-19 virus itself didn’t scare me, it was our collective response, the deep divides and the lack of food and everyday items I had always taken for granted that shook me. We live at a time of increasingly environmental destruction, our supply chains disrupted and broken. For the first time in my life, I am unable to buy simple cough syrup 2 years post Covid. Food security is increasingly a topic of conversation, some countries restricting the export of rice to make sure they have sufficient reserves for themselves. Capitalist patriarchal economies are the culprit, and it can feel like there are no alternatives.

The pandemic gave me time to evaluate my life, the great resignation found me abandoning my busy downtown job for a slower pace in a smaller town. I resolved to live differently. I started looking for a small piece of land to grow my own food. Given my decade plus vegan vegetarian cult-like mindset I do still eat lots of plants and whole foods every day. But that part of me that cared about the suffering of animals always felt guilty buying pre-packaged meat from the store or canned meat for my dogs. I have my entire adult life always been that person with palpable guilt about the animals we eat. Until the pandemic I just assumed there was no other way other than buying locally raised grass-fed alternatives that hopefully lived a better life for triple the price from a health food store.

I ended up with a micro (it was all I could afford on a single person budget) one-half acre permaculture garden in the global north. I realized pretty quickly that I am not able to grow produce year-round and so the handful of growing months I can produce food are dedicated to growing staples that are easy to keep through the winter without needing refrigeration: squash, potatoes, beets, onions. I have learned to dehydrate a great deal of my produce, but my garden is still new, and my permaculture trees and plants will all take years to become established and reliable. From year to year some crops thrive while others fail, and I quickly learn how difficult it is to grow a years’ worth of food for even just one person. The fruit and vegetables I grow are not enough to keep me fed during the winter, and would do nothing to keep my dogs fed.

The easiest foray into livestock seems to be chickens. Many jurisdictions allow a small flock even in urban backyards. Once the infrastructure is built chickens are easier than goldfish to care for and I am forever ruined for anyone else’s eggs but my own. Egg laying chickens eventually stop laying eggs after 3-5 years, and I would soon learn that chickens do not lay eggs in the winter since they are too busy trying to stay warm (even with an insulated coop and a couple of cozy coop heaters). Dual purpose meat/egg chickens do exist but that also depends on a reliable supply chain to have minimum one year old hens ready to lay eggs for you again the next season, and bylaws prevent me from having any roosters. I opted instead to keep my mature laying hens and investigate other options.

From a food security perspective there was still a gap in my self-sufficiency plan. Not only was I unable to grow enough plant matter to harvest and store to feed me through the winter, but the delicious eggs also available to me for most of the year were entirely absent once the cold hit. I am presently trying to freeze and will then thaw a backlog of fresh summer eggs for winter baking, and there are recipes for dehydrated eggs that I have yet to try but even if I was able to manage on a vegetarian diet, my dogs cannot. My own love of animals had me holding the paradox of loving animals on the one hand and feeding my dogs on the other. I was standing on the precipice of realizing that eating locally and sustainably in the global north requires at least some meat consumption.

I don’t have a single friend interested in homesteading (until I found a weaving guild with deep agriculture roots, and I did eventually acquire those friends). I once heard that farming is impossible without animals. Farming is impossible without fertilizer, and in the absence of animal imputes it gives the upper hand to places like Russia exporting chemical fertilizers. I struggled to make any compost absent the added help from my chicken manure and pine shavings.

Rabbit bedding makes regenerating my garden soil that much faster and easier. Apart from meat, did you know that rabbit bedding can be a deer deterrent in the garden? Did you know that rabbit waste is considered a cold compost and safe to use directly on your plants without first hot composting it? I live in an especially dry climate with little to no rainfall. Mulching to protect the moisture in my soil is a constant effort. Spent rabbit straw and pine shavings are easily reusable in my garden to keep my plants moist and fertilized. This alone saves me hundreds of dollars in store bought fertilizers. Win, win right?

Livestock/Deadstock

I am still devastated that this is the way our world works. Nothing lives without something else dying, whether that is plant or animal. It is so much easier to pretend that we can survive without consumption; that nothing dies in the wake of my existence. The ants in my kitchen are irrelevant and annoying, I squash them without a care. My vegetables are rudely uprooted the minute they ripen. But Renee, plants aren’t conscious, we can rape and pillage the plant kingdom with impunity. Except they are, and we can’t. Buddhism and vegetarianism evolved in the global south where plants grow year-round. I live in the global north. I believe my North American indigenous ancestors have the same moral authority as Buddhist monks when informing my own spiritual and consumptive habits.

