[MAK]

Like Beewyched I have gone thru the question of housing and am using the breeding rota advised on a previous thread.
After building the typical French concrete cage with wire door, 2 wooden equivalents then  converting a large oak,2 draw,2 cupboard sideboard into a hutch - guess what ? They used neither.
The Female rabbits have moved in with the ducks. We wanted the females to be able to run around ( the buck is lifted in and out of his run). So after exstensive tunnelling under the "sideboard hutch" a mole kept popping up in the tunnel entrance and has evicted the rabbits. 2 days ago a female was plucking fur to make her nest and chose one of the duck hutches becuase the mole lived in her tunnel . Her fur nest was made overnight in a duck hutch next to a clutch of eggs. we moved the fur to the "sideboard hutch" at 08:30 and by noon she had had 10 babies. She pops in and out of the small hutch door and still sits and feeds with the ducks and the other female. The buck watches from the other side of the garden.
So I guess our plans for housing were scuppered by us wanting to have them free range witin the duck compound. However the mum and babies now use the large " sideboard" hutch as we had planned.
Rabbit is popular in the supermarket here at about 8.5 Euro each. I gather that 2 females and a buck can yield 200 pounds of meat a year.
Why are there no wild rabbits in Germany ?? Any clues?

[Mel Rice]

No wild bunnies??? The hawks are very plentiful....We see far more, and bigger ones than in the UK..mainly buzzards here rather than the kestrel that was the most often seen(by me) in the UK. Hawk perches are put up everywhere esp by newly planted trees. We do also get RHD. Rabbit/rappid hemoragic disease. A virus that is fly borne in the heat...and fatal. You can innoculate but as its viral that is not always sucsessful.
 
 And I did once read that the Uk had very few wild bunnies once. They were kept in controlled warrens (the warrener was a popular job, hence sirname with variations) Only at the mid 18th Centuary were they released/escaped and became the pest that they are.

[MAK]

They say that a buck and 2 females can yield 200 pounds of meat a year. Not sure if this weight includes the heads that are eaten with some relish by the old dears up the road.
We keep ours in wooden cages with wire doors and the buck has one of the concrete hutches that we lift him into at night. All run free in a penn or in a wire cage that we move acroos the lawn. We chuck them broad leaf weeds, grass and carrots and we gathered hay ( made 12 bales)  after the council cut the verges of the minor lanes here.
We have 10 kittens just now and will sell 5 for 5-7 Euros each ( a big dressed rabbit can cost 9 Euro a Kg in the supermarket).
It all seems quite straight forward and is low cost - we have evn used an old sideboard for the mummy hutch and have given it a roof.
Oh females regularly jump up on top of the duck hutches so make sure you do not put hutches too near a fence that they can jump over. Oh and we stopped their tunneling ( they only seemed to want to tunnel into the chickens penn) by puting wooden boards then rocks infront of that lenght of fence.