Quick Hit: The last rabbit kill.

Forgot to get the photos for today, so instead I'm just going to do a quick post, after all, this particular post doesn't really need any new photos. Last night I did the last butchering of rabbits that's going to take place here on the homestead. It was a killing that needed to happen, but I still am glad that it's the last one unless I'm going to be teaching people.

Herbie was the last rabbit on the homestead because he wasn't a rabbit we could let move on to another home. We'd tried to give him almost 6 months to recover from the back leg problems he was having, but he never did recover. It seems he may have injured his spine while playing and jumping around in the hutch, and just never was able to move properly after. It's a thing I've been putting off hoping he'd magically get better and we'd be able to pass him on, but it just wasn't happening.

Physically, skill wise, it was one of the easier killings I've done. Both of us were calm, and the physical process went perfectly. On an emotional level, it just confirmed that we made the right choice not to do rabbits anymore even if we were going to be able to stay in the homestead. The question now is, how do I continue to eat ethical meat, and stay healthy? Mostly, by eating less meat, and only buying from ethical sources.

But to be honest while we're in the process of selling the house and under financial duress, we're probably going to have to compromise and just eat what we can afford, while eating as little meat as we practically can.

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Greening, and resorting to Roundup.

Well, being sick or exhausted for a couple weeks we've missed the easy time to really do ground clearing, now we have a thoroughly greened area. We went from just go yank it up to, I suggest power tools. Given that this slope is a if we have time area, not a focus area I have a sneaking suspicion it isn't going to be gotten to this summer. Ahh well. That said, none of what's over there is something that has to die right now, the only weed we have around that needed to die right now was in our front garden bed, so we did something about it.

Wandering animals, and ethics vs feelings.

It's another rainy day with no great photos to share, and fortunately I've been thinking about ethics again. Before I get there though, we have a couple things going on around the homestead. First the turkey is missing this morning, and there's no exploded poof of feathers. I suspect she's going looking for a tom that will give her what she wants since I'm clearly not doing it for her. I hope she comes home soon, and we'll keep you updated. The second thing is, somehow in the weather changes the hutch with Dawn and her daughter ended up open. On the big up side, when I walked up and picked dawn's daughter up, she didn't run anywhere but back to the hutch and let me put her back in. The benefits of having well socialized rabbits. I guess being outside in the rain wasn't as much fun as she thought. Below the cut, let's get on to some thinking.

Sometimes you have to eat the pork chop.

Today we're going to talk about a topic that we aren't necessarily fond of, and that's the reality of food when you leave your home. The quote in the title comes from The Compassionate Carnivore by Catherine Friend. To paraphrase a chapter in her book, sometimes you can't eat perfectly, and you just have to eat the (deep fried) pork chop. If you want a good read, that's a book well worth it. It was one of the books that have informed the basis of our philosophy. I want to discuss that a bit today since it became a focus for the Lady of the House and I as we traveled to a convention to sell her art.

At home it's relatively easy for us to talk about eating well. We have a yard full of greens to eat, not all of which we planted or even have to work for. We've built our lives at home around trying to eat well, and while we aren't perfect we do well. When you leave the house though things HAVE to change. Restaurants aren't geared around ethical eating, or even healthy eating most of the time. Some areas are worse than others of course, but even in good areas most food in our price range isn't ethical food, and if we're out with friends at a restaurant, or at their house we aren't going to examine every aspect of our meal, demand ethically raised and cared for food, or not eat.Whether it's because we need to eat, or we want to not be anti-social, or not offend our friends when they want to feed us. Sometimes we just have to eat what's in front of us. That's exacerbated when traveling outside of our "home range" as we did last weekend.

When traveling one can only bring so much food with you on a practical level, and what you bring has to be non perishable. That means preserved most of the time. We brought a fair amount of good food with us, and tried as much as possible to eat it, we even did fairly well. That said we also ended up eating fast food 4 times over the course of 4 days. In all 4 of the cases it came down to we'd either been working, or traveling all day long, and just needed some hot food. I'm going to be honest, I didn't even think about food ethics for 3 of them, I just needed food, and I needed it now so I didn't fall asleep while driving. So where does that leave us, given that we try to live better than that? The big thing in my mind is, making small changes in our every day lives matter more than occasional lapses. It's part of our philosophy of, small changes are better than no change. Obviously, the better we can do, the happier we'll be with ourselves, but if we're going to maintain this dual life, sometimes, we'll just have to eat the pork chop.

