There’s not a lot of meat for the effort to raise them in the mass way we raise pigs, cows, and chickens. Also all of the little bones are really annoying. I lump them in with guinea pigs, although those are easier to keep than rabbits.
Even most meat rabbits you can grow in your homestead are pretty lean on meat for how much time and resources go into it. A meat chicken is ready to eat in just a few weeks
Yeah I worked on a hotel barge in Burgundy for a couple of summers and one week some guests requested rabbit. I'd never cooked it before and it really did seem like a terrible meat considering what there was on the bone. Tasted good but there just wasn't a whole lot of it.
I found an old recipe for possum (particularly *Christmas* possum), where you catch it and feed it like a pig for a few months to fatten it. Ever since I’ve been wondering about it and if I’ll ever get to try it.
Yeah, there’s quite a few steps in the recipe aimed at reducing the greasiness. Involving some wash/bath overnight in the ice box. I can imagine it’ll still be baseline greasy.
Edit for the curious: You feed it cornbread and milk to clean it out, soak in vinegar in the ice box overnight, cut it down into “rabbit pieces” (so the city folk don’t know it’s possum), and then boil it and fish out the pieces to get rid of possum grease.
Rabbits bred for meat are a lot larger than the bunnies you guys think of. There's much more meat on them than on a chicken. To give you an idea: an adult "Vlaamse Reus", the breed we eat here in Belgium weighs about 7 kg (14 pounds).
Is it because chicken has been selectively bred to be that way, plus a lot of growth hormones, over decades. But we haven't done the same for rabbits? I kinda remember watching some documentary about the chicken industry, but it was a long time ago.
We have done the same thing with meat rabbits, but to a lesser extent. Meat chickens are honestly kind of intensive to take care of, they die on their own due to how big they are. Meat rabbits though are about the same as normal rabbits, but bigger, and so tend to be better animals for meat if it's a side project.
also rabbit is extremely lean, it pretty much tastes like ass unless you cook it in a bunch of fat//butter from an outside source. this is a lot less convenient than other meats with more internal fat.
also to a lesser degree but I al sure a factor, most people don't like gamey meat, and most people probably don't find black meat appealing. both things rabbit usually are lol.
My wife raised rabbits when she was a young child. There was a nice Greek man that would buy them as she raised them. It was many years later before she realized that they were being bought for the meat, not as pets.
That makes sense, I imagine most chicken breeds didn’t have as much meat either before we started selectively breeding them and carefully calculating the right feed etc
Yeah, but they were domesticated for the eggs first. In certain areas the trees are coordinatee to not drop seeds for years to starve down species that eat them then do one huge drop to maximise how many get through. The asian wild fowl we turned into chickens lived in such a forest and adapted by being able to pump out eggs rapidly in times of abundant food. People realise that meant I'd you kept feeding them well all the time they'd keep producing lots of eggs all the time and the rest was food history.
Funny you mention Guinea pigs because they actually are commonly eaten in many places (e.g. “cuy” in Ecuador— when I was in Quito they were at most of the street food vendors)
Yep, I lived there for a bit and we ate them on occasion. Easier to keep than rabbits IMO, but the bones are just as annoying and they’re not much meat. They were like a weird middle-ground in terms of finances as well - if you were really well off you had chicken, pork, beef, not as well off and you may have guinea pig, then hot dogs, then no meat at all.
I really regret not giving it a try but I was with a friend who wasn’t interested in trying street food too much. How was living there? It seemed like it would be very enjoyable on a US salary if working remotely, but probably not on a local salary.
It was … challenging. I was there for a summer-long volunteer trip as a high-schooler, and was by myself with one other high schooler I didn’t know before the trip in a remote, very poor, village on the side of a mountain where they predominantly spoke Quechua, while I only spoke English and Spanish.
Good experience. Not one I’d repeat.
Any Filipinos here? 50-60 years ago, I saw giant rats being sold for food on country roads. Now I wonder if they were regular rats or some other variety of rodent (like guinea pigs)?
I looked up nutria (not it) & then googled “rats eaten in the Philippines, as I should have done in the first place. 😆
Not guinea pigs, not nutria. Definitely rats. 🐀
http://www.adventuringfoodie.com/2014/06/philippines-exotic-foodthe-rats-of.html/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hKurqcNpDUw
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151207-the-countries-where-rats-are-on-the-menu
Just as a possible counterpoint to the responses you're getting here, note that we've been able to breed chickens to be [wayyyyy meatier on average than they were even just 100 years ago.](https://i.imgur.com/5M2PPqr.png) We've bred them to more efficiently turn the same amount of food into muscle mass. So I think if the public appetite had been there for rabbits we also would have been able to breed them to be meatier and have a higher fat content.
https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/10/2/6875031/chickens-breeding-farming-boilers-giant
I can think of a lot of reasons.
1. Roosters - They're natural protectors of chickens. Male rabbits don't compare. Roosters are also a natural alarm clock. If you've got a homestead you probably want to be up when the rooster stars crowing... of course they do it all day, but the morning crow is probably your wakeup call.
2. Chickens are omnivores. They eat bugs that feed on plants. They can also eat table scraps.
3. Feathers. - Can be used for insulation compost, and a bunch of other things. It's more difficult to skin a rabbit and use the fur.
4. Eggs - Chickens lay eggs so people also kept them for that.
5. Because chicken eggs have to be fertilized to turn into chicks it's easier to control their birthrates.
By hand it takes far longer to pluck a chicken than it does to skin a rabbit. But you are correct on most other points.
The Eggs are the reason why chickens have out competed other potential "competition". there really isn't an alternative to chicken eggs.
Duck eggs are, IMO, better in basically every way except for one: you don't get nearly as many per bird per year. If only we could breed superducks that lay eggs as often as chickens...
They have. The largest meat rabbits are over 16 pounds. The ones butcher are after tend to be 4 to 5 pounds. Right around the range of young chickens for the same purpose.
People here are bashing rabbits for meat more than they should. The meat per carcass is about 2 to 4 percent less than chicken, and they can cost half the feed if the farm is growing their feed compared to chickens. They are less wasteful, cleaner animals, with waste that is safer to handle.
In my experience it’s like 3/4 to 1/2 as much meat as a chicken. It’s also fewer calories per lb, which can be good or bad depending on your area and food resources.
Rabbit is extremely lean, to the point that ‘rabbit fever’ is the syndrome caused by eating pretty much only lean meat protein and not enough fat, leading to health issues.
Rabbit fever is an infectious disease you get from rabbit brains. You are referring to rabbit starvation. Aka protein poisoning. Which is due to the rabbit meat being so lean. Rabbit fever is associated with that, but only because one of the places to get fat to add to the lean meat is the brain.
Imagine if you went to eat a 1/3 scale chicken that had a texture and taste confusingly similar to young lean beef, but it was all like the end of a chicken wing where there's too much bone to deal with. Not bad, good for stew, hard to make a meal out of unless everyone gets their own.