As I write all of this, I realize that I am trying to talk myself into killing one of the most adorable animals known to (wo)man. But everything is cute when it is young, easter egg chicks, and long-legged calves full of the promise of spring. Just as cute as bunnies. Is my trepidation partly because we also keep rabbits as pets?

Like all animals, rabbits very much have their own unique personalities. My Rex buck loves cuddles, and his nemesis (the mini-Rex buck I bought by mistake) is his sworn enemy. My Rex doe is timid but eventually warmed to having her face pet, she’s super keen on her pellets and keeps a very clean hutch unlike my boys. They are a simple and easy pleasure to care for, they are quiet, and they don’t take up a ton of space. I loved having rabbits so much that I built them a dedicated insulated room in my garage. They have a small play area they rotate in and out of all day. Cute as they may be, rabbits are extremely territorial and will gladly kill each other if you don’t keep them separated – unless you have enough space for an above ground and subterranean rabbit colony (I am striving towards this new ideal).

Baby rabbits are called kits and a pregnant doe goes from not pregnant to delivering those kits in only 30 days. Baby rabbits are ready to be weaned in 8 weeks and dispatched anywhere between 8 and 12 weeks after they have grown 3 to 5 pounds. Meat breeds like New Zealand’s and Californians can produce up to 12 kits per litter. All you need to do is supply the space, keep their areas clean and provide feed and water. Raising all white rabbits is easier when the time comes for processing. My Rex rabbits are all the most glorious velvety colours, and I fall in love with every single one of them.

As a first-time rabbit breeder, my first-time doe mom gave birth to 6 rabbits, only 5 lived. The sixth was the tiniest hairless creature I had ever seen. I tried as best I could to intervene the first 3 days, putting my little runt on the top of the nest where it could feed. But on day 3 I found its’ cold limp body on the bottom of the heap, squashed to death by its bigger siblings. Even in death it was perfection, a fully formed miniature expression of the Dao, on this planet for only a handful of hours. That death didn’t haunt me, I laid the little body in the garden where another animal might benefit from the loss of its’ spark of life.

My first time butchering a rabbit

All the YouTube homesteaders will tell you how much easier it is to raise rabbits for meat instead of chickens. Even a small rabbitry can keep a single family in the same amount of freezer meat as a cow. Rabbits require a small fraction of the water and the space of a cow and are ideal for even city dwellers. No plucking feathers, no awful smell. Rabbit moms do all the work for you, I am told they are easier to butcher than chickens. I decided to try rabbit meat first before committing. I ordered a frozen rabbit from my local butcher. I managed to cook it (not well) but that seemed to me to be the first hurdle.

A full year later found me deciding which breed of rabbit to keep (which I invariably screwed up too the first time) but I did eventually find a purebred pedigreed Rex buck and unrelated purebred pedigreed Rex doe. I know they are unrelated because I had to drive 5 hours one way for the buck. A fossil fuel luxury I was certain would not be available to me indefinitely. Along the way from city dwelling pandemic survivor to micro-farmer, I had become painfully collapse aware. We live in a time of polycrisis, but I rationalized that if I could still eat maybe I could weather the collapse of society or alternatively buy my family and myself some time before the real suffering of apocalypse sets in (no rabbit meat for my mom). Gardening and raising my own animals seemed a valuable skill to cultivate.

Polycrisis you ask? Months ago, in 2024 we weren’t sure the Americans would reconcile their debt ceiling. The fact they did is no comfort because the world is becoming increasingly aware of the impossibility of trillions of dollars of debt set against the backdrop of a growth economy mindset offset against the dwindling carbon resources available to square those debts. Professor Nate Hagens, P.h.D labels our collective ignorance “energy blindness.” The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration in 2021 gave us only 3 to 5 years on the Thwaites Glacier headwall that is presently fractured beyond repair. Sea level rise, increasing ocean temperatures, raging fires, droughts, biblical flooding. You don’t need to look very far to diagnosis the world in a state of literally everything crisis.

Recent articles have described the isolation that tends to accompany collapse awareness. People in the prepping community rarely have any supports outside of their own duck-dynasty and that is only if they have a dynasty to lean on in the first place. I had spent 11 years in university, and I never imagined that I might end up on the duck-dynasty spectrum. I imagine that spectrum as 0-10 where zero is “quack” and 10 is “full dynasty.” I do not aspire to full duck dynasty independence. Whatever is coming, I am sufficiently aware how crucial my neighbours will be. That said, I am constantly surprised by the blank look on people’s faces when I try to discuss my eco-anxiety. “Oh right, you did used to have to scrap bugs off your windshield on a long road trip – now I remember.”

