How to butcher a rabbit at home

A necessary part of the food cycle is the killing and processing of animals. Rabbit fryers are harvested when they are about two months old and weigh somewhere between three and a half and four and a half pounds. The carcass will dress out at about fifty to sixty percent of live weight and about seventy-five percent of the carcass is edible. The process is easier if you don’t allow the animals to eat for twelve to twenty-four hours prior to butchering. Rabbits are a good backyard food source in that they are easy to process and can be done just before cooking so you don’t need refrigeration.

The butchering of all animals is about the same. Deer, goats, raccoons, chickens, all are similar with only a few minor variations and all of them can be done with a simple pocket knife. Using hooks set up on a board or hangers for larger animals does make the job easier. Most people use other tools like tin snips to cut off feet and specialty cutting tools and these do help save time. We will demonstrate here with just a knife so that you can see that it can be done without anything more complex. Any knife will do. The sharper the better.

We prefer high carbon steel blades since they can be easily sharpened manually. A good knife doesn’t have to be very expensive. The Swedish Moro knives are only about fifteen dollars at this time. The downside is that they do tend to rust and they need to be sharpened frequently. Stainless steel blades stay sharp for a long time and don’t rust or discolor but they are very difficult to sharpen manually. Having a clean area to work in with running water makes the process much easier. It’s not necessary though. Many hunters completely field dress deer in the woods with only a pocket knife and a bit of rope.

Please understand that this is not a commercial kitchen and these methods are only for meat you intend to eat at home. I’m not particularly good at this and I really don’t enjoy it. Professionals working in rabbit processing plants can completely process a rabbit in less than ninety seconds. It still takes me about twenty minutes. Fasting for a day or two before the butchering helps for the first time you try this. Hunger gets you in touch with the reasons why you’re doing it. My intention is always to make the kill as quick and as painless as possible.

Animals rarely die right away and there usually are a few moments of spasm in the bodies. The first step is to wet the hide down because if you’ve got running water to do that it keeps the fur from getting all over the meat. Some people cut the heads off at this point and bleed them for a little longer. It’s a bit cleaner to just start skinning and I prefer to do it this way. One of the first steps is to cut the fur off from around the hocks. Cutting fur will really dull a knife edge so once there’s an opening get your knife in under it and skin from underneath.

Cutting fur off from around the hocks Cutting fur off from around the hocks Pull the skin off. If you are saving the skins for tanning it’s important not to use your knife but to pull the skin off as knife cuts make the tanning process more difficult. I just pull the fur off and it gets amazingly physical here. The rabbit comes right out. Cutting fur off from around the hocks Cut the skin from around the fore feet and neck and then cut off the head. Cut the tendons and then snap the feet off. It’s easy if you just cut that joint.

Then twist it or pop it off. Now since you’ve already broken the neck the head will come off real easily. I’ll just go ahead and put these parts in a plastic bag to save this dog food for later. The hocks are similar to the front. You just break that tendon. Now at this point since we’ve got a little bit of mess I’ll often rinse them off just to clean things up a little bit. This one got a little bloody on me. They usually aren’t that bad. This is where we get to the point and see sometimes you do have tremors.

The rabbit is not alive that’s just his body. Make a slit in the belly and there are the guts. Examine the organs as best you can. Each time you’ll learn a little more of what a healthy rabbit looks like. Having a reference book to check helps a lot. I used the rabbit production book mentioned earlier. So here’s the big colon. See he hadn’t eaten for a while so there’s not much in the colon which is what I did. I didn’t let him eat for like 12 hours beforehand and there’s not much in the rectum although you can see some pellets.

Now here is the liver. Generally the first organ to learn is the liver. Checking to see there’s no abnormal color, inflammation or scarring or any worms or discoloration. And this guy looks pretty healthy. It’s a pretty nice looking liver there. Some people eat the organs especially the liver, heart and kidneys. Native peoples ate the intestines. A lot of people do and they just pull right out. There’s really nothing to it. Put them on a plate. And we’ll have a doggie that really wants to eat that. Now you want to get the kidneys out. And this fat by the kidneys is highly prized in some cultures.

We begin with fat and the kidneys. You can just pull and cut out some of this different membrane. But you’ve got your lungs here. And I must have already pulled the heart out already. Just two lungs. And we are basically done. I’m just going to clean this meat up a little bit. And also maybe cut out the tail in the anus. I might just cut out some of these other lower pieces because they’re not something we’re really going to eat. A lot of people don’t eat the skirt either. We often cook it just to make it into stew meat.

I’m going to rinse this guy off. And I’m just rinsing through. Okay. Now I’ll just kind of feel around with my knife here. It’s not an exact science by any means. Not for me anyway. After rinsing the meat, I usually quarter the carcass for easier handling. I’m trying to move up so you can see him a little bit. I’ll often just cut the back just to make it easier to get it all in a package. Now you’ve got most of your pieces. That’s if he’s going in a freezer. The good thing about rabbit though is you don’t need to refrigerate them.

They come in family-sized packets. They grow a lot of rabbit in bird world countries for families. It’s a big protein source. At this time, we primarily use the organs for feeding the dogs. We also feed the dogs the heads, the feet, and sometimes the skin. After stewing an old rabbit, we give the dogs the bones, and in this way, we often get three or four meals for the dogs out of one rabbit. Now, some tanning you can do with simple chemicals, and those furs will package up and put in the freezer, but some skins, since we’ve taken it off like this, and it’s almost like taking a sweater off of somebody, you can just put it over some two-by-fours and let it dry like that.

We have some articles explaining those methods in the document sections. We’ve been experimenting with using fire ants to clean off the excess fat and skin from the hides, and this is an example of it. And it actually turns out to be a pretty good tanning job. Make sure you put the hides where the dogs can’t get to them. We have read that you can use the skins to make glue, and there’s the possibility of selling the fur to hat-making companies. If nothing else, the skins make good dog food. Other than rabbits, you are most likely to butcher an old hen or extra rooster.

Older birds are best cooked by stewing, and in that process, the skin is not critical. Since skinning is faster than pulling feathers, we often skin those tougher birds. But for chickens that we want to keep the skin intact on the carcass, the process has only small modifications from the butchering of a rabbit. First, the bird is killed by cutting into the neck or brain, and the blood is drained into a bucket. Next, we dry-pluck any feathers or down that we want to keep. Then we dip the birds into hot water, which is around 180 degrees Fahrenheit, for about two minutes, which loosens the feathers and makes it easier to pluck.

Note that a simple fire pit can be made out of an old barrel and some pieces of rebar. A metal garbage can works well if you don’t have a big pot. After soaking in the hot water, we pull out all of the feathers. Then it’s very similar to rabbit processing, in that we cut off the heads and feet, we remove the anus and tail, we open the abdomen, and remove the guts. Next, cut out the craw, which is a sack of small rocks the chicken uses to digest food. It’s located near the collarbone. Rinse the meat to clean it, and you are done.

All of the scraps can be fed to the dogs. When butchering other animals like goats or raccoon, there are small glands that you really want to remove. They are usually near the skin and often go out with the skinning process, but check with someone knowledgeable before butchering them. [tr:trw].