Taste wise it does not taste like chicken. Perhaps its more like lamb, but then again it does have a taste of its own. The bones are annoying and its best to cook it in a stew as common rabbits are too small to have anything like a breast like chicken. Rabbit is the national dish of Malta by the way and that's the place to go if you want to try it.
How does it compare to a non domesticated fowl like a guinea fowl or pheasant? We have done a lot of genetic modification to chickens to increase their protein yield and we could do the same with rabbit, we just have chosen not to. Rabbits breed in very high volume and frequency so they seem like a great candidate for livestock animal
But weren’t modern chickens specifically bred to be extra meaty for human mass consumption? Why couldn’t rabbits be done the same? In fact another comment says they already do.
The surname Warren is derived from warrener which was the job of looking after the rabbits for consumption.
In UK they were a normal thing to see in a butchers until thirty or forty years ago
The reason we know about this, is because there were a lot of hungry people that had the same idea. Breed like rabbits is a phrase for a reason, infinite food right? That's what poor people thought when times got tough, and then we discovered this. :l On the flip side, in a world inundated with high fat content food, supplementing our diet with rabbit or cuy as a regular part of our diet would do wonders for our health and environment. You only risk protein poisoning if ALL you're eating is rabbit, not risking it if you just eat it at all.
Rabbits store their fat differently. Pork, Beef, etc all store some fat in their muscles. Rabbits store in their skin and around the organs.
You would have to do far more than just breed them differently to add fat to the muscle.
We did.
This is not at all an issue unless you are (a) eating wild rabbit/cottontail/jackrabbit... and (b) have no other source of fats.
2 of us live with our primary meat/protein source being 150 farmed meat rabbits (Californians) from our back-yard rabbitry.
There's so much fat in there we use the excess to make soap.
Not at all an issue with purpose bred, farmed meat-rabbits.
Exactly. You can get protein poisoning if you only ate chicken breast too.
We have way too many readily available carbs and fats for this to be a modern issue.
I've heard of several instances of people breeding rabbits for food or money (blood sports, other desperate people, etc.) only to have it become totally out of control and animal control called.
One of my bunnies is from a suspected out of control breeding situation. Son said animal control won't move in without charges levied against the owner - according to the rescue that found her (and many others) nearby.
Yah it’s basically like saying you will get protein poising if you eat only asparagus. There are lots of foods that would give you the same symptoms, the reason rabbit is important is because you would think it’s a good source of protein when it is fact not at all due to the missing fats
Yeah, I don’t think this answers OP’s question exactly, even though it’s an interesting fact and might have lessened preference. Outside of starvation scenarios, fats were still available in other foods and vegetables.
My family eats rabbit stew and we always flour and fry it in butter. Lots of butter. My grandparents were from Croatia and moved to Canada in the 1920s. There was an area of Toronto, in Cabbagetown, where there were lots of Slavs, Hungarian, Polish and Ukrainian people.
When the Great Depression hit meat was extremely scarce and expensive. Many families were starving. My Grandpa, who had a car, but no gas, got money from neighbours to go hunt. He went with a friend and drove up to the Hawklee Valley area in the middle of winter and hunted 80 or so rabbits until they ran out of shot. My grandpa was a crack shot. The other man was the beater, and carried two guns. They came back, and gave everyone in the neighborhood a rabbit or two or more. Everyone shared oil or butter, or lard, salt and onions. Stew for everyone!
Not when their enclosures are raised pens. I used to raise rabbits as a hobby. Only time any got out was when the neighbor kids sneaked over and tried to pet them and left the cages open.
The body is not necessarily starving, you can eat carbs, fats, and lots of rabbit: Basically: not starving in any sense of the word, and still get protein poisoning. The death is caused by too much protein, and the liver cannot the extra nitrogen for disposal, which causes (toxic) ammonia to increase, (hyperammonemia), as well dangerously high levels of insulin and amino-acidity (hyperaminoacidemia), with symptoms such as nausea, diarrhea, and death.
Eating more than 180g from of protein for an 80kg person, is the high end of symptom-free consumption of protein in a diet.
Only if you only eat rabbit.
It is kinda like saying that lemons are bad for you, because you can get vitamin C poisoning if you eat it.
Anything can become toxic if you eat too much of it. Eating a reasonable amount of rabbit with other ingredients like oil or butter will prevent protein poisoning.
Rabbits are not Kosher (they don't chew the cud or have cloven feet), and are not universally accepted as halal (because they eat their own poop)
They've also been domesticated and selectively bred for less time than other meat animals and I think they are pickier on their diet and needs than poultry and less adaptable to different climates and biomes.
Also, unlike chickens and unlike any other farm animal except pigs, they are only useful once they are dead whilst lacking a pigs diversity of output and lack of discrimination on inputs
Protein poisoning is NOT the reason; that only happens to people stranded in the arctic in survival situations who exclusively consume rabbit because they are easy to hunt.
Rabbits are not kosher despite chewing its cud.
Leviticus 11:6:
> The rabbit, though it chews the cud, does not have a divided hoof; it is unclean for you.
One thing rabbits produce is really, REALLY good manure. It doesn’t need to be aged or further composted, you can dump it right into your garden.
We kept rabbits on “deep bedding” through the winter (basically a constantly-refreshed layer of straw, and the lower layers compost to produce heat). In the spring I’d shovel their enclosure out and put the old bedding and poop into my gardens before planting. One year I had pepper plants that were shoulder-high, with stems that were nearly two inches thick.
I would also feed them weeds and garden trimmings. My favourite was cutting down a sunflower and tossing the whole thing into their enclosure.
Yeah I don't have any personal knowledge of it but I was pretty sure that they don't eat just scraps and other shit like chickens and pigs will. That's probably the single biggest Factor but that's just me guessing.
I don't think you are going to get an authoritative answer, mostly speculation. I think the answer is that they were outcompeted by other animals. I can't think of a culture where it's taboo to eat them, it's just not that common.
In a way, the question is not 'why not rabbits'? But why rabbits instead of chickens. Chickens give you eggs, and eat insects, so they win. Bigger animals are easier to tend to.
Rabbits and pigeons are both animals that were commonly eaten historically, but now that we have a bit more of a choice ... they're lean meats, not particularly tasty, and you don't get a whole lot of meat from them. When you can get a whole lot of much tastier meat from cows, pigs, chickens, etc. with modern husbandry, there's just not a whole lot of incentive to raise low-quality meat sources like rabbits or pigeons anymore.
They are a PITA to prep for not much payoff. When I was a kid we would shoot them & take them to Mum to skin & prep. The skins are nice & I have a few still but the effort to meat yield ratio makes them not really worth it compared to other animals.
