Butchering rabbit

[aisa0]

I'm eating rabbit stew tonight, which is a day I knew would come. In fact, I knew exactly when it would come: We're slaughtering our rabbits as part of our November work party. I still had a month to prepare for it

Comments

[crankles]

Thank you for posting about this. *hug* I wish the rabbit had the kinder ending you had planned for.

How did you know where to cut without puncturing the organs?

[aisa0]

We have a couple of books that cover dressing a rabbit. It leaves you with a ton of questions, after reading them, that basically all get answered the first time you try it.

It was reading the book, though, that gave me a start on where to begin cutting. Having done it now, however, I need to review the material; given my greater understanding of the subject.

[julian_wolf]

Thank you for sharing.

[aisa0]

You're welcome.

[lupagreenwolf]

That would actually be my biggest concern with butchering--poking a hole in the intestines and ruining the meat :( Congrats on the successful endeavor!

[aisa0]

You can rest assured that it is harder than it seems, then!

[ferrousoxide]

I wish i knew what to say. Sad that the rabbit didn't have a saving throw versus dog--if you guys were going to kill it yourselves, it would have been much more humane, i'm sure.

Interesting, however, to hear about your experience after. I've done the gutting/scaling fish thing, but have never had to do the equivalent with a mammal (though, i reckon i'm fairly prepared to do so if need be/i ever get the chance to run my own self-sustainable place). Hopefully, it was a good lesson for all.

[yarrowkat]

i think it was a very good learning experience for all of us. i posted my experience of it on the sunflowerriver community in an open entry, if you want to see one more. :)

[aisa0]

Certainly one of the things I would do differently next time is to kill the rabbit earlier. I think a combination of my reluctance to start the process and an enormous amount of wishful thinking on my part prolonged his suffering.

The only real quantifiable difference I could see between gutting a fish and doing a mammal is that hair got everywhere. We used salt water to help clean it off, as crrreature had warned us it would happen.

[zylch]

Yeah, it makes quite a difference when the meat is looking back at you. [Can't recall if I told you about the deer and beaver we butchered when I was in England; suffice to say, I've had a reasonably similar experience & can empathize with a lot of this.]

Mindful eating, I think, is the best offering one can make. But then I'm jaded from all the time I spent as a WFM meat monkey, selling meat to people who wanted to avoid being reminded that boneless skinless chicken breast come from (gasp!) a real live chicken.

[aisa0]

What is WFM? desertwind spent some time as a butcher, which I'm guessing is the same thing as a meat monkey?

[zylch]

WFM = Whole Foods Market. I worked there for a few years, one year of which was in the meat department. Never got to the stage of training where you learn to make all the fancy cuts of beef and pork, but I know the basics on those and can take poultry apart pretty much any way the customer wants it.