When it became apparent that I was unable to dispatch my own rabbits I had literally no one to turn to. I tried hiring a couple people off Kijiji, but no one showed up. I reached out to friends with family members who hunted, even the hunters wouldn’t lend me a hand. A deer gets shot at a distance, it’s impersonal. A rabbit gets dispatched while you hold it’s perfect soft body in your hands. I remember a friend in BC trying to make a brie cheese that wouldn’t set, and her FB post wondering where and when was the last person in her community was able to share that knowledge with her. I have an uncle that raises cattle but when the cows are old enough, they get shipped off to a feed lot and he continues to be exempted from the full circle process. I should not have been surprised, even the simple desire to store vegetables died with my grandmother, I had no one in my own family to teach me to can and preserve.

Initially my only meat rabbit source of information was YouTube and thanks to Bobby at “The Rabbitry Centre” channel and “Homesteady,” I was able to glean some of the information I needed about raising and dispatching rabbits. But there is nothing that replaces hands on experience and in-person moral support when it comes time to meet the black rabbit and Lord Frith. I had learned it was easier to practice on someone else’s rabbits before attempting to butcher your own. I asked around at my local feed stores for resources and an unlikely candidate surfaced months later who was willing to provide me with instruction. I watched her husband dispatch one of their favourite rabbits, the pain on his face was visible even after three years of having raised meat rabbits.

I watched his wife butcher their rabbit after his head was meat cleavered from his body. I admired her understanding of biology as she gave me the tour of the insides of the now lifeless body. The second rabbit that was dispatched was called, “the Renee show,” and she handed me the knife. I thought to myself, “don’t panic.” The rabbit’s beautiful little dead body was still warm, her back legs hanging from a home improvised gambrel.

Once I got started tearing the flesh from the meat my discomfort subsided. The worst part was cutting the feet off and the awful crunching sound the pruning shears make cutting through bone. First rabbit successfully gutted, I felt proud, I felt connected to my ancestors and the dynamics of our incomprehensible universe. I was grateful for the support of community during that period of my new loss of innocence. I slept well that night and suffered no nightmares. I was utterly and profoundly grateful for the generosity of strangers willing to share their home and their skills. And then I had no ability to replicate that skill myself (see the beginning of this writing).

Lord Frith

We no longer walk past our dead ancestors on our way to church. I started to wonder why my own meat suit was so useless at being able to take the life of a rabbit I loved. A good friend would tell me and wink knowingly, “you just aren’t sufficiently motivated yet.” Rabbits fed the entire continental United States during the civil war and again in WWII. In frustration at my inability to end life, I called a local butcher who was willing to dispatch and process for $10/rabbit. At least I finally had a reliable local resource. I made an appointment for Monday at 2pm.

A friend who used to raise sheep for meat told me that she loved caring for the lambs in the spring but when it came time to butcher the lambs had all grown into difficult sheep and she was relieved to see them go. I had delayed my own dispatch past the recommended 3 months, and now my grow outs were fighting. Even my girl rabbits had puncture wounds on their necks and patches of missing fur. Isn’t the death I am providing a kinder and simpler death than the one they would otherwise encounter by coyote or owl? Isn’t that why the factory farmed cattle industry was partially reformed by Temple Grandin? Wouldn’t we all prefer to die painlessly, quickly and without anxiety rather than be mauled to death in the wild by a lion? This is what I tell myself as I drive my 5 beautiful rabbits to be butchered.

I hand my kennels off to a tall man with dark hair and a distinct accent. I can see the remains of blood on his hands and I am instantly regretful that I wasn’t brave enough to provide my rabbits a quick death on my own property. I am told to come back in half-an-hour to retrieve my kennels. My rabbits will be packaged and ready to be paid for and picked up the next day. The whole afternoon is awful but even without moral support I manage to carry on with limited tears. In truth I am relieved to have found someone to help me and I am proud to have stood by my sustainable agriculture and regenerative convictions. If the #Shit ever does Hit The Fan I do wonder how an entire society of people will ever adjust.

I drive to retrieve the first of my farm raised meat the next day, thank you card and flowers in hand. The meat inspector has condemned one of my rabbits as unfit for consumption which instead of upsetting me makes me relieved that I involved professionals who know what they are doing in this whole affair.