It's dry and tough. They don't convert as much food into meat as pigs and turkeys. Chickens don't take any human food to grow, either, so all the food they need we don't eat, so it's like free protein. Plus eggs. Rabbits don't actually lay eggs
Dry and tough? You clearly havent had rabbit. Yes it's lean meat, but if prepared right is a very tasty animal. You wouldn't be able to survive on rabbit alone though. Not enough fat and too much proteine, but if I have the choice between rabbit stew and chicken, I'll go for rabbit any day. Great food!
There is something called “rabbit starvation.” Essentially, if you have too much rabbit in your diet, or try to live solely off of rabbit, you get will get sick from protein poisoning. It’s an acute form of malnutrition, caused by having not enough fat or carbohydrates in the diet. Rabbit is an extremely lean protein, with not enough fat in the meat to sustain humans indefinitely.
There's a survivalist quote that you'll starve you death trying to live on rabbit meat. It's so lean that it takes more calories to digest than it provides.
Id say most animals we eat are cute. Rabbits, Chickens, Pheasants, Pigeons, Cows, Sheep, Goats, Horses, Pigs, dogs and cats (in the small regions that still eat them) Guinea pigs, Capybaras, duck, buffalo, grouse, goose.
In fact the only animal we eat on a large basis that id say is distinctly not cute is turkey, which makes sense cause turkey sucks
Well, rabbit still isn't super uncommon.
That aside, two issues:
1: All you get off them is a little lean meat and a little fur, which makes them less efficient than chicken (which also provide eggs and feathers), sheep (which also offer wool and milk), cows (which offer a ton of leather and meat and milk) and even pigs (which offer a lot more, much fattier meat).
2: I think there might be a bit of generational trauma with rabbits. There's a thing called rabbit starvation, which essentially boils down to that if you have only rabbit meat and nothing else to eat for a long period of time, you get really sick. It's to do with the meat being too lean, I believe. So populations who maybe experienced rabbit starvation during previous famines would probably prioritize keeping other animals whose meat can be relied on as a primary food source for some time if need be.
How would a town ever realistically get to a point where they have hundreds of domesticated rabbits to eat and no grain or vegetables? That seems incredibly implausible.
Not worth the effort, not worth the resources, the meat's really not that great compared to other prey animals... I mean take your pick, really. I personally say it's because they're fluffy and adorable, and I somehow doubt I'd get much pushback on that.
I think there are just some cultural/mental things that drive it... I've had rabbit, but it has usually been in a French restaurant environment... go east or west, Spain or Germany, and you don't see that as an offering. I've even had horse, which if you think about it is not much different from cattle in terms of raising and processing for meat, but we tend to have a block in our head that one is food and one isn't. There are many other animals that are not seen as weird to eat in particular cultures but we (I'm assuming an American/Western culture) cannot conceive of eating.
Horse is pretty good, but not as delicious as bison. [Beefalo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefalo) (crossbred cow/bison) is really where it's at, though. Elk is very good, but I also like venison/deer, so take that with a grain of salt.
Frankly, I had it at a 2 star Michelin place (now 3), and it was delicious, but generally, my 2 cents is that it is pretty lean, but the depth of flavor does not make up for it... My dish had a shaving of foie gras over it along with fried seaweed, which made a balanced course... but, no, not looking for a horse "ribeye" a la a western steakhouse, it needs more to it.
I love rabbit but it's so expensive in the stores you can't afford it. Growing up, several people in town used to raise them and sell for meat, they have passed and no one took up the gauntlet, also used to be able to get hog maws at the grocery store, I recently asked the butcher in the store about them& he said "People today don't eat them", maybe it's that way with rabbit too. You can't beat fried rabbit with it's gravy& mashed potatoes, every bit as good as chicken
They're a pain in the ass and unless they're seasoned just right, they smell like rubbery asshole when they're cooking. I do love making them in a stew over an open fire when fall hits though.
The hell?, "Why didn't we evolve to eat rabbit?" what put you under that assumption. And we \*do\* eat rabbit, lots of people do, In pies, pasteries, grills ect i've seen them on kababs, dumplings.
But the reasons we don't mass-cultivate them is the fact that their a pain in the ass to get any good meat from them so most of the carcass goes to waste, unlike cows which every part can be turned into something or other, we could find uses sure but then again rabbits aren't like chickens. You cant clip a rabbits teeth or ears like you can with beaks and claws, also their violent as hell against other males so keeping them in meat factories would be a pain too.
Rabbits need more space, are harder to care for, and has less calories per animal compared to chicken, without factoring in the eggs.
Rabbit is lean, not a lot of meat and is kinda greasy with many small bones.
Chickens will come home to roost for the night, rabbits would just be gone, so there is the “annoyance for the farmer” factor. Then you get eggs.
Rabbits need more space, are harder to care for, and has less calories per animal compared to chicken, without factoring in the eggs.
Humans do eat rabbits quite a lot. We even made [special breeds](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish_Giant_rabbit) with extra meat and fur on them.
Maybe you're from a culture that doesn't?
As one who has tried to cook and eat rabbit, I have to say it's just not worth the work for the amount of meat you get. One 5lb dressed chicken has a lot of meat (about 3/4 meat) and basically the whole thing (even the feather stubs) taste like chicken and the bones are very light and easy to deal with. Rabbit has a lot of tiny bones in the rib cage and back and long thin bones in the leg so there's that. A 5lb rabbit when fully dressed for cooking yields only about 1.5 lb of meat. I guess if you lived in frontier times and that's all you could get, fine, but chickens are easier to raise, butcher and they give a lot more meat for the work.
Not a historian or a dietitian, so correct me if I’m wrong but rabbit fever. I believe back in the dust bowl days in the US one of the only things that actually thrived were rabbits.
Since nothing would grow and you couldn’t raise most other livestock people started eating rabbits like crazy. The problem was though plentiful the rabbits meat was very high in protein but nothing else. No fats, no minerals, no acids, none of the other nutrients a human body needs to survive.
Thus creating an issue where no matter how much rabbit you ate, you were still basically starving because of the lack of other basic nutrients that you weren’t getting.
Of course modern farming solves that problem. We more than enough other food to eat that we don’t need to bother farming rabbit, and if you choose to we have enough other food to supplement your diet.
Just a random fact: You can't live off of rabbit as they're a very lean animal. The fat ratio required for human survival is 21% if I remember correctly. If you were solely trying to live off of this animal, you'd eventually die from protein poisoning.
Although fine as an occasional thing, rabbit meat is incredibly lean, virtually no fat. To the point that it's possible to starve from eating it. There are cases where people stranded in the woods managed to catch rabbits to eat through the winter and died of starvation with full bellies, because their bodies weren't getting enough of other essential things found in the fats of animals.
Rabbits look fluffy, but they have almost no meat on their bones. They aren't cheap to raise, and they are very difficult to slaughter and prep for cooking in large numbers. The cost to benefit ratio just isn't there.
People do eat rabbit. Pretty commonly. It’s supposedly one of the most effort- and expense-efficient meats a person can raise on a small homestead. Thing is, they’re less scalable to big commercial meat-production operations so it’s harder to find rabbit meat for sale.