More rainy day thoughts: Why we started, how we will continue.

Another day of rain, this time it's a significant down pour. As we call it in this area a Noreaster, in Texas we'd call it a gullywasher. It's not the best sort of weather for a 45 - 50 degree day, but it'll help the water level for the area which is low for a number of the reservoirs. The chickens aren't getting time out wandering and free ranging because I don't want the high winds that have come with it blowing them around the yard and getting them injured or lost, unable to find their way back to get dry and warm. They objected strongly as I left this morning for work, I could even hear their objections in the car.

Since without photos there isn't much to talk about homestead side other than that the Lady of the House still hasn't given birth to the Critter, and we're going to be doing another work day Saturday, I'm going to have another day of thoughts on Homesteading.

Visiting Wheel-View Farm

The Lady of the House and I went to Wheel-View Farm for their open house day, and wanted to share some photos and thoughts about their farm and overall operation. Their site has a lot of good information including about the environmental benefits of grass fed beef farming. They also have a lot of other photos, all of the ones we have up for this post are our own photos taken by the Lady of the House when we visited. I think if you just want a summary it is the idyllic pastoral farm that one imagines, but rarely actually existed if it ever did.

Discussion: Whole Foods rabbit care standards.

I could subtitle this, rabbit production done right on an institutional scale, but out of reach for small operations. Before I get to the rest of this post which is going to be a bit long probably, I want to note that I'm not a fan of a 40 degree morning mid August.

There has been a lot of uproar from some pet rabbit groups about the inclusion of rabbit meat for sale at Whole Foods Market in some places. Right now it is a non universal program based on the local availability of rabbit to those stores. http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/department/article/rabbit One of the things you can note in that link is a link to their animal welfare standards. If you haven't clicked through to read it here.

I read through it, and it isn't overly legalese in its presentation. It is in fact a clear document stating the requirements for keeping rabbits for sale to Whole Foods. I'm going to start with the ethical side of the keeping of the animals, and move on to the difficulties to the farm after I have covered the pure ethics and animal welfare side. I'm going to go through in some detail below the cut.

Thoughts on the influence of my SciFi love on homesteading.

Well, today is a day of forgetting things, but fortunately only non vital things. For purposes of the blog the
most important thing I've forgotten is to take photos. Not by far the Only thing of course as I left the chickens water outside over night which is only non vital because we have running hot water, and that deals with frozen water right quick. I'm not sure if it's the time of year and the changed light that's made me a bit less attentive than I should be, or simply the stress level from non homesteading things. For yesterday I can actually blame creaming the back of my head on a pallet shelf at work so hard I saw double for part of the day Tuesday, this morning was just me screwing up. But, since I don't have new photos to talk about, I'm just going to talk about my thoughts and some consideration I've been giving lately. Oh, and include some of the better photos from the past of the blog. Sorry about the slightly rambling nature of the post below, but if you have the time to read I'd love to hear responses.

Ag Gag and Glass Abattoirs.

Today we don't really have a whole lot to talk about since I went through just about everything that happened over the weekend on Tuesday. Now that doesn't mean that there isn't anything to talk about, just that it isn't the current activities on the homestead. Instead, I'm going to talk about my opinion on Ag Gag laws and my feelings on the distance between people and their food.

Chocolate--Edible Happiness at What Price?

Chocolate--Edible Happiness at What Price?

Chocolate and Valentine’s day go hand in hand, whether you receive it from a lover or are raiding the bargain bin on February 15th.  Being that our most popular post is last year’s The Costs of a Rose where we destroyed many people’s love of giving flowers, this year we’re gonna follow tradition and focus on the other common token of love: chocolate.

After last year's post I would have thought these would be better than real roses...

Chicken coop design process Pt. 1

As we sit through winter and prepare for the arrival of spring, and the changes that will bring. The Lady of the House has her focus settled on the garden, and I am trying to have a design for the chicken coop nailed down as much as possible before mud season begins. Below is my first draft considerations for the requirements for the coop, with information that is informing this and my next steps of the design process.

Discussion: Is Ethics a Luxury?

