Thursday, March 08, 2007

Bunny Love

First of all I would like to state that I am leaning away from producing the bunnies to help subsidize the Creole Pot Street Parties vendors main dish, "Creole Rabbit Stew in Coconut Milk and Red Wine". I am finding that they are just to cute.



Instead I am looking into starting a Bunny Co-op. The basic idea is to start a 3 week training course where for each day of the week I have different member of the class assist in feeding the rabbits. On Saturday mornings we will have a short 1 hour class to cover economics of bunny raising, hutch design,and so forth.


At the end of the 3 or 6 week period the students will each receive a female rabbit if they meet the following conditions.

1. Have a 3 cage hutch. (working on a design that uses bamboo a free and wonderfully handy material)
2. They have a 50 pound bag of feed. (32EC)
3. A self watering system for the rabbit.

Here are two 50 pd bags of feed, notice it says Wayne Feed, my father worked for Wayne feed in Fort Wayne Indiana, small world huh?


















Here is a picture of the self watering system that uses materials that are normally thrown away. Its basically a gravity design where the stick inside keeps the bottle above the water level but once the rabbit drinks it refills until it is level again.


This is critical since rabbits most commonly die of dehyradation in hot climates. I picked this design up from a Mother (a cool hippie magazine) article.

This is the nursing box, it takes 28 days from fertilzation for the rabbits to give birth, a few days before birth the mother rabbit pulls fur from her chest. At that point you seperate her from the other rabbits and place her fur in the breeder box where she will have the baby bunnies. They are hairless for about 2 weeks.







I am going to have to seek more sponsorship in the community as I will be going through 3 bags of grain a month now. I am going to try to get some fundraising from Community Club, the Poverty Reduction Fund and a few private donors. Who knows, it is worth a try. I would need their sponsorship for feed and building materials for the trainees when they are making their own hutches. I have been using bananna leaves and other edible fauna to try to stretch out the feed.




I think this is the best Peace Corp way to spread this opportunity around Canaries for other people to have an easy economic activity. The main point of Peace Corp is to not provide money but instead training to help people improve their lives hopefully.


Take care everyone and pray that the rabbits do not eat me out of house and home.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you really gone that soft Leo? This is not the same Leo who hacked off a chicken head or tossed a rotting turtle on a front lawn.

Too cute!? Now I'm going to have to come there just to eat all your rabbits.

You need to read less hippie magazines and more "Guns and Ammo".

Soldier up boy!

Big Country (Leo) said...

That was quality, thanks Joe!

IF you come down I will let you personally pick the rabbit you want to eat. :)

PS article on President Carter being attacked by a swamp rabbit.
http://www.narsil.org/politics/carter/killer_rabbit.html

Anonymous said...

That President Carter story is bizarre, I don't know which is funnier the press making a big deal of it or a President actually afraid of a rabbit.

islandscapes said...

PERHAPS THE INFILTRATION OF THREE WOMEN IN THREE MONTHS HAS GOTTEN LEO IN TOUCH WITH HIS SOFTER SIDE. GOOD WORK SON, I AM PROUD OF YOU AS ALWAYS. AUNT TINA

Caro said...

what a great project! you are very much more sustainable than any of us were! unless you count the happy day bar of course... :-)