Today was an exciting day around here! We finally got a puppy after some months of looking and years of wanting on the part of the kids - especially Aaron. The puppy is a male Golden Retriever and we named him Kitchi. He is adorably cute.
His owners were coming to town this morning to get the puppies to the new owners and so we ended up getting him on our way to church so he went along too.
Kitchi is an outside/garage dog which means that tonight Aaron made himself a bed in the garage so that he could be with him. Hopefully that all goes smoothly!
The puppies owners wondered if we would like some rabbits too and they were wanting to downsize. We had been thinking about getting rabbits sometime in the near future anyway so we said yes (after some consideration). So now we also have a male and female rabbit. The female which Mara is holding above is named Esther and the male (below) is Shiboleth.
Our idea behind getting rabbits is that we will breed them and butcher them as we have heard they can be a very economical source of meat. We will see how that goes. We have them in some temporary cages and hope to get some hutches made soon.
If anybody has tips on rabbit raising or dog training I would be glad to hear them.
We now have mammals on our homestead - next step: a pig and maybe a kitten. We still have some figuring to do on the dairy cow that I would like. :-)
4 comments:
I think Rabbits as protein for your family is such an interesting idea! Our family enjoys the homesteading/backwoods living show "Live Free or Die" and the homesteading family was showing their rabbits a few weeks ago. I would not have considered them for protein before seeing that show or your post here.
As we live in the city, unable to have farm animals, we will have to continue to get protein through Mark's fishing and hunting.
As always, I am enjoying all of your posts! Welcome to the new animals!
We always trained our dogs "down" instead of sit. We trained them by putting a leash on them and then stepping on the leash and pulling them down to the ground while saying "down." We found it works well. "Sit" can come later.
-Someone in ND
Amy, In the city you quite possibly could raise rabbits for meat if you wanted too. They don't take up much space and are very quiet. I will let you know how it works for us as things go along. Rabbit meat is good but I guess it wouldn't be good to eat only Rabbit meat as it doesn't have fat and our body needs some fat.
Someone in ND, Thanks for your training tip. I will admit that I feel a little overwhelmed with the whole training thing. It seems like I might mess it up somehow and that we really don't know what we are doing. I am looking up getting the kids in 4-H and having one of them take the dog training program.
Growing up, my dad raised rabbits for food. They are a delicious source of protein. You just can't make pets out of them, or it will really tear you up when it comes time to kill them for food.
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