AHC: Make rabbits a popular food animal

Domestic rabbit

I will add another piece of information, this time from Czech Republic.

Here, rabbit is a part of our cuisine for a long time. You can find roasted rabbit in a lot restaurants and a lot of people eat them at home. There was even a time when rabbit meat was the cheapest meat on market and we often had it in our school cafeteria (although that is a long way back). In rural areas, rabbits are often kept for food and fur alongside chicken - in the last century, there were even travelling "rabbit fur buyers" going from village to village and some might even exist to this day. My parents and grandparents raised them for food and fur as well and from what I remember, they bred like crazy and were fairly easy to care for (compared with larger animals).

There are also commercial "mass producers" of rabbit meat here (and they export to rest of Europe as well as I found out). From what I found, it seems the methods are similar to mass production of chicken and it seems it can be scaled and automatized similarily, so I guess there would be no problem making rabbit the "new chicken" in some other timeline.

The meat is similar to chicken - it does not have a lot of it's own taste and takes on the taste of other ingredients / spices, it is white and has low fat. Personally, I like it, but there are people who can't stand it - like every other food I guess.
 
Rabbit isn't eaten much in NZ for a few reasons, one being, historically anyway, the availability of mutton and beef. Also, rabbits being a terrible pest on farms in NZ I would have been as likely to eat local rabbit as I would have a stoat or rat. We used to shoot them and then burn them.

Bit of a waste yes, but we used to shoot a lot for pest control and almost no one was buying them, or exporting the meat.
 
@ Julius Vogel: it being a pest would be a good reason to put them on the menu. Then again I'm from the part of Europe were eating Rabbit is not uncommon, nor are there any moral objections against eating horse meat (if one aware that they are eating that or anything else for that matter, so correct labelling). Also rabbit IMHO doesn't taste bad (though as with every dish, that depends on the chef).
Plus it being lean meat could be plus nowadays.
Then again mutton at least in the Netherlands also isn't that common anymore; at one point it probably was since, sheep used to be more common, when there was more heathland in the Netherlands, before agricultural innovations like fertilizers etc.

@ Simreeve: have you every tried rabbit meat?

@ Scientist Shan: Bugs Bunny:rolleyes::p
 
No, its another "Anglo-Saxons can usually afford enough of better meats" thing. :p

The difficult part is defining "better" when talking about meats. Juicy? rabbit is. Tender? rabbit is (unless you cook it right after killing it). Healthy? rabbit is Flavor? well, that goes with the person. As i said, i know many people who prefer rabbit over all other meats. Then again, those people like eating chicken legs, so their judgement about meats is suspect :D
 
My mother grew up eating rabbits in a rural area of Eastern England and learned how to skin and prepare them for the pot. From what she says that was fr from uncommon for the children of hr village. Certainly in our family there's no problem with eating rabbit and we do like it. It's not commonly on the menu though as it's not often sold in supermarkets.

Having said that, I know people who refuse to eat rabbit because they think of them as cute and fluffy, and not all of them grew up in urban areas. I think that it's a bit of a generational thing now, but I would have expected rural English people to eat rabbit quite often up until the 1960s to 1970s. I suspect that one reason rabbit is not easily found in supermarkets (except in pet food) is because it wasn't a common food in towns and cities, so supermarkets didn't stock it because most of their customers were from towns and cities. This in turn meant that as more and more people got their food from supermarkets fewer bought rabbit meat. To get rabbit as a common food in England I think you would need to get more rabbits in towns and cities earlier, so more are eaten. This would then mean rabbit is easier to find and more readily available rabbit meat would probably mean it is eaten more often.
 
As The Professor said, I believe that it is too lean a meat to use for nutritional purposes and there is even a term involving it, rabbit starvation. That need not change it's popularity though, especially if used with the proper weeds or leafs. Maybe it could be touted as a way to avoid gout in Europe a few centuries back? The poor man's peacock, perhaps.

Could be about gout, but the stigma of anything relating to the poor makes that unlikely. Also, medicine had severe troubles looking for empirical evidence. The doctor who stated childbirth mother deaths were related to poor sanitation of doctors was put into a Swiss mental institution by instigation of another doctor who had superior seniority. After decades of effort to publicize, there the doc died to 'treatment'. This was in the 19th century, and how dare another doctor claim they have dirty, ungentlemanly hands!!! Put that claimant into the chamber.

Back to rabbits. Eskimos dreaded living off of rabbit. Peter Freunchen's first wife almost died one summer, talking her mother out off mercy killing her as the two younger children were hung by neck. Barely she survived from the lean meat of rabbit. Not much protein that summer, as the migration habits shifted. Eskimos would also chew the ugly pellets, a sort of chewing gum left amongst the tundra.

Rabbits taste a bit as stringy chicken. I, drafted into the chore as a child, found butchering them more difficult than chicken, but don't recall why. The nice thing of rabbits (and chicken) are the lesser requirement of food as mentioned and much shorter gestation with large numbers of offspring per litter. In a famine period, they multiply quickly, unlike cattle and to a lesser extent other hooved beasts. Hence, low class and not so difficult to obtain, especially shortly after drought/etc. Supply and demand dictates desirability through scarcity, like pepper once being a status symbol as was aluminum, now more of peon nature. So I would opt for the religious route, through lack of other opportunities. Maybe there are others, so keep your eyes open for the storyline.
 
Could be about gout, but the stigma of anything relating to the poor makes that unlikely.

By the way, gout was a rich man's disease outside of the American colonies (North or South America, especially towards the poles from Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn in steppe areas (were the locals had terrible teeth beyond 25 years old due to so much meat eating. Besides, the lack of exercise for rich people, beyond walking the shrubbery mazes, would clinch it.
 
Could be about gout, but the stigma of anything relating to the poor makes that unlikely. Also, medicine had severe troubles looking for empirical evidence. The doctor who stated childbirth mother deaths were related to poor sanitation of doctors was put into a Swiss mental institution by instigation of another doctor who had superior seniority. After decades of effort to publicize, there the doc died to 'treatment'. This was in the 19th century, and how dare another doctor claim they have dirty, ungentlemanly hands!!! Put that claimant into the chamber.

Back to rabbits. Eskimos dreaded living off of rabbit. Peter Freunchen's first wife almost died one summer, talking her mother out off mercy killing her as the two younger children were hung by neck. Barely she survived from the lean meat of rabbit. Not much protein that summer, as the migration habits shifted. Eskimos would also chew the ugly pellets, a sort of chewing gum left amongst the tundra.

Rabbits taste a bit as stringy chicken. I, drafted into the chore as a child, found butchering them more difficult than chicken, but don't recall why. The nice thing of rabbits (and chicken) are the lesser requirement of food as mentioned and much shorter gestation with large numbers of offspring per litter. In a famine period, they multiply quickly, unlike cattle and to a lesser extent other hooved beasts. Hence, low class and not so difficult to obtain, especially shortly after drought/etc. Supply and demand dictates desirability through scarcity, like pepper once being a status symbol as was aluminum, now more of peon nature. So I would opt for the religious route, through lack of other opportunities. Maybe there are others, so keep your eyes open for the storyline.
I've just seen a program from the BBC telling how rabbit became a food of the well off after the Enclosure Act and other laws made game animals the property of the major land owners. Something like that earlier on might help with things.
 
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