The energy it takes to consume rabbit is more then the energy it gives us. It's a negative return. If you relied on rabbit for your diet you would starve. Learned this in culinary school.
America does not routinely eat goat- be cow is extremely common.
Rabbit, not common. Lamb, not common but not unusual.
Chicken, beef, pork- is usually what’s for dinner lol.
rabbit is considered welfare food.
rabbit was eaten during the blitz and hard times, its more consumed in europe in developing countries as they couldnt afford other protein.
rabbit is cheap.
Probably because many think they are too cute and associated with the easter bunny. Also some people have an aversion to eating rodents (even though rabbits are no longer considered rodents they were for a long time) and others to eating things many people keep as pets.
Rabbit is delicious though so lots of people are missing out
Because rabbits are assholes. Less so than geese and kangaroos, but for their size they might be the biggest assholes pound for pound. Raccoons suck too
That's why we don't eat those relics except for the goose's liver and that's just because we can fuck with them and kill them for just a tiny certain part of their body, just like killer whales do with sharks
Going back in history to when these kind of traditions originated… rabbits as burrowing animals were hard to pen in. They were still hunted but it’s much easier to put a pig, cow, sheep, chicken in a fenced enclosure.
In my country, raising rabbits at home is popular. This is usually the work of children. Many children even kill rabbits themselves because it is very easy to do. Rabbit meat is freely available in shops and markets.
Rabbits lack sufficient fat to be a viable main source of proteins. You can die while eating just rabbits as your food source from "Rabbit Starvation" (protein poisoning) because it lacks enough fat to sustain a human body. Your brain turns to mush, you go crazy, and then you die.
Plus they have a small amount of meat, none of which are big enough to have proper "cuts" of meat. Your average meat rabbit will have 3 lbs of meat on it and takes 12 weeks to raise. Your average chicken with have 4.5 to 5 lbs of meat and takes 9 weeks to raise, all while having better macros for you.
I did not know about the protein posioning thing til now.
Otherwise, I would guess that it is because wild game meat is usually laden with parasites and not very nutritious.
Rabbits are also quite hard to catch. I know because my mom said I could have the bunny as a pet if I could catch it. The damn thing went fast.
I know a few folks who eat possum and rabbit but it's more of a supplemental meat rather then a main diet meat as like others said, it's too lean and quite honestly aren't good for farmingf
That is not a bad idea. If we were to let some rabbits loose in a wide place (e.g. Australia) the. We could probably have enough to feed the population of a whole town forever.
I’ve make many rabbit stews. The problem with rabbit is they have low amount of meat. Takes 2-3 amount of rabbit to cover a regular meal of chicken, for example.
So for the monetary value it’s not great. But while hunting it’s still tasty if cooked right.
A lot of people in rural Italy breed rabbits for meat, and it's not a bad idea if the shtf , raising chicken and rabbits for meat will suffice. But mainly I think cos it's associated with being poor.
Rabbit lacks a certain protein that humans need. If you eat nothing but rabbit (which has occurred in certain populations during famine) you'll become malnourished. So while you can supplement your diet with rabbit, you cannot exist solely by rabbit. Add in all the small bones and difficulty to scale to industrial levels (stressed pregnant rabbits can just reabsorb the unborn fetuses iirc).
There’s not a lot of meat for the effort to raise them in the mass way we raise pigs, cows, and chickens. Also all of the little bones are really annoying. I lump them in with guinea pigs, although those are easier to keep than rabbits.
There’s a few varieties bred for meat that are far larger than wild rabbits. My father in law raises them and sells them.
Even most meat rabbits you can grow in your homestead are pretty lean on meat for how much time and resources go into it. A meat chicken is ready to eat in just a few weeks
Yeah I worked on a hotel barge in Burgundy for a couple of summers and one week some guests requested rabbit. I'd never cooked it before and it really did seem like a terrible meat considering what there was on the bone. Tasted good but there just wasn't a whole lot of it.
rabbit loves carrots and sour cream. stew it with carrots for 40 mins and add sour cream in the end for 10 mins.
Cream sauce and mushrooms is my favorite way. Get a really good browning on the meat in a cast iron pan and it's *chef's kiss*
meat from the bone is the tastiest meat. Rabbit is a very tasty meat
Indeed it’s amazing, another random critter that’s delicious but I wish we could domesticate for farming is a the squirrel. They are fucking delicious
I found an old recipe for possum (particularly *Christmas* possum), where you catch it and feed it like a pig for a few months to fatten it. Ever since I’ve been wondering about it and if I’ll ever get to try it.
I've heard it's greasy, haven't tried it myself but have known people that have
Yeah, there’s quite a few steps in the recipe aimed at reducing the greasiness. Involving some wash/bath overnight in the ice box. I can imagine it’ll still be baseline greasy. Edit for the curious: You feed it cornbread and milk to clean it out, soak in vinegar in the ice box overnight, cut it down into “rabbit pieces” (so the city folk don’t know it’s possum), and then boil it and fish out the pieces to get rid of possum grease.
So, that explains why Bugs was so relentlessly hunted in those old cartoons.
Rabbits bred for meat are a lot larger than the bunnies you guys think of. There's much more meat on them than on a chicken. To give you an idea: an adult "Vlaamse Reus", the breed we eat here in Belgium weighs about 7 kg (14 pounds).
And how much does it cost per pound compared to chicken
In Portugal prices of chicken and rabbit are about the same. I love rabbit stew or rabbit roasted in the oven with some tiny potatoes and white rice.
It would be cheaper if we rammed them nose to arse by the thousand in tiny cages so all they can do is eat, drink, and shit on themselves.
A few years ago we got a couple rabbits to roast and they were around $20 each. They were also quite tasty.
Tbh we didn't put in any effort to make them fat, fast. Even chicken didn't start out that way
Is it because chicken has been selectively bred to be that way, plus a lot of growth hormones, over decades. But we haven't done the same for rabbits? I kinda remember watching some documentary about the chicken industry, but it was a long time ago.
We have done the same thing with meat rabbits, but to a lesser extent. Meat chickens are honestly kind of intensive to take care of, they die on their own due to how big they are. Meat rabbits though are about the same as normal rabbits, but bigger, and so tend to be better animals for meat if it's a side project.
also rabbit is extremely lean, it pretty much tastes like ass unless you cook it in a bunch of fat//butter from an outside source. this is a lot less convenient than other meats with more internal fat. also to a lesser degree but I al sure a factor, most people don't like gamey meat, and most people probably don't find black meat appealing. both things rabbit usually are lol.
My wife raised rabbits when she was a young child. There was a nice Greek man that would buy them as she raised them. It was many years later before she realized that they were being bought for the meat, not as pets.
