Hi there! I love your blog! Of course I love the photos, but I also love seeing all your updates and learning new things here and there. I just have question, or rather a scenario. I recently sent some of your photos to a friend, just for a good dose of cuteness, and they asked about the tattoo on the ear. I explained a little on meat rabbits, show rabbits, breeding, etc. They were so horrified. (1/3)
How often do you run into issues like this and what is your reaction? I brought up traditional farm animals, but they responded by saying that it "wasn't the same thing". Do you know of any good sites (besides like wiki ha) or other blogs that I could look into that would give more information so that I could better explain things like house pet rabbits vs meat rabbits?
I don't know how often I'll run into that scenario again, but I want to be better prepared for next time. Sorry for the spam of asks haha. I didn't think it would be so long. Best of wishes from Virginia :)
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often, actually. every time i meet someone new and tell them what i do for a living and as my hobbies i have to brace myself for the possibility that they will go off at me. fortunately(?) i’m a hermit and rarely talk to people offline, so i personally haven’t deal with it too much. my husband however gets it a lot, since he keeps skulls/pelts at his desk and likes to talk about the farm animals with his coworkers, but he’s also a lot better at handling that sort of thing than i am. i just get annoyed at how close-minded people are, but he can be rational about it :’)
i’m honestly not that sure about any resources that discuss rabbits as a meat source off the top of my head, because there’s just not as much out there online. the google searches on rabbits are dominated by the HRS and other house-rabbit communities.
we get a lot of the ‘how can you eat bunnies? they’re pets!’ and like your friend said, when we explain that they’re no different than a cow or pigs, they insist they are. the best way we’ve found to confront it is to simply ask ‘why do you think that?’ what is it about rabbits that people feel are different than any other meat source? because they are cute? because you think they are only pets? many people keep pigs and chickens as pets too. get them to examine their bias, and sometimes they’ll realize they’re just making a knee-jerk reaction without actually thinking about it logically. (it also helps sometimes to cook them something with rabbit in it and have them realize oh, it’s delicious!)
i also just try to remember that a lot of people, especially if you live in an urban area, have never interacted with a “proper” farm animal before, and have no idea how cute and personable that chickens, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, ducks, etc actually are. they’ve only interacted with rabbits in a pet capacity and may not have even known they were also a meat source! and a wonderful one at that, especially for lower-income people since they don’t need much space to raise, are relatively inexpensive to feed, are not noisy like chickens, and are prolific breeders.
fortunately here in the seattle area people seem to be much more open to the idea of raising your own food, including meat, than they were down in houston. there’s more emphasis on eating local and humanely sourcing your food, so we’ve had way more people accept or even be enthusiastic about the fact that they now have a source of meat and eggs that they can trust. i’ve even had vegetarians say they’d be perfectly comfortable eating my rabbits and chickens because they have been to my house and have seen how i raise the animals and know that they’re happy and healthy and killed humanely!
also - it’s really only the show rabbits that NEED tattoos, since the ARBA requires them to show. i tattoo all my keepers because i like to be organized, but many meat producers don’t bother. and lots of pet breeders tattoo their animals too, so they can keep track of where they end up and able to claim them if they ended up in a shelter or craigslist something.