To most people the answer is obviously no, ethics isn't a luxury. Ethical behavior is what keeps humanity from ripping itself to pieces. But really, beyond the knee jerk reactions let's look at it for real. For this post I'm going to confine it to, are ethical choices about food a luxury?

First Butchering Done

Yesterday we did our first butchering, and over all it went very well. We have one of the first two litters we are holding aside for potential breeding to bring Sunny's strengths into our American Blue lines if we can. As you can see Above he is still in the growing out hutch, and seems to be enjoying being able to eat without fighting off everyone else.

There are no photos of the process below the cut but there will be detail about the killing and butchering process.

Ups and Downs

 Dawn is doing fairly well in the wake of giving birth to her second litter. She has been a little nervous and jumpy lately, but has been a good mother to her 5 babies. The main signs of her nervousness is trying to dig at the cage and occasionally chewing on the wire. I've been considering whether it might be good to shift her to the growing out hutch when butchering happens on Wednesday.






Dawn's second litter is still in the huddle in small balls in their nesting box. In this case, a literal nesting box. They are doing quite well for being at that age, and are very very energetic. I'm not sure how much of that is the warmth allowing them to use more of their food to move around rather than just live, how much of it is them, and how much of it is Dawn being a more experienced mother. In any case, they are all over the place. I look forward to seeing how fast they grow.

Preparations For Litter 2, and Reality Reminder

Dawn has begun nest building preparations for her second litter as of this morning. When the Lady of the House went to put hay in, Dawn was so eager for it she was taking hay from the Lady of the House's arms. We were a bit surprised by this turn of events needless to say, given that this is day 24 of her pregnancy, and we wouldn't be expecting kits for 4 more days.

General Update

Well, looks like I forgot today was Thursday. I have no new photos for you today, and nothing at all even vaguely planned too write. So instead I'll do a quick run down of where we are and our plans for the near future.

Learning Experiences, and Growing Out Hutches

We've had a couple of learning experiences over the last two days. Fortunately none of them have been devastating like some of our earlier learning experiences. As you can see in this photo our driveway is still here, and with minimal damage. We had some sudden and very hard rain on Tuesday night. Fortunately the lady of the house managed to get home in time to put down 2x4s angled towards the edges of the driveway every 30 - 40 feet or so to slow the water down and prevent major erosion.

How to Butcher Our Rabbits

Even now, before we get our breeding rabbits we had a big question we have to answer before we even decided to finalize our decision to get rabbits. What about butchering them. Given our requirement for ourselves that our raising methods be humane, we also require of ourselves that we give a humane death to our rabbits. To some this may seem like a strange statement, after all, we are killing them for meat. That said, there are better and worse ways to kill an animal. Think of it this way, why do we euthanize our dogs and cats instead of letting them die at home of cancer, or cluster seizures? It's less painful and frightening to them. Ok, so why bring them to a vet which is stressful for them instead of shooting them at home? My answer to that is two fold, one, I don't want to kill my pets if I can avoid it, and two, an injection of lethal doses of anesthetic or other method isn't going to miss a vital organ and leave a screaming animal in pain. So, given that to have a meat operation we would have to kill animals, we went to our favorite activity, research.

Rabbits: Space Part 2

Last Thursday we discussed factory and pet home suggestions for raising rabbits, and some complications for what we were going for. Today I am going to be writing about pasture raising, and colony raising and concluding with what we want to do, and why.

Pasture Raising
Pasture raising a rabbit is not like pasture raising a cow, it isn't out of a cage wandering in a field and eating grass. It is in a movable pen called an Ark. I don't know who pioneered this first, but the one who one most often hears about with it is Joe Salitin of Polyface Farm. His operation is one of the big ones that we drew inspiration from, especially involving the rabbits and chickens sharing space in one way or another. Here you see the movable pens that his rabbits forage in and their Raken   as well as some information on that.

Decision Making On Rabbits: Floor Space

Obviously, given the subtitle of the blog, we decided in the end that rabbits were indeed a good idea for us to raise. The question that really matters for everyone else is why, and how did we come to that conclusion? As with every other decision we have made so far, it was based on a fair amount of research, and a lot of things are still evolving for us. Our base considerations were cost, heartiness, care requirements, ethics, and finally, can we handle killing rabbits for meat? In this post I'm going to discuss how much space each rabbit needs.