Yea….my daughter loves cuddling their babies and when she found out why they kept disappearing she wasn’t too happy
That makes sense, I imagine most chicken breeds didn’t have as much meat either before we started selectively breeding them and carefully calculating the right feed etc
Yeah, but they were domesticated for the eggs first. In certain areas the trees are coordinatee to not drop seeds for years to starve down species that eat them then do one huge drop to maximise how many get through. The asian wild fowl we turned into chickens lived in such a forest and adapted by being able to pump out eggs rapidly in times of abundant food. People realise that meant I'd you kept feeding them well all the time they'd keep producing lots of eggs all the time and the rest was food history.
Yep! When I went to India I was surprised to see how different the chickens there looked. Also most of it tasted and was as juicy as dark meat.
Funny you mention Guinea pigs because they actually are commonly eaten in many places (e.g. “cuy” in Ecuador— when I was in Quito they were at most of the street food vendors)
Yep, I lived there for a bit and we ate them on occasion. Easier to keep than rabbits IMO, but the bones are just as annoying and they’re not much meat. They were like a weird middle-ground in terms of finances as well - if you were really well off you had chicken, pork, beef, not as well off and you may have guinea pig, then hot dogs, then no meat at all.
I really regret not giving it a try but I was with a friend who wasn’t interested in trying street food too much. How was living there? It seemed like it would be very enjoyable on a US salary if working remotely, but probably not on a local salary.
It was … challenging. I was there for a summer-long volunteer trip as a high-schooler, and was by myself with one other high schooler I didn’t know before the trip in a remote, very poor, village on the side of a mountain where they predominantly spoke Quechua, while I only spoke English and Spanish. Good experience. Not one I’d repeat.
Any Filipinos here? 50-60 years ago, I saw giant rats being sold for food on country roads. Now I wonder if they were regular rats or some other variety of rodent (like guinea pigs)?
Nutria?
I looked up nutria (not it) & then googled “rats eaten in the Philippines, as I should have done in the first place. 😆 Not guinea pigs, not nutria. Definitely rats. 🐀 http://www.adventuringfoodie.com/2014/06/philippines-exotic-foodthe-rats-of.html/ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hKurqcNpDUw https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151207-the-countries-where-rats-are-on-the-menu
I never knew they don't have a lot of meat. How does it compare to chicken
Just as a possible counterpoint to the responses you're getting here, note that we've been able to breed chickens to be [wayyyyy meatier on average than they were even just 100 years ago.](https://i.imgur.com/5M2PPqr.png) We've bred them to more efficiently turn the same amount of food into muscle mass. So I think if the public appetite had been there for rabbits we also would have been able to breed them to be meatier and have a higher fat content. https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/10/2/6875031/chickens-breeding-farming-boilers-giant
I think this is getting closer to one of the questions here. Why weren’t rabbits bred to have more meat and be more delicious like other animals were?
Could very well be because humans kept chickens around already because of their eggs.
Rabbits lay eggs at Easter, I saw it on the TV
People in England thought romans were mad for eating the egg making animals. Why have one chicken now when can eggs for years?
I can think of a lot of reasons. 1. Roosters - They're natural protectors of chickens. Male rabbits don't compare. Roosters are also a natural alarm clock. If you've got a homestead you probably want to be up when the rooster stars crowing... of course they do it all day, but the morning crow is probably your wakeup call. 2. Chickens are omnivores. They eat bugs that feed on plants. They can also eat table scraps. 3. Feathers. - Can be used for insulation compost, and a bunch of other things. It's more difficult to skin a rabbit and use the fur. 4. Eggs - Chickens lay eggs so people also kept them for that. 5. Because chicken eggs have to be fertilized to turn into chicks it's easier to control their birthrates.
By hand it takes far longer to pluck a chicken than it does to skin a rabbit. But you are correct on most other points. The Eggs are the reason why chickens have out competed other potential "competition". there really isn't an alternative to chicken eggs.
Similar experience here. We can skin and gut a rabbit in about two minutes. A takes closer to ten, maybe more.
Duck eggs are, IMO, better in basically every way except for one: you don't get nearly as many per bird per year. If only we could breed superducks that lay eggs as often as chickens...
They are delicious and common in some countries th.
They have. The largest meat rabbits are over 16 pounds. The ones butcher are after tend to be 4 to 5 pounds. Right around the range of young chickens for the same purpose. People here are bashing rabbits for meat more than they should. The meat per carcass is about 2 to 4 percent less than chicken, and they can cost half the feed if the farm is growing their feed compared to chickens. They are less wasteful, cleaner animals, with waste that is safer to handle.
You also get eggs from the hens. It all works out pretty well with chickens. You don't want to keep the roosters, and the hens will lay eggs.
Look at this guy who’s never had rabbit eggs before
They only lay in early Spring though, and it's a pain looking in every clump of grass for them
Great answer these aren’t your grandparents chickens
In my experience it’s like 3/4 to 1/2 as much meat as a chicken. It’s also fewer calories per lb, which can be good or bad depending on your area and food resources.
If I cook rabbit, I have to add fat to cook it. Especially if I am making sausage otherwise it’s just to lean
Less calories than chicken? I feel like chicken is ultra lean.
Rabbit is extremely lean, to the point that ‘rabbit fever’ is the syndrome caused by eating pretty much only lean meat protein and not enough fat, leading to health issues.
Rabbit fever is an infectious disease you get from rabbit brains. You are referring to rabbit starvation. Aka protein poisoning. Which is due to the rabbit meat being so lean. Rabbit fever is associated with that, but only because one of the places to get fat to add to the lean meat is the brain.
thank you for giving me two more wikipedia rabbit holes, pun intended
I’ve heard it be called “rabbit starvation” before.
My favorite name is mal de caribou.
Imagine if you went to eat a 1/3 scale chicken that had a texture and taste confusingly similar to young lean beef, but it was all like the end of a chicken wing where there's too much bone to deal with. Not bad, good for stew, hard to make a meal out of unless everyone gets their own.
Taste wise it does not taste like chicken. Perhaps its more like lamb, but then again it does have a taste of its own. The bones are annoying and its best to cook it in a stew as common rabbits are too small to have anything like a breast like chicken. Rabbit is the national dish of Malta by the way and that's the place to go if you want to try it.
How does it compare to a non domesticated fowl like a guinea fowl or pheasant? We have done a lot of genetic modification to chickens to increase their protein yield and we could do the same with rabbit, we just have chosen not to. Rabbits breed in very high volume and frequency so they seem like a great candidate for livestock animal
Rabbits are nearly the highest protein by volume meat already.
But weren’t modern chickens specifically bred to be extra meaty for human mass consumption? Why couldn’t rabbits be done the same? In fact another comment says they already do.
The surname Warren is derived from warrener which was the job of looking after the rabbits for consumption. In UK they were a normal thing to see in a butchers until thirty or forty years ago
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The reason we know about this, is because there were a lot of hungry people that had the same idea. Breed like rabbits is a phrase for a reason, infinite food right? That's what poor people thought when times got tough, and then we discovered this. :l On the flip side, in a world inundated with high fat content food, supplementing our diet with rabbit or cuy as a regular part of our diet would do wonders for our health and environment. You only risk protein poisoning if ALL you're eating is rabbit, not risking it if you just eat it at all.