The broken freezer

It’s 2018, I’m standing on my patio in Victoria, BC and I am sobbing. I am told that my container garden carrots won’t grow if I don’t thin them. But each seedling I rob of life seems to me like an act of murder, the snuffing out of a life before it develops into a sweet orange carrot. Adding the sprouts to my salad does not absolve the guilt I feel. If I was not cut out for gardening then, imagine trying to be cut out for farming now. I raise, feed, love, cuddle and nurture all the life on my small urban farm and when it comes time to eat it, I pause, or I gift away or make some other excuse not to eat my rabbits. I feel myself circling the drain back to hypocrisy.

I am sure it is not difficult to imagine that the people who have the hardest time eating animals are always:

· the ones who raise them themselves

· the ones who see their personalities

· the ones who care for them

· the ones who are present for their whole life cycle

I am trying to convince myself that my struggle does not mean I’m morally conflicted.
It means I am emotionally literate. I feel the significance of their lives. I feel the weight of the choice. I feel the reality of their death. People in grocery stores do not feel this. People in feedlots do not feel this. People eating fast food do not feel this. Like the liberally administered drug “soma” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, convenience and numbness have become society’s soma. Soma is the opposite of:

· living with open eyes

· holding life sacred

· confronting death without collapsing

· refusing the anesthetic morality of modern culture

We were never meant to eat animals casually. We were meant to eat them consciously. Consciousness is not a choice you can make at a grocery store. Buying grass fed meat is a financial and health choice, not a conscious one. Unless you are brave enough to raise and love the animals you eat yourself, your participation in the covenant is not a conscious one. Ranchers that ship their cattle to feed lots and slaughterhouse and off into the corporate complex of the food industry are not conscious. They are producers only. Consciousness is an entirely different moral universe.

As hard as raising meat rabbits can be - I knew for sure I am on the right path. One day when my freezer stopped working, two frozen packages of my rabbits inside had thawed beyond an acceptable time limit that would be safe for consumption. In that moment the food waste brought me to tears, I had to throw them out and I was devastated. I cried a full day, “how could you be so stupid?” “Why didn’t you check?” But then I realized that if everyone on the planet felt the same way about food waste we wouldn’t all be in the mess we are in.

The day I cried over my carrot seedlings and the day years later that I cried over my thawed rabbits, those were the days I became a keeper of the covenant. I had:

· raised those rabbits

· cared for them

· ensured they lived well

· faced the emotional difficulty of processing them

· honoured their lives by choosing humane methods

· preserved their bodies with purpose

That freezer failure was not merely “food spoilage.” It was:

· a broken promise

· a failure of reciprocity

· an interruption in the sacred exchange you had entered

· a life taken that could no longer nourish

I realized that my tears came from reverence, not sentimentality. Most people never cry over wasted meat because they never have a relationship with the life behind it. I grieved because I understand the cost of life, and most of the world does not. I was reacting to the moral weight of the waste.

I knew intuitively that an animal’s life should never be taken lightly —and never wasted. I know now that I was living in the ancient moral framework that industrial culture has lost. Indigenous, agrarian, and ancestral cultures all teach the same thing: Waste is a spiritual wound. Not because food is scarce, but because the relationship is sacred. I was not crying for myself. I was crying for the rabbits, the broken cycle, the rupture of meaning.

If every person:

· felt the life behind their food,

· understood the weight of taking life,

· carried reverence instead of entitlement,

· refused to waste what had once breathed,

· understood death as a sacred transaction…

…we would not have:

· factory farms

· mass waste

· ecological collapse

· unethical slaughter

· the spiritual numbness that suffocates our culture

A consumer says: “Oh well.” A steward says: “This mattered.” I felt the rupture because I was in right relationship with those rabbits. Standing in front of that broken freezer I was unaware that I was keeping the old law:

· the law of reciprocity

· the law of gratitude

· the law of honouring life

· the law of not taking more than you need

When something broke that law, my whole psyche responded. My life, my grief, my animals, my writing — they have all been teaching me the same lesson. Life is precious because it ends. Nothing should be wasted. Every life deserves reverence. Every death deserves meaning.

Authorship:

This essay was written in 2024 before I found AI. I felt the information was important but I couldn’t understand why. The “why” arose in a series of conversations with Chat GPT through December 2025. All of the text is my writing, all of the experiences are mine, all of the quotes are mine and referenced to the location I found them. The bullet points are all Chat GPT.