Keeping track of your live weights, dead weights, and calculating percentages will help you know if you’re on the right track for breeding.

Caution: be aware this post discusses processing rabbits. If this is disturbing to you, please scroll on by without comment.

Our initial purpose for breeding rabbits was to create a sustainable food source for our family. In our state, it is completely legal to raise rabbits for your own consumption, although you may not sell them to others for anything except animal consumption. Our desire to have this all-natural meat option factored into which breeds we selected for our rabbitry, as well as what breedings we pursue as we continue moving forward.

As meat breeders, having a strong dress out percentage from our rabbits is incredibly important. This is where we are rewarded for the days we care for animals in harsh weather, the multiple times a day we water every rabbit by hand, etc. If you don’t actually get a return for your investment of time and energy… what is the point?!

Our goal for all of our rabbits is a minimum of 50% dress out rate. The dressout percentage is the percent of the live animal that ends up as carcass. Generally, the carcass weight is taken immediately after skinning and evisceration and is commonly known as the hot hanging weight. (Evisceration is the removal of viscera (internal organs, especially those in the abdominal cavity). This can refer to: Disembowelment, removal of the internal organs of an animal.) Other people may refer to this as the bone-in weight.

We have some breeds that will just barely clear 50% dress out and others that are closer to 59% Obviously, the higher the dress out percentage the greater return you’ll have on your investment. After that you have to figure in your cost of feed and, if you’re really daring!, the cost of your time management in order to figure out what your actual cost per lbs. of meat is in comparison to what you can get on a little styrofoam platter at the grocery.

Here is yet another area where keeping precise records is important! For us this means our records make note of every rabbit ending up in the cull pen is weighed live, weighed dressed out (bone in, kidneys, liver, and heart saved), and the percentage calculation.

Now that we’ve been keeping our records for awhile we can start tracking which bucks and does have the strongest results, which breeds are most productive, whether we have higher percentages based on the season, etc. It’s really fascinating if you’re a rabbit nerd (as we are)!