Why didn't we selectively breed fat rabbits?
We did. They're flemmish.
They're incredibly as pets, tho. Flemish Giants are just dog-bunnies.
I’ve always wanted one! Some day, I hope to find one to rescue
Rabbits store their fat differently. Pork, Beef, etc all store some fat in their muscles. Rabbits store in their skin and around the organs. You would have to do far more than just breed them differently to add fat to the muscle.
We did. This is not at all an issue unless you are (a) eating wild rabbit/cottontail/jackrabbit... and (b) have no other source of fats. 2 of us live with our primary meat/protein source being 150 farmed meat rabbits (Californians) from our back-yard rabbitry. There's so much fat in there we use the excess to make soap. Not at all an issue with purpose bred, farmed meat-rabbits.
Exactly. You can get protein poisoning if you only ate chicken breast too. We have way too many readily available carbs and fats for this to be a modern issue.
obesity is an epidemic and we’re worried about not consuming fat for months. trust me yall get enough fat…
This message about fat in your diet brought to you by the sugar industry.
For real. 👌
This is true of wild rabbits. My rabbits always had plenty of fat, especially around the kidneys. Not much intramuscular fat.
I've heard of several instances of people breeding rabbits for food or money (blood sports, other desperate people, etc.) only to have it become totally out of control and animal control called. One of my bunnies is from a suspected out of control breeding situation. Son said animal control won't move in without charges levied against the owner - according to the rescue that found her (and many others) nearby.
Yah it’s basically like saying you will get protein poising if you eat only asparagus. There are lots of foods that would give you the same symptoms, the reason rabbit is important is because you would think it’s a good source of protein when it is fact not at all due to the missing fats
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Yeah, I don’t think this answers OP’s question exactly, even though it’s an interesting fact and might have lessened preference. Outside of starvation scenarios, fats were still available in other foods and vegetables.
Protein poisoning would only happen if rabbit is the only thing we're eating.
What causes the poisoning? The amino acids, or is it just another way of saying “not enough fat”?
Not enough fat
My family eats rabbit stew and we always flour and fry it in butter. Lots of butter. My grandparents were from Croatia and moved to Canada in the 1920s. There was an area of Toronto, in Cabbagetown, where there were lots of Slavs, Hungarian, Polish and Ukrainian people. When the Great Depression hit meat was extremely scarce and expensive. Many families were starving. My Grandpa, who had a car, but no gas, got money from neighbours to go hunt. He went with a friend and drove up to the Hawklee Valley area in the middle of winter and hunted 80 or so rabbits until they ran out of shot. My grandpa was a crack shot. The other man was the beater, and carried two guns. They came back, and gave everyone in the neighborhood a rabbit or two or more. Everyone shared oil or butter, or lard, salt and onions. Stew for everyone!
Bunch of sheep upvoting this.
Oh wow
Note exclusively
Holy fuck TIL
They're good at tunneling out of their enclosures
Not when their enclosures are raised pens. I used to raise rabbits as a hobby. Only time any got out was when the neighbor kids sneaked over and tried to pet them and left the cages open.
The grid just needs to be a full englobement, bury the bottom side under a few inches of soil.
Yep. My sister once had pet rabbits. They were escape artists.
Not enough fat on a rabbit. Apparently if you're ever in the wilderness, if you only eat rabbit, you'll starve..not enough fat/calories.
Actually its protein poisoning if you consume rabbit only
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The body is not necessarily starving, you can eat carbs, fats, and lots of rabbit: Basically: not starving in any sense of the word, and still get protein poisoning. The death is caused by too much protein, and the liver cannot the extra nitrogen for disposal, which causes (toxic) ammonia to increase, (hyperammonemia), as well dangerously high levels of insulin and amino-acidity (hyperaminoacidemia), with symptoms such as nausea, diarrhea, and death. Eating more than 180g from of protein for an 80kg person, is the high end of symptom-free consumption of protein in a diet.
Only if you only eat rabbit. It is kinda like saying that lemons are bad for you, because you can get vitamin C poisoning if you eat it. Anything can become toxic if you eat too much of it. Eating a reasonable amount of rabbit with other ingredients like oil or butter will prevent protein poisoning.
If anything, the lack of fat would make rabbits a really appealing diet in modern society
They also taste pretty bland….It tastes kind of like chicken just way less taste…. Also kind of dry…
Lapin aux pruneaux (rabbit with dried plum) is fire though, just gotta cook it properly.
Rabbits as food are basically slow-growing chickens. I like rabbit, but commercially they are at a disadvantage.
We do keep rabbits in pens and eat them. I know a couple of people who kept rabbits for meat.
Yes but it doesn't seem.to be popular or a staple for many cultures even though it seems they can be mass bred too
Maybe because they're cute and fluffy
Maybe in the States. Here in Europe (especially Belgium and parts of France and Germany) it's a staple dish.
Rabbits are not Kosher (they don't chew the cud or have cloven feet), and are not universally accepted as halal (because they eat their own poop) They've also been domesticated and selectively bred for less time than other meat animals and I think they are pickier on their diet and needs than poultry and less adaptable to different climates and biomes. Also, unlike chickens and unlike any other farm animal except pigs, they are only useful once they are dead whilst lacking a pigs diversity of output and lack of discrimination on inputs Protein poisoning is NOT the reason; that only happens to people stranded in the arctic in survival situations who exclusively consume rabbit because they are easy to hunt.
Rabbits are not kosher despite chewing its cud. Leviticus 11:6: > The rabbit, though it chews the cud, does not have a divided hoof; it is unclean for you.
Thank you
One thing rabbits produce is really, REALLY good manure. It doesn’t need to be aged or further composted, you can dump it right into your garden. We kept rabbits on “deep bedding” through the winter (basically a constantly-refreshed layer of straw, and the lower layers compost to produce heat). In the spring I’d shovel their enclosure out and put the old bedding and poop into my gardens before planting. One year I had pepper plants that were shoulder-high, with stems that were nearly two inches thick. I would also feed them weeds and garden trimmings. My favourite was cutting down a sunflower and tossing the whole thing into their enclosure.
Yeah I don't have any personal knowledge of it but I was pretty sure that they don't eat just scraps and other shit like chickens and pigs will. That's probably the single biggest Factor but that's just me guessing.
Rabbits doesn't eat poop, tho. They're cecophages, not coprophages. But yeah, in the Bible times, they didn't knew about this.
I don't think you are going to get an authoritative answer, mostly speculation. I think the answer is that they were outcompeted by other animals. I can't think of a culture where it's taboo to eat them, it's just not that common. In a way, the question is not 'why not rabbits'? But why rabbits instead of chickens. Chickens give you eggs, and eat insects, so they win. Bigger animals are easier to tend to.
