Grilled Lemon-Garlic Rabbit Wrapped in Bacon

We have been experiencing some unseasonably warm temperatures in Eastern PA, with the high reaching 68°F just last weekend.  It’s amazing!!  The past few winters have been really rough so this is a nice break and we are trying our best to take full advantage of the mild weather.  This past weekend, we went for a family hike on the trails at South Mountain in Emmaus and then grilled some of our home-grown rabbit meat for dinner.  The last time we had this meal was in the summer and I didn’t expect to be able to break it out again until next summer.  But since we just harvested the last of our rabbits for the year, I thought I would take this chance to marinate two of them, wrap them in bacon, and grill them up.  Yum! 

For those of you who don’t know, we raise meat rabbits on our little homestead.  We started two seasons ago and have averaged about 12 rabbits – or 35-40lbs of meat – per season each of those years.  We’ve had a lot of learning experiences over this period and hope to be able to yield even more next year.  For example, a fun fact…I learned that a female rabbit actually has two uteruses (or uteri?) and…get this…she can be pregnant with a full kit (which usually yields about 6-8 baby bunnies) and then get pregnant AGAIN – as in AT THE SAME TIME – using the second uterus!  Crazy!  Talk about a Super Mom!  So it’s true what they say about “reproducing like rabbits”.  These things are nuts.  We have never made use of this back-up uterus because, first of all, it seems a little bit cruel and, also, we’re working on getting good at single uterus production first.  One thing at a time, please.  Even so, the same Mama rabbit can get pregnant, deliver the bunnies, and then go through the whole process again in the same season and all of the bunnies will still be full grown by harvest time in the fall.  So, we could potentially get 12 rabbits or more from each of our two female rabbits in a season.  Like I said, we’re working our way up to this…hopefully next year.  We currently have one male and two female rabbits and these are considered our breeding rabbits.  We keep these around from year to year.  We breed them in the very early spring to try and time the delivery around mid-to-late April when the temperatures are starting to warm up.  The mommies are pregnant for 30-31 days.  When the bunnies are born, their eyes are closed and they don’t have much fur to speak of so they just sort of huddle together in a big clump in the nesting box for a week or so.  In the beginning, they nurse from their mother.  Eventually, they will start to eat on their own and grow like crazy.  In just 14-16 weeks, they will be full grown and ready to harvest.  (You can continue to keep and feed them after this point and they will gain a little more weight but will also consume a lot more feed at a lower conversion ratio.)  Since we raise meat rabbits, their full grown weight will be around 5-7lbs at harvest time and will yield about 2-4lbs of meat each.  Our biggest rabbit was around 5lbs dressed, but that was an 18-month old male who we thought was a female and bit Joe’s finger when he tried to separate it from another male, earning it a one-way ticket to the freezer!

Here are some other fun facts (or “learning experiences”, as we like to call them) that came to light during our first two seasons of breeding and raising rabbits for meat:

1. You should carefully monitor and limit the amount of breeding action, if you will, that a male rabbit experiences in a single day. Case in point…our very first attempt at breeding involved giving one of our Daddy rabbits a chance to spend some time with each of the Mama rabbits in a homemade mobile pen out in the yard.  Keep in mind that rabbits don’t care much for wooing and flowers and chocolates and making a girl feel special.  They just get right down to business and go at it over and over again for as long as you will let it continue.  So after many rounds of this breeding procedure that we came up with, we put the rabbits back into their separated sections of the main rabbit hutch.  Later that same night, the Daddy rabbit had a heart attack and died.  Whoops!  A little too much action for the big guy!  Lesson learned. 
2. It is REALLY difficult to tell male and female rabbits apart. As young bunnies, it is nearly impossible.  But even after being full grown, it is still really hard to tell one from the other.  We had one case where we thought we had the male and female rabbits separated into their respective factions only to find that one of the “Daddy” rabbits turned up pregnant!  So either we got a really special rabbit or we messed up the sexing. 
3. Rabbits can have a false pregnancy where they put on weight and pull out their fur to make a nest, just like they would if they were actually pregnant. But, alas, no bunnies will appear. 
4. It’s not good to deliver babies in January, but rabbits don’t know that and will mate if you put them in the same cage in the greenhouse when trying to protect them from a -15°F polar vortex.
5. As mentioned above, it is hard to tell male rabbits from female rabbits, and when you get that wrong and try to mate boy rabbits with other boy rabbits, they play what looks like a funny game of chase the tail, but really they are trying to castrate each other.  Yikes! They also bite really hard when you try to break them up (drawing blood through a leather glove).  And once you do break them up, they hold a grudge and will rip through wire mesh to get to their new nemesis.  Boys!  They cause such trouble!
6. Their manure is like brown gold…full of nutrients and does not require any composting prior to adding to garden beds (unlike chicken manure, which is too “hot” with nitrogen to be directly added and requires “resting” prior to using as a fertilizer).  Also, their manure is apparently like candies to dogs…we are pretty sure this made up our dog’s primary diet for most of the summer.  Yuck.

So there…I hope I just told you all that you wanted (or didn’t even know that you wanted) to know about raising meat rabbits!  And, if you ever find yourself with some rabbit meat, here is our favorite way to prepare it…

AuthorMaria

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P.S…you can find excellent instructions on how to cut up a rabbit here, if you find yourself in such a situation…

http://honest-food.net/2010/05/19/how-to-cut-up-a-rabbit/