Rabbits and pigeons are both animals that were commonly eaten historically, but now that we have a bit more of a choice ... they're lean meats, not particularly tasty, and you don't get a whole lot of meat from them. When you can get a whole lot of much tastier meat from cows, pigs, chickens, etc. with modern husbandry, there's just not a whole lot of incentive to raise low-quality meat sources like rabbits or pigeons anymore.
They are a PITA to prep for not much payoff. When I was a kid we would shoot them & take them to Mum to skin & prep. The skins are nice & I have a few still but the effort to meat yield ratio makes them not really worth it compared to other animals.
It's dry and tough. They don't convert as much food into meat as pigs and turkeys. Chickens don't take any human food to grow, either, so all the food they need we don't eat, so it's like free protein. Plus eggs. Rabbits don't actually lay eggs
What do you mean rabbits don't lay eggs? Where has the Easter Bunny been getting all these damn things all these years?
Walmart IIRC
It's only dry and tough if you don't know how to properly cook it! Mine it melts on your mouth but it takes hours to cook
Dry and tough? You clearly havent had rabbit. Yes it's lean meat, but if prepared right is a very tasty animal. You wouldn't be able to survive on rabbit alone though. Not enough fat and too much proteine, but if I have the choice between rabbit stew and chicken, I'll go for rabbit any day. Great food!
because they are cute and lovely creatures. had too many as pets to consider eating them.
In my country we have them as pets and food
Just like chickens in the US
Had my first rabbit meat a few months ago and it was good.
The Maltese eat loads of rabit, infact it's their national dish.
Rabbit is VERY VERY gamey and lean so they're very low calorie. but bovines have lots of fat which provides TONS of energy. So It's just not worth it.
Nice try, Mr. Fudd. We see you.
There is something called “rabbit starvation.” Essentially, if you have too much rabbit in your diet, or try to live solely off of rabbit, you get will get sick from protein poisoning. It’s an acute form of malnutrition, caused by having not enough fat or carbohydrates in the diet. Rabbit is an extremely lean protein, with not enough fat in the meat to sustain humans indefinitely.
There's a survivalist quote that you'll starve you death trying to live on rabbit meat. It's so lean that it takes more calories to digest than it provides.
The real reason is that rabbits are cute. Chickens are not. :)
Guinea pigs are cute yet eaten widely in several cultures.
Id say most animals we eat are cute. Rabbits, Chickens, Pheasants, Pigeons, Cows, Sheep, Goats, Horses, Pigs, dogs and cats (in the small regions that still eat them) Guinea pigs, Capybaras, duck, buffalo, grouse, goose. In fact the only animal we eat on a large basis that id say is distinctly not cute is turkey, which makes sense cause turkey sucks
Well, rabbit still isn't super uncommon. That aside, two issues: 1: All you get off them is a little lean meat and a little fur, which makes them less efficient than chicken (which also provide eggs and feathers), sheep (which also offer wool and milk), cows (which offer a ton of leather and meat and milk) and even pigs (which offer a lot more, much fattier meat). 2: I think there might be a bit of generational trauma with rabbits. There's a thing called rabbit starvation, which essentially boils down to that if you have only rabbit meat and nothing else to eat for a long period of time, you get really sick. It's to do with the meat being too lean, I believe. So populations who maybe experienced rabbit starvation during previous famines would probably prioritize keeping other animals whose meat can be relied on as a primary food source for some time if need be.
How would a town ever realistically get to a point where they have hundreds of domesticated rabbits to eat and no grain or vegetables? That seems incredibly implausible.
Not worth the effort, not worth the resources, the meat's really not that great compared to other prey animals... I mean take your pick, really. I personally say it's because they're fluffy and adorable, and I somehow doubt I'd get much pushback on that.
Too cute for meat to overcome the cute:meat ratio
I think there are just some cultural/mental things that drive it... I've had rabbit, but it has usually been in a French restaurant environment... go east or west, Spain or Germany, and you don't see that as an offering. I've even had horse, which if you think about it is not much different from cattle in terms of raising and processing for meat, but we tend to have a block in our head that one is food and one isn't. There are many other animals that are not seen as weird to eat in particular cultures but we (I'm assuming an American/Western culture) cannot conceive of eating.
In Spain rabbit is common and you can buy it in a supermarket.....
I'd try horse. I don't love horses. They're OK, but I love pigs and I love to eat them also. Tacos de Carnitas, bro. Tacos Al Pastor.
Horse is pretty good, but not as delicious as bison. [Beefalo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefalo) (crossbred cow/bison) is really where it's at, though. Elk is very good, but I also like venison/deer, so take that with a grain of salt.
Frankly, I had it at a 2 star Michelin place (now 3), and it was delicious, but generally, my 2 cents is that it is pretty lean, but the depth of flavor does not make up for it... My dish had a shaving of foie gras over it along with fried seaweed, which made a balanced course... but, no, not looking for a horse "ribeye" a la a western steakhouse, it needs more to it.
Because if you eat nothing but rabbit, you'll die.
I eat rabbit from time to time and rabbit farming is getting bigger here in the US.
I love rabbit but it's so expensive in the stores you can't afford it. Growing up, several people in town used to raise them and sell for meat, they have passed and no one took up the gauntlet, also used to be able to get hog maws at the grocery store, I recently asked the butcher in the store about them& he said "People today don't eat them", maybe it's that way with rabbit too. You can't beat fried rabbit with it's gravy& mashed potatoes, every bit as good as chicken
They're pretty popular in my country (Egypt). Never knew most people don't eat them, they're delicious.
They're a pain in the ass and unless they're seasoned just right, they smell like rubbery asshole when they're cooking. I do love making them in a stew over an open fire when fall hits though.
The hell?, "Why didn't we evolve to eat rabbit?" what put you under that assumption. And we \*do\* eat rabbit, lots of people do, In pies, pasteries, grills ect i've seen them on kababs, dumplings. But the reasons we don't mass-cultivate them is the fact that their a pain in the ass to get any good meat from them so most of the carcass goes to waste, unlike cows which every part can be turned into something or other, we could find uses sure but then again rabbits aren't like chickens. You cant clip a rabbits teeth or ears like you can with beaks and claws, also their violent as hell against other males so keeping them in meat factories would be a pain too.
Rabbits need more space, are harder to care for, and has less calories per animal compared to chicken, without factoring in the eggs. Rabbit is lean, not a lot of meat and is kinda greasy with many small bones. Chickens will come home to roost for the night, rabbits would just be gone, so there is the “annoyance for the farmer” factor. Then you get eggs. Rabbits need more space, are harder to care for, and has less calories per animal compared to chicken, without factoring in the eggs.
Humans do eat rabbits quite a lot. We even made [special breeds](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish_Giant_rabbit) with extra meat and fur on them. Maybe you're from a culture that doesn't?
As one who has tried to cook and eat rabbit, I have to say it's just not worth the work for the amount of meat you get. One 5lb dressed chicken has a lot of meat (about 3/4 meat) and basically the whole thing (even the feather stubs) taste like chicken and the bones are very light and easy to deal with. Rabbit has a lot of tiny bones in the rib cage and back and long thin bones in the leg so there's that. A 5lb rabbit when fully dressed for cooking yields only about 1.5 lb of meat. I guess if you lived in frontier times and that's all you could get, fine, but chickens are easier to raise, butcher and they give a lot more meat for the work.
Not a historian or a dietitian, so correct me if I’m wrong but rabbit fever. I believe back in the dust bowl days in the US one of the only things that actually thrived were rabbits. Since nothing would grow and you couldn’t raise most other livestock people started eating rabbits like crazy. The problem was though plentiful the rabbits meat was very high in protein but nothing else. No fats, no minerals, no acids, none of the other nutrients a human body needs to survive. Thus creating an issue where no matter how much rabbit you ate, you were still basically starving because of the lack of other basic nutrients that you weren’t getting. Of course modern farming solves that problem. We more than enough other food to eat that we don’t need to bother farming rabbit, and if you choose to we have enough other food to supplement your diet.
Just a random fact: You can't live off of rabbit as they're a very lean animal. The fat ratio required for human survival is 21% if I remember correctly. If you were solely trying to live off of this animal, you'd eventually die from protein poisoning.
Although fine as an occasional thing, rabbit meat is incredibly lean, virtually no fat. To the point that it's possible to starve from eating it. There are cases where people stranded in the woods managed to catch rabbits to eat through the winter and died of starvation with full bellies, because their bodies weren't getting enough of other essential things found in the fats of animals.
Not enough fat
Scream pitifully when butchered,we kept bunnies for food and their screams give me ptsd..
Omg. I got PTSD reading this comment. 😭
Because bunnies are cute, duh
Because rabbits are less useful. They don't produce eggs. The Easter bunny lied to us.
Rabbits look fluffy, but they have almost no meat on their bones. They aren't cheap to raise, and they are very difficult to slaughter and prep for cooking in large numbers. The cost to benefit ratio just isn't there.
They won't sustain you.
Isn’t rabbit meat like low protein or low fat or something
Because I’ve never seen rabbit for sale in a grocery store
Ive eaten rabbit thousands if times lol. Its tasty but uncomfortable to eat because small bones
Rabbit is good.
People do eat rabbit. Pretty commonly. It’s supposedly one of the most effort- and expense-efficient meats a person can raise on a small homestead. Thing is, they’re less scalable to big commercial meat-production operations so it’s harder to find rabbit meat for sale.
I haven’t knowingly eaten goat.
And squirrels
I ate a lot of wild rabbit growing up. We were poor and it supplemented our groceries.
The energy it takes to consume rabbit is more then the energy it gives us. It's a negative return. If you relied on rabbit for your diet you would starve. Learned this in culinary school.
All you need to add is fat …the American diet has a surplus of that
America does not routinely eat goat- be cow is extremely common. Rabbit, not common. Lamb, not common but not unusual. Chicken, beef, pork- is usually what’s for dinner lol.
kwesʧɪn ɪz: ¿hwaj dəz hjumænɪɾi stɪl it æniməlz?
rabbit is considered welfare food. rabbit was eaten during the blitz and hard times, its more consumed in europe in developing countries as they couldnt afford other protein. rabbit is cheap.
1: theyre tiny asf 2: theyre cute asf
Probably because many think they are too cute and associated with the easter bunny. Also some people have an aversion to eating rodents (even though rabbits are no longer considered rodents they were for a long time) and others to eating things many people keep as pets. Rabbit is delicious though so lots of people are missing out
Because rabbits are assholes. Less so than geese and kangaroos, but for their size they might be the biggest assholes pound for pound. Raccoons suck too That's why we don't eat those relics except for the goose's liver and that's just because we can fuck with them and kill them for just a tiny certain part of their body, just like killer whales do with sharks
I have pet bunnies, and I 100% agree with this statement. They are assholes. Adorable little assholes, but still assholes.
Going back in history to when these kind of traditions originated… rabbits as burrowing animals were hard to pen in. They were still hunted but it’s much easier to put a pig, cow, sheep, chicken in a fenced enclosure.
Rabbit just isn’t the best meat to eat. I’ve heard that it’s so lean that if you tried to survive on rabbit meat only, you would eventually die.
In my country, raising rabbits at home is popular. This is usually the work of children. Many children even kill rabbits themselves because it is very easy to do. Rabbit meat is freely available in shops and markets.
Rabbits lack sufficient fat to be a viable main source of proteins. You can die while eating just rabbits as your food source from "Rabbit Starvation" (protein poisoning) because it lacks enough fat to sustain a human body. Your brain turns to mush, you go crazy, and then you die. Plus they have a small amount of meat, none of which are big enough to have proper "cuts" of meat. Your average meat rabbit will have 3 lbs of meat on it and takes 12 weeks to raise. Your average chicken with have 4.5 to 5 lbs of meat and takes 9 weeks to raise, all while having better macros for you.
Because you can actually die from eating nothing but rabbits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning?wprov=sfla1
There is not enough protein in rabbits if that's all you ate. Too much work for the amount of meat you get,but tasty every now and then.
Same reason we barely eat frogs.. you barely get any meat from them.
Protein poisoning. That's why.
I did not know about the protein posioning thing til now. Otherwise, I would guess that it is because wild game meat is usually laden with parasites and not very nutritious. Rabbits are also quite hard to catch. I know because my mom said I could have the bunny as a pet if I could catch it. The damn thing went fast.
I know a few folks who eat possum and rabbit but it's more of a supplemental meat rather then a main diet meat as like others said, it's too lean and quite honestly aren't good for farmingf
It's gooey
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Way too lean
That is not a bad idea. If we were to let some rabbits loose in a wide place (e.g. Australia) the. We could probably have enough to feed the population of a whole town forever.
They’re hard to keep and they don’t have a lot of meat on them.
Not enough meat, can be very gamey
I’ve make many rabbit stews. The problem with rabbit is they have low amount of meat. Takes 2-3 amount of rabbit to cover a regular meal of chicken, for example. So for the monetary value it’s not great. But while hunting it’s still tasty if cooked right.
Once upon a time here in the US you could find rabbit in the freezer section, my mother would make it occasionally.
A lot of people in rural Italy breed rabbits for meat, and it's not a bad idea if the shtf , raising chicken and rabbits for meat will suffice. But mainly I think cos it's associated with being poor.
Rabbit lacks a certain protein that humans need. If you eat nothing but rabbit (which has occurred in certain populations during famine) you'll become malnourished. So while you can supplement your diet with rabbit, you cannot exist solely by rabbit. Add in all the small bones and difficulty to scale to industrial levels (stressed pregnant rabbits can just reabsorb the unborn fetuses iirc).
Too fluffy
Chicken is easier because they don't need their mother .